uncharitable conduct. Whenever they acquired a proselyte,
even from the distant provinces of the East, they carefully repeated the
sacred rites of baptism and ordination; as they rejected the validity
of those which he had already received from the hands of heretics or
schismatics. Bishops, virgins, and even spotless infants, were subjected
to the disgrace of a public penance, before they could be admitted to
the communion of the Donatists. If they obtained possession of a church
which had been used by their Catholic adversaries, they purified the
unhallowed building with the same zealous care which a temple of idols
might have required. They washed the pavement, scraped the walls, burnt
the altar, which was commonly of wood, melted the consecrated plate, and
cast the Holy Eucharist to the dogs, with every circumstance of ignominy
which could provoke and perpetuate the animosity of religious factions.
Notwithstanding this irreconcilable aversion, the two parties, who were
mixed and separated in all the cities of Africa, had the same language
and manners, the same zeal and learning, the same faith and worship.
Proscribed by the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the empire, the
Donatists still maintained in some provinces, particularly in Numidia,
their superior numbers; and four hundred bishops acknowledged the
jurisdiction of their primate. But the invincible spirit of the sect
sometimes preyed on its own vitals: and the bosom of their schismatical
church was torn by intestine divisions. A fourth part of the Donatist
bishops followed the independent standard of the Maximianists. The
narrow and solitary path which their first leaders had marked out,
continued to deviate from the great society of mankind. Even the
imperceptible sect of the Rogatians could affirm, without a blush, that
when Christ should descend to judge the earth, he would find his true
religion preserved only in a few nameless villages of the Caesarean
Mauritania.

The schism of the Donatists was confined to Africa: the more diffusive
mischief of the Trinitarian controversy successively penetrated into
every part of the Christian world. The former was an accidental quarrel,
occasioned by the abuse of freedom; the latter was a high and mysterious
argument, derived from the abuse of philosophy. From the age of
Constantine to that of Clovis and Theodoric, the temporal interests both
of the Romans and Barbarians were deeply involved in the theological
disp