ing and
announcing that a Pseudo-Bishop had been made against the Bishops? For,
either they are satisfied with what they have done, and persevere in their
crime, or, if they are dissatisfied, and give way, they know whither they
may return. For, since it has been determined by all of us, and is both
equitable and just, that the cause of every one be heard there where the
crime has been committed, and _to every shepherd a portion of the flock is
allotted, which each one rules and governs, as he is to give an account of
his doings to the Lord_, it is certainly behoving that those over whom we
preside should not run about, nor break the close harmony of Bishops with
their deceitful and fallacious rashness, but should plead their cause where
they may find both accusers and witnesses of their crime; _unless to a few
desperate and abandoned men the authority of the Bishops seated in Africa
seem less_, who have already judged concerning them, and have lately
condemned, by the weight of their sentence, their conscience, bound by many
snares of crimes. Their cause has been already heard, their sentence
already pronounced; nor is it becoming to the judgment of priests to be
reprehended by the levity of a fickle and inconstant mind, when the Lord
teaches and says, 'Let your conversation be yea, yea; nay, nay.'" Let any
candid person say, whether he who so wrote to one whom he acknowledged as
the successor of St. Peter, could have imagined that there was a Divine
right in that successor to re-hear not only this, but all other causes; to
reverse all previous judgments of his Brethren by his single authority;
nay, more, to confer on all those Brethren their jurisdiction "by the grace
of the Apostolic See."[15]

Another letter of St. Cyprian to another Pope, St. Stephen, will set forth
both his view of the Primacy, and of the Episcopal relation to it. He
wishes St. Stephen to write a letter to the people of Arles, by which their
actual Bishop Marcian, who had joined himself to the schismatic Novatian,
might be excommunicated, and another substituted for him. This alone shows
how great the authority of the Bishop of Rome in such an emergency was. But
the tone of his language is worth considering. It is just such incidents as
these which are made use of by Roman Catholic controversialists in late
times to justify the full extent of Papal power now claimed.[16] "Cyprian
to his brother Stephen, greeting. Faustinus, our colleague at Lyons,