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According to these most false and most empty reasonings of yours, with the reins loosed and let go, let all sins of human license be left unpunished; with no bars of the laws set against it, let the audacity of harming and the lust of wantonness rage in bacchanal frenzy; let not the king restrain his kingdom, nor the general the soldier, nor the judge the provincial, nor the master the slave, nor the husband the wife, nor the father the son, from the freedom and sweetness of sinning by any threats or penalties. Take away what sound doctrine, for the health of the world, wisely says through the Apostle; and, that you may confirm the sons of perdition in a choice so much the worse the freer it is, delete what the vessel of election says: Let every soul be subject to the higher powers.
For there is no power but from God, and the powers that be are ordained by God. Wherefore he who resists the power resists the ordinance of God; but they who resist purchase judgment for themselves. For rulers are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Do you wish, then, not to fear the power? Do good, and you shall have praise from it; for it is the minister of God, an avenger in wrath to him who does evil. Delete these things, if you can; or these things, as you do, if you cannot delete them, despise. Hold about all these the worst opinion, lest you lose your free will—or at least, since as men you blush before men, cry out, if you dare:
'Let murders be punished, let adulteries be punished, let all the other crimes or vile deeds of wickedness or lust, however great, be punished: sacrileges alone we wish to go unpunished by the laws of rulers.' Or do you say anything else, when you say: Great is the injury to God, if He is defended by men. What does he judge of God who wishes to defend Him by violence, unless that He is not able to avenge His own injuries? Saying these things, what else do you say but: 'Let no human power gainsay and clamor against our free will, when we do injury to God'? O grief! Ancient times were cheated of such teaching, since you were not yet born, when holy Moses bore his own injuries most gently, but avenged God's most severely.
But you now, more learned by heretical presumption, most enviously cry out: God made man and left him in the hand of his own choice. Why is there now snatched from me by human power what God bestowed?—demanding, forsooth, that for the doing of injuries to God, who made man with free choice, free choice may be left to you by man. But even those who, by the decree of King Nebuchadnezzar, with the penalty of their own destruction and the razing of their houses set before them, were terribly forbidden from blaspheming God—Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—and would be sharply punished if they should despise it, could have said what you yourself have said: Great is the injury to God, if He is defended by men.
What does he judge of God who wishes to defend Him by violence, unless that He is not able to avenge His own injuries? These very words of yours those men too could have said, and perhaps did say—if not with the same liberty, yet with no dissimilar vanity. Free choice, then, was given to man when he was created, but on the terms that, if he were doing evil, he should become one suffering it. Finally those first men, when they had sinned, were condemned to death, and before even the final death of the body was accomplished in them, they were sent into exile out of paradise. The emperor has established milder measures against you on account of Christian mildness: he wished to inflict exile upon us, not death.
But you learned men, considering what is owed to desert and what is less in the punishment, add death—not out of his judgment, but out of your own. Do not perish forever, while you wish free choice to be granted you by men at this time for offending God. Hear the Apostle, and you will have a great shortcut by which the royal power cannot harm you: Do good, and you shall have praise from it. From it even before us the just had praise—not only those who faithfully obeyed religious kings, but also those who, for the truth of God, endured impious kings as adversaries: the former the praise of obedience, the latter the praise of suffering; both, however, from it, but by doing good, not by resisting the powers.
But what you do is not only not good, but a great evil: to rend asunder the unity and peace of Christ, to rebel against the evangelical promises, and against Him of whom it is said: He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth—that is, against the true and supreme King of Christians—to bear Christian standards as it were in a civil war. Let it therefore suffice you, as an occasion of correction, that for your so great evils you receive far milder and lesser measures, if you do not of your own accord bring upon yourselves what the emperor has not decreed; and do not wish free choice unto licentious impunity to be granted you by men, lest you fall more unhappily into the hands of God Himself.
For even your own elders judged that, in injuries of this sort against God, the free choice of man was not to be left unpunished by kings, since, although they had a bad cause, they nevertheless, by persecuting the bishop Caecilian, brought the matter even to the judgment of the emperor Constantine. The words of the letter: 'But our faith,' he says, 'which the Lord Christ left to the apostles, these persecutions alone render most welcome to us. Blessed shall you be,' he says, 'when men persecute you and revile you and say against you every evil thing for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for so they persecuted also the prophets who were before you—their fathers did.'
If it was said only to the apostles alone, the faith had its rewards up to them—and what did it profit those who were afterward to believe? Whence it is evident that it was said to all. Then the Apostle Paul says: They who wish to live holily in Christ must suffer persecution. But this the Lord said in the Gospel: The hour will come that everyone who kills you will think he is offering a sacrifice to God. But these things they will do, because they have not known the Father nor Me. To these things the reply: These things would rightly be said by you who seek the glory of martyrs, if you had the cause of martyrs. For the Lord does not say blessed are they who suffer these evils, but they who suffer them for the Son of Man's sake, who is Christ Jesus. But you suffer not for His sake, but against Him;
for you suffer for this reason, because you do not believe Him, and you endure for this reason, that you may not believe. How then do you boast that you hold that faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles? Or do you wish men to be so blind and deaf as not to read, not to hear the Gospel, where they may know what faith the Lord Christ left to the apostles concerning His Church? Divided and separated from which, you do nothing else than rebel against the words of the Head and the Body; and yet you boast that you sustain persecution for the Son of Man's sake and for the faith which He left to the apostles.
Let us pass over other matters and hear his last words on earth, where we may see what faith concerning the Church he left to the apostles, what kind of testament, so to speak, he made — he who was not about to end his life, but to live without end; not to be laid in a tomb, but to ascend into heaven. For rising from the dead, after he had appeared to his disciples to be gazed upon with their eyes and handled with their hands, he said: 'It was necessary that the things written of me in the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms should be fulfilled.' Then he opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures, and said to them:
'Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.' Likewise on the Mount of Olives, after he had said nothing further while set upon the earth, but commended this at the last as what had been most necessary. For there were to be many throughout every part of the earth who would claim for themselves the name of the Church and set themselves against that universal house which throughout the whole earth sings the new song, of which it is written: 'Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord, all the earth' — men who from the corners of their own ruins would bark against it.
For the apostles desired to hear something else, and did not ask for what had been most necessary for them: 'Tell us,' they say, 'whether at this time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?' But he answered: 'It is not for you to know the times or the moments which the Father has placed in his own power; but you shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judaea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.' When he had said these things, a cloud received him. He added nothing further to these words: this he fixed the more tenaciously in the minds of his hearers, the more it came last. This bride the bridegroom, as he departed, commended to his friends. This faith, then, concerning the holy Church, he left to his disciples.
This faith, O Donatists, you resist, and you contend that you endure persecution for the sake of the faith which the Lord Christ left to the apostles. This Son of Man, who with such great care commended his Church, beginning at Jerusalem and bearing fruit and increasing among all nations, you contradict with wondrous shamelessness of blindness, and you cry out that you suffer evils for the sake of the Son of Man. Or do you perhaps say this because you have found for yourselves another son of man, by whose name you may be called, from whose party you may take your title? You are mistaken; he is not the same. When he said that to suffer persecution for the Son of Man was a mark of blessedness, that bridegroom was proclaiming himself, not an adulterer.
We too confess, as you say, that it was not said to the apostles alone: 'Blessed shall you be when men persecute you.' For this pertains to all — not to those who after them have suffered, or suffer, or shall suffer any kind of persecution whatever, but to those who suffer for the sake of righteousness, as they also did. For a little before he had said this: 'Blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' Then he added these words, which you have chosen to cite and to usurp for yourselves in vain. For in vain do you suppose this beatitude pertains to you, when you do not display in yourselves the righteousness to which a reward is owed.
Nay rather, on the contrary, you also suffer for iniquity — less at the hands of others, more at your own — so that even before the judgment of God which is to come, you yourselves may render to yourselves in some part what you deserve. Hence, since you yourself have said that this was said not to the apostles alone but to all — lest faith should seem to have had its rewards only down to their day — just as this, then, was said not to the apostles alone but to all who, even after them, were to suffer any evils for righteousness' sake, so also that other was said to all: 'If they persecute you in this city, flee into another.' Why do you not do this, if you belong to the fellowship of those to whom these things were said?
But even if you were to do it, you would not on that account belong to them, since even robbers can do this — robbers whom the public laws have commanded to be sought out. Yet because you are unwilling to do this, you show by a short cut that you do not belong to those to whom these things were said. And so that your very excuse may show you all the more plainly to be strangers to that number of true Christians, you now say that the places to which you might flee — which he promised would not be lacking until the end of the age — are wanting to you; in no way convicting him of having promised falsely, but showing rather that you do not belong to the fellowship of those to whom he promised this, and therefore that you are not truthful martyrs but deceitful heretics.
What further shall we say to you, when your own tongue overcomes you? For that also which you added the apostle said — 'All who wish to live godly in Christ must needs suffer persecution' — he did not indeed say 'must needs,' but he said: 'All who wish to live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution.' But who doubts that you do not belong to these? For if you too are among those of whom the apostle said this, why do you not do what the apostle himself did? For if the gates were shut against you, you ought to have been let down by the wall, that you might escape the hands of your persecutors. The gates lie open, and you are unwilling to go out. What persecution do you suffer except from yourselves? Your persecutor loves you, and your own madness persecutes you:
the one desires that you flee, the other drives you to perish. But you so understand what the apostle says — 'All who wish to live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution' — that you must needs confess your own forefathers did not live godly under the apostate emperor Julian. For whoever became a Donatist in that time, if he died before the godly care of Christian emperors again rose up against your error, did not live godly, because he suffered no persecution.
But if the apostle said this for the reason that, as is written elsewhere, 'the life of man upon earth is a trial,' and it never ceases to try the godly and true Christians not only by the assault of adversity but also by the seduction of prosperity — so that the human mind may either succumb under affliction or grow vain through elation — then assuredly, as long as one lives here, all who wish to live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution, so as either, being conquered, to be seized by the devil, or, being proved, to conquer the devil. But those whom he already possesses, seized and captive, he does not persecute in order to obtain them, but, because he already possesses them, he uses them.
Furthermore, if he alone is to be called a persecutor who tortures another with some pain, or who wishes to hold him in order to torture him, let not the torturer of the heart seem to you lighter than the torturer of the body; and consider what kind of persecution he was suffering who said in the psalm: 'I saw the senseless, and I pined away.' This persecution the righteous Lot suffered in Sodom, even before the angels, his guests, were sought after for lust by the Sodomites in his house, when they were thought to be men. For the righteous man could not, without great torment of heart, behold them so publicly base, even before the injury to his own house. Hence the apostle Paul also, among his persecutions, mentions such things, saying: 'Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not set on fire?'
Accordingly, the greater the love of Christ within us, the greater is the grief of soul with which we see you holding the sacraments of Christ and being separated from the members of Christ and rebelling against the peace of Christ. But as long as you live in this body, some hope concerning you is given to us; yet when you die in that dissension, we grieve for you far more bitterly. Furthermore, when you slay your very selves — either by rushing upon the weapons of others, or by your own precipices and drownings and fires — it cannot be sufficiently expressed with how great sorrow you torment us. For the impious Absalom, dead, afflicted his holy father David more than when he was in rebellion. For David desired that he be taken alive, so that he who raged with malice might be healed by repentance.
Therefore that man was a persecutor of his father not only in dividing the people of God, nor only in bearing arms and waging war against the law of God and against the lawful kingdom of his father, but much more he persecuted his father's heart by dying in that impiety. And so the best of fathers wept for his worst of sons, slain — the son whom, while living, he had not lamented, because he had not despaired — but with hope now ended, he wept for him dead. Learn, therefore, what it means that the apostle says: 'All who wish to live godly in Christ shall suffer persecution.'
If the Donatists had not plundered the houses of Catholics, if they had not burned Catholic churches, if they had not cast the holy books of Catholics into the very fires, if they had not afflicted the bodies of Catholics with most savage beatings, if they had not cut off the limbs of Catholics, if they had not put out their eyes, if, in short, they had not cruelly slain Catholics — this alone we would most truly say we endure from you as the gravest persecution: that we see you senseless, and we pine away; that we see you made weak, and we are weakened; that we see you made to stumble, and we are set on fire; that we see you lost, and we mourn.
These evils of yours, which cast you into eternal ruin, persecute us more bitterly than those which are inflicted by you upon our bodies or our goods or our houses or our basilicas. You persecute us less when you rage against us than when you perish yourselves. For in that persecution wherein you rage against us, we rejoice with praise; but in this, wherein you perish, if we should rejoice, we perish along with you. Yet as long as you live in this flesh, we cannot despair of you;
but when you die in this impiety — most of all when you slay your very selves in the dreadful blindness of frenzy — our most bitter sadness is consoled by this alone, which consoled holy David: namely, by the people gathered together in the unity of God, which had been divided by the tyranny of a wicked son. For it is far more tolerable that your most obstinate, being far fewer, perish by their own precipices or drownings or fires, than that innumerable peoples, hindered from their salvation by these men, should burn together with them in the burning of eternal fire.
Never, therefore, has there been lacking, nor will there be lacking, to the Church of Christ that whereby, according to the apostle, those who wish to live godly in Christ may suffer persecution — either by enduring the malice of the impious while they live in guilt, or by grieving over them when they perish. Do not, then, be deceived, as though it was said of us: 'The hour will come, when those who kill you will think they do a service to God' — or, as you cited this testimony, 'will think they offer a sacrifice to God.' It is manifest that this was not said of the persecutions which the pagan nations inflicted upon the Church. For the pagans reckoned that they did a service to their many gods, who indeed are no gods, whereas they were doing this to the one God.
Hence this same thing which the Lord foretold to his own was fulfilled either through the Jews, who slew holy Stephen and many others while they thought they were doing a service to God, since they seemed to worship the one true God; or else it was said also of us, that is, of Catholics, concerning the various heretics raging on every side, who, where they can and when they can and in whatever way they can, by slaying Catholics think they do a service to God — and most of all concerning you, who have made yourselves a special name in Africa out of such sacrifices. For if it had been said of you, you would surely not slay yourselves, but would rather wait to be slain by us, who, as you say, suppose that when we do this we do a service to God.
But now, when you hasten to death lest you be held by our men, you fear to live, not to be killed, because you blush to be corrected or to be convicted of your error. Or perhaps are you those to whom both may pertain, because, since you are killed even by yourselves, you think you do a service to God and offer him these sacrifices out of yourselves? To you, then, pertains what follows and was cited by you. For the Lord at once added and said: 'But these things they will do to you, because they have not known the Father nor me.' Since, therefore, you slay your very selves, thinking you do a service to God, you have neither known the Father — whom you did not hear saying, 'You shall not kill' — nor known the Son, whom you did not hear saying, 'Flee.' The words of the letter:
'But,' he says, 'they boast themselves inhabitants of a war-bearing peace and a bloody unity. Let them hear the Lord saying: My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. For the peace of the world is confederated among the discordant minds of the nations by arms and the outcome of war; but the peace of the Lord Christ, tranquil with a wholesome gentleness, invites the willing, it does not compel the unwilling.' To this the answer: You indeed desire to make a war-bearing peace and a bloody unity, either by our violent deaths or by your voluntary deaths — not imputing to yourselves what you do to us, and imputing to us what you do to yourselves.
But we are compelled both to endure what you do to us, and, as for what you do to yourselves, we can do nothing but grieve — provided only that the peace and unity of Christ come to pass for the salvation of many, as it does come to pass in very many, even if because of the frenzy of a few it does not come to pass in all. For if you were willing to attend not with an envious but with a faithful eye, you would see with what true peace and unity of Christ they rejoice who have come over from you to us — such and so great throngs of peoples, among whom, even if there are still some troubled by the very novelty, these too are little by little healed of this weakness.
And even if some feigned ones persevere, surely those whom we see to be true were not on their account to be left ungathered — some of whom, in your very regions, have shown themselves greater than certain of our own, when, that liberty of perdition being granted you, they refused to return to you. We ought therefore, lest we lose these true ones, to gather in even the feigned, since in the Gospel it is read that the servants gathered to the marriage of their lord guests both good and bad — especially since the wind of pride, like a wicked blast, has shaken you off the Lord's threshing-floor before the time of winnowing, whence we strive, as much as we can with God's help, to call you back to it.
And you surely know how, with the brooms of diligence, the wheat too is dragged along together with the earth when it is called back to the threshing-floor. But as for your opinion that the unwilling are not to be compelled to the truth, you err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God, who makes them willing while they are compelled unwilling. For did the Ninevites repent unwillingly, because they did it at the compulsion of their king? For the prophet had already, going about the whole city for three days, foretold the wrath of God to it. What need, then, was there of the king's command, that God should be humbly supplicated — God who looks not on the countenance but on the hearts — except that there were among them certain men who would neither heed nor believe the divine warnings unless terrified by an earthly power?
Therefore by this command of royal power — against which your voluntary destruction is set — an occasion is afforded to many for the salvation which is granted in Christ; for even if they are led violently to the supper of so great a Father of the household and are compelled to enter, yet within they find wherewith to rejoice that they have entered. For the Lord himself foretold that both would come to pass, and he brought both to pass. For when certain ones were rejected — who are surely understood to be the Jews, since they had before been invited through the prophets and chose for the time to make excuses — the Lord said to his servant: 'Go out into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the feeble and the blind and the lame.' And the servant said: 'Lord, it is done as you commanded, and yet there is room.' And the lord said to the servant:
'Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to enter, that my house may be filled.' We understand 'highways' as heresies, 'hedges' as schisms; for the highways in this place signify diverse opinions, but the hedges perverse opinions. Why then do you marvel, if whoever comes to this supper — neither gladly brought in nor violently impelled — dies not of bodily but of spiritual hunger? The words of the letter: 'We rejoice,' he says, 'in the hatred of the world. Under its pressures we do not succumb, but are glad. This world cannot love the servants of Christ, who is known not to have loved Christ, the Lord himself saying: If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you also.' To this the answer:
How is it that, rejoicing in the hatred of the world, you do not succumb to its pressures but are glad, when you wish to slay your very selves lest you suffer any troubles whatever, and you choose to die not slain by others for the truth of Christ, but by your own selves for the party of Donatus? This is the insanity of the Circumcellions, not the glory of martyrs. Since, then, your deeds are plain to see, why do you usurp for yourselves words that are another's? 'This world,' he says, 'cannot love the servants of Christ, who is known not to have loved Christ.' We, then, do not belong to this world, because we love you;
but you are not the servants of Christ, who, rendering evil for good and turning your malice — when you cannot exercise it upon us — back upon yourselves, neither love us nor spare yourselves but kill yourselves. But when the Lord said: 'If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you also,' he said this not to you, but to those to whom he gave the command that, if they were persecuted in one city, they should flee into another — which you do not do. He spoke to those to whom he said that the cities to which they might flee would not be lacking until the end of the age — those cities which you complain are now wanting to you, yet are unwilling to confess that you are not the men to whom these things were said. The words of the letter:
'But even if persecution should be at rest,' he says, 'whence is the number of martyrs made complete? John saying: I saw the souls of the slain beneath the altar of God, crying out and saying: How long, O Lord, do you not judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell upon the earth? And white robes were given to each of them, and it was said to them that they should rest yet a little while, until the number of their brethren should be fulfilled, who are about to be killed even as they.' To this the answer: If you wished to be martyrs beneath the altar of Christ, you would not, by burning yourselves, make a sacrifice to the devil. For who rejoices over this frenzy of yours except the devil, who inspires it in you, and those who are of his party?
It is he who used to cast that boy, of whom we read in the Gospel, now into water, now into fire; it is he who drowned that herd of swine, plunged headlong into the waves; it is he who, by a most audacious temptation, suggested even to the Lord himself that he should cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Without doubt you belong to the devil, when you frequent in your deaths the three kinds of death — water, fire, and the precipice. For if you did not lose your minds through madness, those very words which you set down from the holy book ought to call you back from this destruction which you bring upon yourselves. For what do the souls of the martyrs say beneath the altar of God? 'How long, O Lord, do you not judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell upon the earth?'