“They are adherents,” he says, “of the Devil, who is their father; they are insane, traitors, irreligious, profane, ranged against God and enemies of the Holy Church. Would to Heaven!” he concludes, “that these heretics or schismatics might have regard even now for their own salvation, and, brushing aside the darkness, turn their eyes to see the true light, leaving the Devil, and flying for refuge, late though it be, to the one and true God, who is the judge of all! But since they are set upon remaining in their wickedness and wish to die in their iniquities, our warning and our previous long continued exhortations must suffice. For if they had been willing to obey our commandments, they would now be free from all evil.”
Evidently the Emperor was thoroughly weary of the whole controversy, and disgusted at such unreasoning contumacy. The same feelings find powerful expression in the letters and manifestoes of St. Augustine, a century later, when the great Bishop of Hippo constituted himself the champion of the Catholic Church and played the foremost part in the stormy debates which preceded the final disappearance of the Donatist schism, after the Council of Carthage in 410. Then the momentous decision was reached that all bishops who, after three appeals to them to return to the Church, still refused submission, should be brought back to the Catholic fold by force. The point in dispute was still just what it had been in the days of Constantine, whether a Christian Church could be considered worthy of the name if it had admitted faithless and unworthy members, or if the ministers had been ordained by bishops who had temporised with their consciences and fallen short of the loftiest ideal of duty. That was the great underlying principle at stake in the Donatist controversy, though, as in all such controversies, the personal element was paramount when the schism began, and was still the cause of the bitterness and fury with which the quarrel was conducted long after the intrigues of Lucilla and the personal animosities between Cæcilianus and the Numidian bishops had ceased to be of interest or moment to the living Church. And it is interesting to note that while it was the Donatists themselves who had made the first appeal unto Cæsar by asking Constantine to judge between them and Cæcilianus, in St. Augustine’s day the Donatists hotly denied the capacity of the State to take cognisance of spiritual things. What, they asked, has an Emperor to do with the Church? Quid est Imperatori cum Ecclesia?
STATUE OF CONSTANTINE FROM THE PORCH OF SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERAN, AT ROME.