Soldiers Inside Their Own Camp

Cyprian to Maximus and Nicostratus, and to the other confessors: greetings. [a]

Dearly loved brothers, you have gathered often enough from my letters what honor I have always kept in the way I speak of your confession, and what love I have for the brotherhood that stands with you. So believe these letters too, I beg you, and go along with them. In them I write to you, and take thought plainly and faithfully for you, for what you are doing, and for your good name.

For it weighs on me and it saddens me, and an unbearable grief takes hold of me — the grief of a spirit struck down and all but flattened — when I learn that there, against the order of the church, against the law the good news lays down, against the unity of the one arrangement the whole church keeps everywhere, you have agreed that a second overseer should be made. That is a thing neither right nor permitted to be done: that a second church should be set up; that the members of Christ should be torn apart; that the one mind and the one body of the Lord’s flock should be cut to pieces by a rivalry that splits it.

I beg that in you at least this unlawful tearing of our brotherhood may not go on. Remember what you confessed, and remember what has been handed down from God, and come back to the Mother you went out from — the one from whom you came to the glory of your confession, and who rejoiced over it with you. And do not think that you are holding to the good news of Christ this way, when you cut yourselves off from the flock of Christ, and from his peace and his harmony — since good soldiers who have won their honors do better to take their post inside their own camp, and, placed inside it, to see to the business that has to be handled in common and to arrange it.

For since our agreement and our harmony must not be divided in any way, and since we cannot leave the church and go outside her to come over to you, we ask and beg you, with what urging we can, to come back instead to the church your Mother, and to our brotherhood. Dearly loved brothers, I wish you always well, from my heart.