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 CONSULS OF GOD

sonally is of unlimited fruitfulness. That conquest of things which comes from keeping them at a distance, the whole mystery of a crea- tiveness which grows out of renouncement of the created, the ora and labora which are so simple and majestic a way of human life (yes, the simplest and most majestic of all ways) : this the Church, as fire from Heaven and salt of the earth, had to master and retain. But the flame which soon burned on hundreds of hearths when Benedict of Nursia, both a perfector and a pioneer, wrote his Rule in the sixth century, was also in immediate need of a guardian who could tend it when it smouldered or burned too fiercely, lest the house as a whole suffer injury. Like all things human, the Church and its monasticism were in danger of losing sight of the proportion between the whole and its parts.

As a political institution the Church necessarily required leadership which could keep under control the life which coursed through his- torical space and time. If its Catholicism implied bringing together all values into one complex totality, nothing was more urgent than scrutiny of these values before they were accepted. The foundation had to be strengthened as more was added to the building.

In a state that wished to establish the government of One Shepherd and One Fold amidst the turbulence of earthly life, the value of a monarchical unity of leadership was self-evident. It was a law of Christ's Kingdom that its teacher was to be like unto the master of a house who takes both old and new out of his chest; it was to preserve what had been handed down, to sift what was in the making, to make young growth conform to the logic of the old, and to blend the old with the new. The restive creativeness of the human spirit had from the beginning thrown the Church into struggle concerning what was false and what true in her teaching. The dogmatic conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries at first sight read like a chronique scandaleuse* Though all sides earnestly wished to serve the cause of Christ, the issue at bottom was whether the new religion was to live or die. The thing that held all the separate camps together was a position against Rome, ot rather the common bond was Rome's opposition to their teachers and their doctrines*

Thus there existed in North Africa a sectarian Church of ultta- asccrics. These were the Donatists. No one known to have sinned

DOGMATIC