treat _libellatici_ more severely than unabashed
transgressors;[249] but, even then, it was still a gross self-deception
to style themselves the "pure ones," since the Novatian Churches
speedily ceased to be any stricter than the Catholic in their
renunciation of the world. At least we do not hear that asceticism and
devotion to religious faith were very much more prominent in the
Catharist Church than in the Catholic. On the contrary, judging from the
sources that have come down to us, we may confidently say that the
picture presented by the two Churches in the subsequent period was
practically identical.[250] As Novatian's adherents did not differ from
the opposite party in doctrine and constitution, their discipline of
penance appears an archaic fragment which it was a doubtful advantage to
preserve; and their rejection of the Catholic dispensations of grace
(practice of rebaptism) a revolutionary measure, because it had
insufficient justification. But the distinction between venial and
mortal sins, a theory they held in common with the Catholic Church,
could not but prove especially fatal to them; whereas their opponents,
through their new regulations as to penance, softened this distinction,
and that not to the detriment of morality. For an entirely different
treatment of so-called gross and venial transgressions must in every
case deaden the conscience towards the latter.

5. If we glance at the Catholic Church and leave the melancholy
recriminations out of account, we cannot fail to see the wisdom,
foresight, and comparative strictness[251] with which the bishops
carried out the great revolution that so depotentiated the Church as to
make her capable of becoming a prop of civic society and of the state,
without forcing any great changes upon them.[252] In learning to look
upon the Church as a training school for salvation, provided with
penalties and gifts of grace, and in giving up its religious
independence in deference to her authority, Christendom as it existed in
the latter half of the third century,[253] submitted to an arrangement
that was really best adapted to its own interests. In the great Church
every distinction between her political and religious conditions
necessarily led to fatal disintegrations, to laxities, such as arose in
Carthage owing to the enthusiastic behaviour of the confessors; or to
the breaking up of communities. The last was a danger incurred in all
cases where the attempt was made