The Harm Done by New Doctrine

But to make what we say clearer, we must illustrate it with particular examples and treat it somewhat more fully, so that important matters are not rushed over and lost sight of through aiming at too much brevity. In the time of Donatus, from whom his followers were called Donatists, great numbers in Africa were rushing headlong into their own mad error. Forgetting their name, their religion, and their profession, they preferred the sacrilegious recklessness of one man to the church of Christ. At that time, throughout Africa, only those were safe within the sacred bounds of the catholic faith who loathed the profane schism and remained in communion with the universal church. They left to later generations a shining example of how, and how rightly, the soundness of the whole body should from then on be preferred to the madness of one, or at most of a few. [a]

So too, when the Arian poison had infected not a small part of the church but almost the whole world, a kind of blindness fell on almost all the bishops of the Latin tongue, who were outmaneuvered partly by force and partly by fraud, and it kept them from seeing what most needed to be done in the midst of so much confusion. Then whoever was a true lover and worshiper of Christ preferred the ancient belief to the new misbelief, and so escaped the deadly infection. [b]

The danger of that time showed abundantly how great a disaster the bringing in of a new doctrine causes. For then not only matters of small account were overturned, but others of the very gravest importance. Not only kinships, relationships, friendships, and families, but cities, peoples, provinces, nations, and at last the whole Roman Empire were shaken to their foundations and ruined. For this same profane Arian novelty, like a Bellona or a Fury, first took the emperor captive, and then subjected all the chief persons of the palace to new laws. From that time it never stopped throwing everything into confusion, disturbing all things, public and private, sacred and profane. It paid no regard to what was good and true, but, as though it held a position of authority, struck down whomever it pleased. Then wives were violated, widows raped, virgins defiled, monasteries torn down, clergy thrown out, the lower clergy flogged, priests driven into exile, and jails, prisons, and mines filled with saints. Most of these, forbidden to enter the cities and driven from their homes, wandered in deserts and caves, among rocks and the haunts of wild beasts, exposed to nakedness, hunger, and thirst, and were worn out and consumed. Was there any other cause of all this than that, while human superstitions were being brought in to replace heavenly doctrine, while well-established antiquity was being overturned by wicked novelty, while the institutions of former ages were being set at nothing, the decrees of our fathers repealed, and the decisions of our ancestors torn to pieces, the lust of profane and novel curiosity refused to keep itself within the most chaste limits of hallowed and uncorrupted antiquity? [d]