Letters (Epistulae)

14 But if they should wish to kill themselves, so that those who are to be liberated might not be liberated, and in that way terrify the piety of those who are liberating them—so that, while it is feared lest some lost souls should perish, those who are not rescued from perdition are those who either already did not wish to perish or could have been restrained from perishing—5 what does Christian charity do here, especially since those who threaten their own voluntary and furious deaths are very few in comparison with the crowds to be liberated? What then does fraternal love do? Does it, while fearing the temporary fires of the furnaces for the few, abandon all to the eternal fires of hell, and leave to everlasting destruction so many who either already want to come to perpetual life through Catholic peace or would be unable to do so later, all by taking care lest some die by a voluntary death who live to the hindrance of the salvation of others, whom they do not permit to live according to the doctrine of Christ, so that they may teach them at any time, according to the custom of diabolical doctrine teaching of the devil, to hasten toward those deaths that are now feared in them? Or does it rather preserve those it can, even if those it cannot preserve perish of their own accord? For it ardently desires that all should live, but it labors more so that not all should perish. Thanks be to the Lord, however, that even among us—not indeed in all places, but in a great many—and throughout other parts of Africa, Catholic peace runs and has run its course without any such deaths of these insane people. For those fatal events occur there where there is such a furious and useless race of men, who have been accustomed to do the same things in other times as well.

IV 15 25 And indeed, before these laws were sent by the Catholic emperors, the peace and unity of Christ were gradually growing...