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Updated: June 16, 2025
In Africa and elsewhere they made fun of what they called his craze for scribbling. He himself, in his Retractations, is startled by the number of his works. He turns over the Scripture saying which the Donatists amusingly opposed to him: Vae mullum loquentibus "Woe unto them of many words."
The Donatists who were taken in arms, received, and they soon deserved, the same treatment which might have been shown to the wild beasts of the desert. The captives died, without a murmur, either by the sword, the axe, or the fire; and the measures of retaliation were multiplied in a rapid proportion, which aggravated the horrors of rebellion, and excluded the hope of mutual forgiveness.
Yet its fate was none the less a mere question of time. Its cold logic generated no such fiery enthusiasm as sustained the African Donatists; the newness of its origin allowed no venerable traditions to grow up round it like those of heathenism, while its imperial claims and past successes cut it off from the appeal of later heresies to provincial separatism.
Finally, he knew his fellow-countrymen; he knew that the Donatists, even victorious, even sole masters of the land, would turn against themselves the fury they now satisfied against the Catholics, and never stop tearing each other in pieces. Here was now nearly a hundred years that they had kept Africa in fire and blood. This meant before very long a return to barbarism.
In the opinion of the Italian Catholics, nothing good came from Carthage: these Carthaginians were generally Manichees or Donatists sectaries the more dangerous because they claimed to be orthodox, and, mingling with the faithful, hypocritically contaminated them.
With fifty thousand warriors he landed on the coast of Africa, formed an alliance with the Moors, and became as dangerous an ally to Count Boniface, as Lord Clive was to the native princes of India. Africa was then disturbed by the schism of the Donatists, and these fanatical people were taken under the protection of the Vandals. The Moors always hated their Roman masters.
Dionysius of Alexandria, who flourished A.D. 247, describing a conference or public disputation, with the Millennarians of Egypt, confesses of them, though their adversary, "that they embrace whatever could be made out by good arguments, from the Holy Scriptures." XII. The Donatists, who sprung up in the year 328, used the same Scriptures as we do.
His enemies, the Donatists, called him "the Carthaginian arguer." After he became Bishop of Hippo, he was continually going to Carthage to preach, or dispute, or consult his colleagues, or to ask something from men in office. When he is not there, he is ever speaking of it in his treatises and plain sermons.
See also, beside others, Cyprian, book 1, epist. 11; that Dionysius, the author of The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, chap. 3, part. 3; Basil., Epist. to Amphilochius, can. 4; Ambrose, De Officiis, lib. 2, chap. 27; Augustine, in his book against the Donatists after the Conference, cap. 4; Chrysostom, hom. 83, in Matt.; Gregor. the Great, Epist., lib. 2, chap. 65, 66; Walafridus Strabo, Of Ecclesiastical Matters, chap. 17.
He adds, "Now, I am only contending for the fact, that the communion of Rome constitutes the main body of the Church Catholic, and that we are split off from it, and in the condition of the Donatists." The other replies, by denying the fact that the present Roman communion is like St.
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