What greater iniquity than yours can there be found to be praised? What is there more iniquitous than to exorcise the Holy Ghost, to break down altars, to cast the Eucharist to animals? Yet your people praise you and----thus do they plunge you into folly----call you fortunate, and name you for good luck, and swear by your name, and so are seen already to treat your persons as though you were God.
XXII. The Impiety of the Donatists, who were accustomed to swear by their Bishops.
Men are accustomed to use the Name of God when they swear, as a pledge of their truthfulness, but your party, when they swear by you, keep silence about God and Christ. If the worship due to God has passed from Heaven to you (as would seem from the fact that men swear by you), then let none of you or your party fall sick! Then refuse to die; give orders to the clouds: draw down the rain, if you can, that they may swear even more freely in your name, and may keep silence about God. For what could the Devil effect more by the hands of your people, than he did in the ages that are past, when |109 he caused his temples to be built and his idols to be fashioned----excepting this, that silence should be kept about God, whilst men in their foolishness speak of him alone.
XXIII. The wickedness of the Donatists in scraping the heads of anointed priests.
O sacrilege heaped upon impiety! You gladly listen to men swearing by you, but refuse your ears to the voice of God in the hundred and fourth Psalm, when He says:
'Touch not Mine Anointed and cast not your hands on My prophets.'
That both kings and priests are God's Anointed is shown by the books of Kings and also by David, saying in the hundred and thirty-second Psalm:
'As the precious ointment on the head, that ran down unto the beard of Aaron.'
You, on the contrary, have striven against God to despise His precepts, as earnestly as they who fear God strive to keep His Commandments. Tell us, where is your authority for scraping the heads of priests, when there are so many examples to the contrary, showing that this may not be done? |110 Saul, before he sinned, received the grace of being anointed. After his anointing, he sinned grievously. God, when He saw this, wishing to give us an example |111 not to touch the Oil, professed His repentance. For we read that the Lord spoke thus:
'It repenteth Me to have anointed Saul to be a king.'
Yet surely God might have taken away the Oil which He had bestowed; but, since He wished to teach that the Oil should not be touched even in a sinner, He who had given it, declared that it repented Him. If then God, in order to teach you, could not (because He would not) take away that which He had given, who are you to take away what you did not give?
And when you ought to have opened your ears to listen, you prepared your razor for sin. When you ought to have been the sons of God, you preferred to be the sons of men, and, in order to bite into other men's offices, turned your teeth into arrows and arms. You sharpened your tongues into swords; you fulfilled that which was written of you in the fifty-sixth Psalm:
'Sons of men----their teeth are arms and arrows; their tongue is a sharp sword.'
XXIV. The wrong done by the Donatists to men of every degree and age by laying hands upon them in Penance.
So you have sharpened your tongues into swords with which you slew not the bodies of men, but their dignities; you have destroyed not their members, but their titles. What boots it for those to live, who have been slain by you in their office? Their members are indeed whole and sound, but they carry about the corpse of the dignity which you have scratched away. For you stretched forth your hand and placed the death-bearing Veils upon every head; so that |112 whilst there are (as I have said above) four kinds of heads in the Church----Bishops, priests, deacons, and the Faithful, yon have not spared one.
You have overturned the souls of men. God holds these actions of yours up to detestation in Ezekiel the Prophet, when He says:
'Woe to you who make a Veil,'
that is, who place your hands
'upon every head and upon every age, to overturn souls.'
You have found boys, you have wounded them with Penance, so that none of them might be ordained.
Recognise that you have 'overturned souls.'
You have found old men amongst the Faithful, you have made them do Penance.
Recognise that you have 'overturned souls.'
You have found deacons, priests, Bishops, you have made them as laymen.
Recognise that you have 'overturned souls.'