Leporius Recants His Pelagian Views

Still, those who grew from this stock of deadly thorns have already been healed by God’s help and goodness. So we should also now pray to our Lord God that, since in some points that older heresy and this new one are akin to each other, he would grant a like happy ending to those that had a like bad beginning. [a]

Leporius, then a monk and now a presbyter, followed the teaching, or rather the evil deeds, of Pelagius, as we said above, and was among the earliest and greatest champions of that heresy in Gaul. He was warned by us and corrected by God, and he condemned his former mistaken conviction so nobly that his amendment was almost as much a cause for rejoicing as the unbroken faith of many. For the best thing is never to fall into error; the second best is to renounce it well. So, coming to himself, he confessed his mistake with grief but without shame, not only in Africa, where he was then and is now, but also in penitent letters to all the cities of Gaul, containing his confession and his grief. In this way his return to the faith would be made known where his straying from it had first been published, and those who had once been witnesses of his error might afterward be witnesses of his amendment too.