Chapter 39.—45. But as for you, when the case of the followers of Maximianus is brought up against you, who, after being condemned by the sentence of a Council of 310 bishops;2404
after being utterly defeated in the same
Council, quoted in the records of so many proconsuls, in the chronicles of so many municipal
towns; after being driven forth from the basilicas of which they were in possession, by the order of the judges, enforced by the troops of the several cities, were yet again received with all
honor by you, together with those whom they had
baptized outside the pale of your
communion, without any
question respecting their
baptism,—when
confronted, I say, with their case, you can find no reply to make. Indeed, you are vanquished by an expressed opinion, not indeed true, but proceeding from yourselves, by which you maintain that men
perish for the faults of others in the same
communion of the sacraments, and that each man’s character is determined by that of the man by whom he is
baptized,—that he is
guilty if his baptizer is
guilty,
innocent if he is
innocent. But if these views are true, there can be no doubt that, to say
nothing of
innumerable others, you are
destroyed by the
sins of the followers of Maximianus, whose guilt your party, in so large a
Council, has exaggerated even to the proportions of the
sin of those whom the
earth swallowed up alive. But if the faults of the followers of Maximianus have not
destroyed you, then are these opinions false which you
entertain; and much less have certain indefinite unproved faults of the Africans been able to
destroy the entire
world. And accordingly, as the
apostle says, "Every man shall bear his own burden;"
2405
and the baptism of Christ is no one’s except Christ’s; and it is to no purpose that Petilianus promises that he will take as the subject of his second book the charges which we bring concerning the followers of Maximianus, entertaining too low an opinion of men’s intellects, as though they do not perceive that he has nothing to say.
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