The inevitable appeal to the civil power to settle the dispute was first made by the Donatists, who were incited to do so by receiving proof, in their exclusion from certain privileges conferred on the African church, that the sympathies of Constantine were with the other party.

They accordingly petitioned the emperor to appoint a commission to try the case, indicating a preference for Gallic bishops, among whom there were no traditors, the Diocletian persecution not having extended to Gaul. The result was that a commission was issued to five Gallic bishops, under the presidency of Miltiades, bishop of Rome. The number of referees was afterwards increased to twenty, and the case was tried at Rome in 313. Ten bishops appeared on each side, the leading representative of the Donatists being Donatus of Casae Nigrae. The decision was entirely in favour of Caecilian, and Donatus was found guilty of various ecclesiastical offences. An appeal was taken and allowed; but the decision of the synod of Arles (314) not only confirmed the position of Caecilian, but greatly strengthened it by passing a canon that ordination was not invalid because performed by a traditor, if otherwise regular. Felix had previously been declared innocent after an examination of records and witnesses at Carthage. A further appeal to the emperor in person was heard at Milan in 316, when all points were finally decided in favour of Caecilian. As a necessary consequence of this the power of the state was directed to the suppression of the defeated party. Persistent Donatists were no longer merely heretics; they were rebels, and incurred the confiscation of their church property and the forfeiture of their civil rights.

The attempt to destroy by force a fanatical sect had its usual result in only intensifying its fanaticism and consolidating its sectarianism. Majorinus, the Donatist bishop of Carthage, dying in 315, was succeeded by Donatus, surnamed Magnus, a man of great force of character, under whose influence the schism gained fresh strength from the opposition it encountered. Force was met with force; the Circumcelliones, bands of fugitive slaves and vagrant (circum cellas) peasants, were enlisted as the champions of Donatism, and their violence reached such a height as to threaten civil war. In 321 Constantine, seeing probably that he had been wrong in abandoning his usual policy of toleration in this case, sought to retrace his steps by granting the Donatists liberty to act according to their consciences, and declaring that the points in dispute between them and the orthodox should be left to the judgment of God. This wise policy, to which he consistently adhered to the close of his reign, was not followed by his son and successor in the Western Empire, Constans, who, after repeated attempts to win over the sect by bribes, resorted to persecution. The renewed excesses of the Circumcelliones, among whom were ranged fugitive slaves, debtors, and political malcontents of all kinds, had given to the Donatist schism a socialist aspect; and its forcible suppression may therefore have seemed to Constans even more necessary for the preservation of the empire than for the vindication of orthodoxy. The power which they had been the first to invoke having thus declared so emphatically and persistently against them, the Donatists were led to adopt the theory known in more recent times as that of spiritual independence, which Donatus Magnus formulated in the question, “What has the emperor to do with the church!” (Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?) Such a theory naturally aggravated the lawlessness of the Circum-cellion adherents of the sect, and their outrages were in turn made the justification for the most rigorous measures against the whole Donatist party indiscriminately. Many of their bishops fell victims to the persecution, and. Donatus and several others were banished from their sees.

With the accession of Julian (361) an entire change took place in the treatment of the Donatists. Their churches were restored and their bishops reinstated, with the natural result of greatly increasing both the numbers and the fanaticism of the sect. A return to the earlier policy of repression was made under Valentinian I. and Gratiau, by whom the Donatist churches were again closed, and all assemblies of adherents of the sect forbidden. It was not, however, until the commencement of the 5th century that the sect began to decline, owing partly to the occurrence of a division within it, but still more to the arguments used against it by the greatest theologian of the early church. The division arose out of a quarrel between Maximian, a deacon in Carthage, and Primian, the successor, of Parmenian in the (Donatist) bishopric. Maximian, being excommunicated, formed a party which, as Neander puts it, “stood in precisely the same relation to the body of the Donatists as the Donatists themselves did to the Catholic church.” The dispute was a source of weakness in itself, and still more by the unanswerable arguments it furnished to the Catholic party, who during the reign of the emperor Honorius made repeated and determined efforts to secure the extinction of the schism. In 405 an imperial edict was issued commanding the Donatists, under the severest penalties, to return to the Catholic church. Meanwhile the more appropriate weapon of argument was being effectively wielded by the Catholic party, under the leadership of one of the ablest controversialists the Christian church has ever known. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, after several years’ negotiation, found it possible to arrange a great conference between the Donatists and the orthodox, which took place under the orders of the emperor at Carthage in 411. There were present two hundred and eighty-six Catholic and two hundred and seventy-nine Donatist bishops. Before entering on the proceedings the Catholics pledged themselves, if defeated, to give up their sees, while in the other event they promised to recognize the Donatists as bishops on their simply declaring their adherence to the Catholic church. The latter proposal, though it was received with scorn at the time, had perhaps ultimately as much influence as the resistless logic of Augustine in breaking the strength of the schism. The discussion, which lasted for three days, Augustine and Aurelius being the chief speakers on the one side, and Primian and Petiliau on the other, turned exclusively upon the two questions that had given rise to the schism,—first, the question of fact, whether Felix had been a traditor, and secondly, the question of doctrine, whether a church by tolerance of unworthy members within its pale lost the essential attributes of purity and catholicity. On the second point, to which alone abiding interest attaches itself, the Catholic view was stated and defended by Augustine with a force of argument, an aptness of quotation from Scripture (often, however, founded on misinterpretation), and a beauty of language that all but compel assent. Nowhere else in polemical theology are there to be found more valuable statements as to the connection between the divine and the human elements in the communication of grace, and as to the relative importance of the two attributes of catholicity and purity respectively as tests of the true church. It is to be observed, however, that on the side of Augustine as well as on that of his opponents there is the inevitable confusion of thought that arises from failure to apprehend the distinction between the visible and the invisible church.

The decision of Marcellinus, the imperial commissioner, was in favour of 'the Catholic party on both questions, and it was at once confirmed on an appeal to the emperor. As in the case of the similar decision almost exactly a century earlier, there followed the severest penal measures against the schismatics, the clergy being banished and the laity subjected to heavy fines. The extinction of the schism, which all the arguments of Augustine had failed to effect, was still less to be brought about by persecution. The Donatists continued to maintain an independent existence until the 7th century, when they disappear from history, along with the whole Christian church of North Africa, before the invading Saracens.

Sources.—1. Contemporary. - -Optatus MilevitanUs De Schismate Donatistarum Lib. VII., (Dupuis’s ed., Paris, 1700), and several of the works of Augustine. 2. Modem.—Walsh’s Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Ketzereien, Neander’s Kirchcngeschichte, Hagenbach’s Kirchengeschichte, Herzog’s Encyclopädie, art. “Don-atisten,” Robertson’s History of the Christian Church.