Begun to Stand with Christ

Cyprian to Caldonius, my brother: greetings. [a]

We have received your letter, dearest brother. It is thoroughly sensible, and full of honesty and faith. That is no surprise: you are trained and practiced in the Lord’s Scriptures, and everything you do you do with care and good judgment. You have judged quite rightly about granting peace to our brothers. They have won that peace back for themselves by true repentance and by the glory of confessing the Lord — counted righteous now by their own words, the very words with which they had once condemned themselves.

So then: they have washed away all their sin, and with the Lord’s help their old stain has been scoured out by a greater courage. They ought not to go on lying there any longer, flat under the devil’s power, as it were — not when they have been driven into exile and stripped of everything they owned, and have picked themselves up and begun to stand with Christ. And I wish that the others too would repent after their fall, and be brought back to where they stood before.

And so that you may know how we have dealt with these people — pressing, rash, and relentless in their determination to force peace out of us — I have sent you a book, together with five letters that I wrote to the clergy and to the people, and to the martyrs and confessors as well. Those letters have already gone out to many of our colleagues and have satisfied them, and they wrote back that they hold the same view I do, in keeping with the faith the whole church holds.

Pass this on yourself to as many of our colleagues as you can reach, so that among us all there may be one way of acting and one agreement, according to the Lord’s commands.

I wish you always well, dearest brother. Farewell.