Chosen Before All the People

Cyprian, Caecilius, Primus, Polycarp, Nicomedes, Lucilianus, Successus, Sedatus, Fortunatus, Januarius, Secundinus, Pomponius, Honoratus, Victor, Aurelius, Sattius, Petrus, a second Januarius, Saturninus, a second Aurelius, Venantius, Quietus, Rogatianus, Tenax, Felix, Faustinus, Quintus, a second Saturninus, Lucius, Vincentius, Libosus, Geminius, Marcellus, Iambus, Adelphius, Victoricus and Paulus, to Felix the elder and to the people living at Legio and Asturica, and to Laelius the deacon and the people living at Emerita — brothers in the Lord, greetings.

When we had met together, dearly loved brothers, we read the letters you sent us by our fellow overseers Felix and Sabinus — letters written out of the soundness of your faith and your fear of God. In them you tell us that Basilides and Martial, stained with certificates of idolatry and tied down by the knowledge of wicked crimes, ought not to hold the office of overseer or carry out God’s priesthood. You asked for an answer in writing, and for your worry — as just a worry as it was a necessary one — to be relieved either by the comfort or by the help of our judgment. [d]

What answers a request like this is not our advice so much as God’s own commands. Long ago the voice of heaven ordered, and the law of God laid down, who and what sort of men ought to serve the altar and carry out the sacrifices of God. In Exodus God speaks to Moses and warns him: “Let the priests who come near to the Lord God make themselves holy, or the Lord will abandon them.” And again: “And when they come near to the altar of the Holy One to serve, they shall not bring sin upon themselves, or they will die.” In Leviticus too the Lord commands and says: “Anyone who has a spot or a blemish on him shall not come forward to offer gifts to God.”

Since these things are announced and made plain to us, our obedience has to wait upon God’s commands. In a matter of this kind human indulgence cannot take account of anybody’s rank, or make an allowance for anyone, once God’s own ruling has stepped in and set a law. We ought not to forget what the Lord said to the Jews through the prophet Isaiah, rebuking them and angry that they had thought little of God’s commands and followed human teachings: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is a long way from me. They worship me for nothing, teaching human doctrines and human commands.” The Lord says the same thing again in the Gospel: “You set aside the commandment of God so that you may establish your own tradition.” [h]

With all of this in front of our eyes, and weighing it anxiously and with reverence, we ought when priests are ordained to choose nobody but unstained and upright overseers — men who offer sacrifices to God in holiness and worthily, and who can therefore be heard in the prayers they make for the safety of the Lord’s people. For it is written, “God does not listen to a sinner; but if anyone worships God and does his will, God listens to him.” So it is right that with every care, and by honest inquiry, those should be chosen for God’s priesthood whom God will plainly listen to.

And the people must not flatter themselves that they can keep clear of the infection of sin while they share communion with a priest who is a sinner, and give their consent to the unjust and unlawful office of the overseer set over them. God’s rebuke through the prophet Hosea threatens them and says: “Their sacrifices will be like the bread of mourners; everyone who eats it will be defiled.” He teaches plainly, and shows, that every one of them without exception is bound to the sin who has been contaminated by the sacrifice of a profane and unrighteous priest. We find the same thing brought out in Numbers, when Korah and Dathan and Abiram claimed the right of sacrificing for themselves in opposition to Aaron the priest. There the Lord commanded through Moses that the people should be separated from them, so that by keeping company with the wicked they would not be tied down in the same wickedness themselves. “Separate yourselves,” he said, “from the tents of these hardened and wicked men, and do not touch anything that belongs to them, or you will die together in their sins.” For this reason a people who obey the Lord’s commands and fear God ought to separate themselves from a sinful overseer, and not join in the sacrifices of a sacrilegious priest — especially since it is they themselves who hold the power either of choosing worthy priests or of refusing unworthy ones. [j]

This very thing, too, we see coming from divine authority: that the priest should be chosen in the presence of the people, before everyone’s eyes, and should be approved as worthy and fit by the public verdict and testimony. So in the book of Numbers the Lord commanded Moses: “Take Aaron your brother, and Eleazar his son, and set them on the mountain in front of the whole assembly; strip Aaron of his clothes and put them on Eleazar his son; and let Aaron die there and be gathered to his people.” God commands that a priest be appointed in front of the whole assembly. That is, he instructs us and shows us that the ordination of priests ought not to be carried out except with the knowledge of the people standing by, so that in the presence of the people the crimes of the wicked may be exposed or the merits of the good declared, and so that the ordination may be just and lawful, having been examined by the vote and the judgment of everyone. [l]

And this is kept up afterward, according to God’s instruction, in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter speaks to the people about appointing an apostle in Judas’s place. “Peter,” it says, “stood up among the disciples, and the crowd was all in one place.” Nor do we find that the apostles kept to this only when overseers and priests were ordained, but when deacons were too; the same book says, “And the twelve called together the whole company of the disciples and said to them.” It was done that carefully, with the whole body of the people called together, surely for this reason: so that no unworthy man might creep into the service of the altar or into the office of a priest. That unworthy men are sometimes ordained — not according to the will of God, but according to human presumption — and that whatever does not come of a lawful and righteous ordination displeases God, God himself makes plain through the prophet Hosea, saying: “They have set up a king for themselves, but not by me.”

For this reason you must carefully watch and keep the practice handed down from divine tradition and apostolic custom, which is kept among us as well, and in nearly all the provinces: that for ordinations to be properly carried out, all the neighboring overseers of the same province should come together with the people for whom an overseer is being ordained; and that the overseer should be chosen in the presence of the people, who know each man’s life through and through and have watched what each one does in his everyday conduct. [n]

This is what you did, we see, in the ordination of our colleague Sabinus: by the vote of the whole brotherhood, and by the sentence of the overseers who had assembled where you were and who had written to you about him, the office of overseer was given to him and hands were laid on him in Basilides’ place. Nor can an ordination rightly completed be undone by the fact that Basilides, after his crimes were found out and his conscience laid bare by his own confession, went to Rome and misled our colleague Stephen — who was far off and knew nothing of what had been done or of the truth — canvassing to be put back unjustly into the office he had been justly deposed from. The result is that the sins of Basilides are not so much wiped out as made worse: to his old sins he has added the crime of deceit and trickery. For the man whose own carelessness let a fraud catch him off guard is not so much to be blamed as the man who worked the fraud is to be cursed. And if Basilides could deceive men, he cannot deceive God, since it is written, “God is not mocked.”

Nor can trickery do Martial any good either, as though a man tangled in great crimes could still hold his office — for the apostle warns and says: “An overseer must be blameless, as God’s steward.”

So then, dearly loved brothers: you have written it, our colleagues Felix and Sabinus confirm it, and another Felix, of Caesar Augusta — a man who holds to the faith and defends the truth — reports the same in his letter. Basilides and Martial have both been contaminated by the abominable certificate of idolatry. [p]

Basilides did more than take the certificate. Laid low by illness, he blasphemed against God, and admitted that he had blasphemed. Then, because of the wound in his own conscience, he laid down his office of his own accord and turned to repentance, begging God, and counting himself happy enough if he were allowed to share communion even as a layman. Martial, for his part, was for a long time a regular at the disgraceful and filthy banquets of the Gentiles in their guild. He placed his sons in the same guild, in the manner of foreign nations, among profane graves, and buried them there alongside strangers. He has also stated, in official records taken down before a ducenarian procurator, that he had given himself over to idolatry and had denied Christ. And there are many other serious crimes that Basilides and Martial are held to be caught up in.

Men like this claim the office of overseer for themselves in vain. It is plain that such men may not rule over the church of Christ, and ought not to offer sacrifices to God — especially since our colleague Cornelius decided this long ago: a peaceable and righteous priest, honored besides with martyrdom by the Lord’s own stooping favor. He decided it with us, and with all the overseers appointed throughout the whole world: that men of this sort may indeed be admitted to repentance, but are barred from ordination among the clergy and from the honor of the priesthood.

And do not let it upset you, dearest brothers, if with some people in these last times an uncertain faith wavers, or a fear of God with no reverence behind it goes unsteady, or a peaceable harmony does not hold. These things were foretold as bound to happen at the end of the world. The voice of the Lord and the testimony of the apostles predicted that now, as the world fails and the Antichrist draws near, everything good would fail and everything evil and hostile would prosper. [s]

And yet, in these last times, the strictness the good news lays down has not so failed in the church of God, nor has the strength of Christian virtue or of faith gone so slack, that no part of the priesthood is left standing under this collapse of things and this shipwreck of faith. There are still men, bold and steady, who keep up the honor of God’s majesty and the dignity of the priesthood, with the whole of that fear observed. [t]

We remember and keep in view that Mattathias boldly stood up for God’s law when others gave way and yielded; that Elijah stood and fought nobly when the Jews gave way and abandoned the worship of God; that Daniel, put off neither by the loneliness of a foreign country nor by the wearing down of unending persecution, suffered martyrdom again and again and gloriously; and that the three young men, mastered neither by their tender years nor by threats, stood up faithfully against the fires of Babylon and beat the conquering king in the middle of their own captivity.

Let the tally of turncoats and traitors look to itself — men who have now begun to rise up inside the church against the church, and to corrupt the faith along with the truth. Among a great many there is still an honest mind, a reverence with substance in it, and a spirit given to nothing but the Lord, its own God. The treachery of others does not press the Christian faith down into ruin; it spurs it on and lifts it up to glory, as the blessed apostle Paul urges when he says: “What if some of them have fallen away from their faith? Has their unbelief made the faith of God worthless? Certainly not. For God is true, and every man a liar.” But if every man is a liar and God alone is true, what else ought we — God’s servants, and his priests above all — to do, than let go of human errors and lies and stay in the truth of God, keeping the Lord’s commands?

So then, dearest brothers, although some have been found among our colleagues who think that godly discipline may be neglected, and who rashly share communion with Basilides and Martial, a thing like that ought not to shake our faith. The Holy Spirit threatens such men in the Psalms, saying: “But you hated instruction and threw my words behind you. When you saw a thief, you gave him your consent, and you took your share with adulterers.” He shows that men who keep company with wrongdoers become sharers and partners in other men’s sins. And Paul the apostle writes and says the same thing: “Whisperers, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things — who, although they knew the judgment of God, did not understand that those who do such things deserve death: not only the ones who do them, but the ones who agree with those who do them.” [w]

Since, he says, those who do such things deserve death, he makes it plain and proves it: not only do those who do evil deserve death and come to punishment, but so do those who agree with the ones who do such things. They are mixed into unlawful communion with the evil and the sinners and the unrepentant; they are polluted by contact with the guilty; and, joined to them in the fault, they are not separated from them in the penalty.

For this reason, dearly loved brothers, we do not merely approve of the reverent care your integrity and faith have cost you — we applaud it. And we urge you by this letter, as strongly as we can, not to mix into sacrilegious communion with profane and polluted priests, but to keep the soundness and honesty of your faith steady, with reverent fear. I bid you, dearest brothers, always and heartily, farewell.