Carthage, had endeavoured to repress a fanatical eagerness for martyrdom, and to correct the superstition which regarded the martyrs with excessive veneration. In this policy he was supported by his archdeacon Cæcilian. Mensurius died A.D. 311, and Cæcilian was elected and consecrated in haste as his successor. The Numidian bishops denied the validity of his consecration on the ground that Felix, Bishop of Aptunga, who had consecrated him, was a traditor-that is, had been guilty of purchasing escape from martyrdom by surrendering copies of the Sacred Scriptures to the heathen during the persecution. The charge against Felix was denied, but an assembly of several Numidian bishops proceeded to depose Cæcilian, and consecrated Majorinus to fill the bishopric. Cæcilian refused to submit, and both parties appealed to the Emperor to decide the quarrel. Constantine directed the Bishop of Rome and five Gallic bishops to hear the appeal; their decision was given in favour of Cæcilian, but his opponents impugned the authority of the tribunal. The Emperor then remitted the question to a Council which met at Arles. The Council confirmed the previous decision; but the defeated bishop still refused to yield. Constantine himself was entreated to hear the cause, and after hearing it at Milan he confirmed Cæcilian in the bishopric.

Majorinus died A.D. 315; he had for his successor Donatus, who became the head of the party opposed to Cæcilian and gave his name to it. The Emperor, to crush the schismatics, deprived them of their churches, and a Roman army was sent into North Africa to enforce the imperial edict. The Donatists resisted, and they were supported by hordes of wild and reckless men who, according to the description of Augustine, "followed no kind of useful occupation; they held their own lives in fanatical contempt, and thought no death too cruel for those who differed from them; they wandered about from place to place, chiefly in the country districts, and haunted the huts of the peasants for the purpose of obtaining food. Hence they were called Circumcelliones.'" 4 Property was destroyed;

A Numidian bishop of the same name had already been one of the principal opponents of Cæcilian. It is possible that the adherents of the "schism were called Donatists before Donatus the Great " was elected Bishop of Carthage.

• Augustine, contra Gaudentium Donatistam, i. § 32. Migne,

ix. 725.

!

houses and churches were burnt; large numbers of persons were massacred. So formidable were the outrages that Constantine at last yielded, and the laws against Donatism were repealed. On his death, Constans, who succeeded him in North Africa, attempted by a lavish distribution of money among the adherents of the schism to reconcile them to the Catholic Church. This provoked fresh violence, which the Emperor endeavoured to repress by fresh severities. Another attempt to bribe them into submission was followed by another fierce outburst of revolt, and the Circumcelliones again attempted to terrify the representatives of the empire by the devastation of property, by assassination, and massacre. They were again suppressed. At the accession of Julian (A.D. 361), the Donatists were restored to their churches. At his death the persecution was renewed.

A conference, at which 565 bishops were present, was held at Carthage A.D. 411, in the presence of an imperial commissioner, with a view to terminate the quarrel. Among the Catholics, who were in a small majority, was Augustine, who was now taking a leading part in the controversy. The commissioner decided in favour of the Catholic Church; the Donatist clergy were exiled and their adherents fined. From this time the power of Donatism was crushed; the great authority of Augustine effected what persecution had been unable to accomplish. The schism originated in the validity of the ordination of a bishop; it soon raised questions of supreme importance in relation to the nature of the Christian Church.

The Catholics contended that as long as a Church retained the true episcopal succession, it was a part of the true Church of Christ, and that to separate from it was to forfeit the blessings of the Christian redemption. The Donatists, like the Novatians, replied that the character of the members of a Church is not less important than the succession of its bishops; that there can be no apostolic Church where there is no apostolic discipline; that when a Church permits unworthy members to remain in its communion, it loses the "note" of sanctity,

There is some doubt as to the number of those actually present at the Council. Mansi gives 286 Catholic and 279 Donatist bishops. Seven representatives were chosen by each side to argue the case before the imperial commissioner. (Concilia, iv. 7-276.)

and separation from it becomes the duty of all who desire to be loyal to Christ.

The Catholics maintained that the Donatists were in schism. The Donatists replied by appealing to the constancy of their martyrs, to the holy lives of their bishops, to the visions which came to them from God, to the miracles which were wrought in answer to their prayers. The Catholics declined to acknowledge that these were infallible signs of the true Church; Christ Himself had said that "there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect."

The Donatists quoted the words of Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians, where he insists on the practice of church discipline." "When the Church did not act in accordance with these rules," said they, "but tolerated unworthy members in her communion, she lost the predicates of purity and holiness."

Augustine replied: "It was true, church discipline should, by all means, be vigorously maintained; but that still such a complete separation from the rest, even of manifest transgressors, was, in the existing state of the Church, impracticable; that the evil must be patiently endured, to avoid a still greater one, and to give opportunity for reformation to such as could be reformed, especially in those cases where the wickedness which was to be corrected by church discipline was shared by too many." He attempted to show, by what we must allow to be a rather forced interpretation, that "the Apostle Paul was speaking only of individuals, whose vices were not common to many, and whose vices were universally known; so that the sentence of excommunication pronounced against such persons must have been acknowledged as just by all. . . . Where the infection of sin had seized on the many, the severity of a divine chastisement was required; for the counsels of human separation were vain and mischievous. They proceeded from pride; they rather disturbed the weak among the good, than exerted any power of reformation on the boldly wicked. Let man then punish what he may punish, in the spirit of love. Where he may not, let him suffer patiently, sigh and mourn with love, until either chastisement and reformation come from above, or, at the general harvest, the tares be rooted out 6 Matt. xxiv. 24. 7 I Cor. v.

and the chaff sifted away. 998 When the Donatists met Augustine's argument from the parable of "the tares of the field" by our Lord's own explanation of it, in which "the field" is declared to be, not the Church, but the world, Augustine replied that in this passage Christ used the term " world " in place of the "Church "-an assertion which has been made over and over again by the defenders of the Catholic theory from Augustine's time to our own.

It has been a great and lasting misfortune to Christendom that the noble idea to which the Donatists were driven to appeal in defence of their schism should have been presented to the majestic and regal mind of Augustine under conditions so unfavourable to a fair estimate of its truth and importance. Among the Donatist bishops there may have been men of conspicuous holiness; but, while asserting the necessity of maintaining the sanctity of the Church, they were intimately associated with wandering bands of fanatics and assassins. Where there is the most earnest protest on behalf of the authority of Christ, there ought to be the most generous charity. But the Donatists were not satisfied with insisting that they themselves were bound in conscience to separate from Cæcilian and to deny the validity of his consecration; they went on to declare that every Church that continued to recognise Cæcilian as Bishop of Carthage ceased to be a true Church of Christ, and that the only true Church in the whole world consisted of the partisans of Donatus in North Africa. It was doubtful whether Felix was a "traditor." The Catholics were satisfied that he was not; and they retaliated on their opponents by appealing to official municipal documents to show that the Donatists were "traditores " themselves. But if Felix were guilty and the Donatists innocent, this was no justification of a schism which broke up the peace of hundreds of Churches, and inflicted on a whole province a century of horrible outrages and crimes. The trouble began on a merely technical question, lying very remote from the great principle which was declared to be involved in the controversy.

Augustine himself was not a man to refuse to recognise the contrast between the real and the ideal Church. In his

8 Neander, Church History, iii. 275-276, and Augustine, Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis, iii. § 15. Migne, ix. 632. Cf. contra Cresconium, ii. 43. Migne, ix. 492.

treatises on Baptism, on the unity of the Church, and against Cresconius, he teaches that the Church really consists of thoseand of those only-who are one with Christ. He says that men may administer and may receive the sacrament of Baptism, and yet not be spiritually regenerated; that only those who are spiritually regenerate are members of the Body of Christ; and that it is of these and only of these-that the Church. consists. He says, further, that the Church consists of those who build on the rock-that is, of those who hear the words of Christ and do them, and not of those who hear the words and do them not. But to attempt to separate the regenerate from the unregenerate seemed to Augustine impossible. The Catholic Church had thrown open its gates to all comers, and the number of those who had entered, but were flagrantly destitute of all qualifications for "the communion of saints,' was so enormous, that to have attempted to exclude them would have broken up every existing Church both in the East and in the West. To begin afresh, to gather together in city after city those who gave credible evidence of their loyalty to Christ, would have been a policy of enormous difficulty. To Augustine such a policy would have appeared destructive of the very foundations of faith. He had found a refuge from scepticism in the traditions and authority of those great historic societies which had preserved through generation after generation" the faith once for all delivered to the saints." These constituted the Catholic Church; and apart from these, so Augustine believed, there was no sure knowledge of the mind of Christ, and no possibility of eternal salvation. Naturally, inevitably, he endeavoured to justify their position. He concluded that the laws and characteristics of the ideal Church are not to determine the constitution and discipline of those visible societies which are held together by participation in the Christian sacraments. The tares are to grow together with the wheat till the harvest comes, and then the tares will be burnt in the awful fires and the wheat will be gathered into the garner of God. The ideal contrast between the Church and the "world" remains, but no attempt must be made to realise it. These conclusions, enforced by the name of the most illustrious theologian of the early centuries, have governed the policy of the great Churches of Christendom for fourteen hundred years.