Chapter 4.—5. Nor would I therefore be understood to urge that ecclesiastical discipline should be set at naught, and that every one should be allowed to do exactly as he pleased, without any check, without a kind of healing chastisement, a lenity which should inspire fear, the severity of love. For then what will become of the precept of the apostle, "Warn them that are unruly, comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak, be patient
toward all men; see that none render evil for evil unto any man?"2338
At any rate, when he added these last words, "See that none render
evil for
evil unto any man," he showed with sufficient clearness that there is no rendering of
evil for
evil when one chastises those that are
unruly, even though for the fault of unruliness be
administered the
punishment of chastising. The
punishment of chastising therefore is not an
evil, though the fault be an
evil. For indeed it is the steel, not of an
enemy inflicting a
wound, but of a surgeon performing an operation. Things like this are done within the
Church, and that spirit of
gentleness within its pale
burns with
zeal towards
God, lest the
chaste virgin which is
espoused to one
husband, even
Christ, should in any of her members be
corrupted from the simplicity which is in
Christ, as
Eve was
beguiled by the subtilty of the
serpent.
2339
Notwithstanding,
far be it from the
servants of the
father of the
family that they should be unmindful of the
precept of their
Lord, and be so inflamed with the
fire of holy indignation against the multitude of the tares, that while they
seek to
gather them in bundles before the time, the
wheat should be rooted up together with them. And of this
sin these men would be held to be
guilty, even though they showed that those were true charges which they brought against the
traditors whom they
accused; because they separated themselves in a spirit of impious presumption, not only from the
wicked, whose society they professed to be avoiding, but also from the good and
faithful in all
nations of the
world, to whom they could not
prove the
truth of what they said they knew; and with themselves they drew away into the same
destruction many others over whom they had some slight
authority, and who were not
wise enough to understand that the
unity of the
Church
dispersed throughout the
world was on no account to be forsaken for other men’s
sins. So that, even though they themselves knew that they were pressing true charges against certain of their neighbors, yet in this way a
weak brother, for whom
Christ died, was perishing through their
knowledge;
2340
whilst, being offended at other men’s
sins, he was destroying in himself the
blessing of
peace which he had with the good
brethren, who partly had never heard such charges, partly had shrunk from giving hasty credence to what was neither discussed nor
proved, partly, in the peaceful spirit of humility, had left these charges, whatsoever they might be, to the cognizance of the judges of the Church, to whom the whole matter had been referred, across the sea.
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
