Letters (Epistulae)

...sending themselves everywhere into voluntary deaths and throwing away their feral souls by means of punishments brought upon themselves?

16 Many who were established within that very heretical superstition used to shudder at these things. And when they thought it sufficient for their own innocence that such things displeased them, they were told by the Catholics: "If those evils do not pollute your innocence, how can you say that the Christian world is polluted by the sins of Caecilian a Bishop of Carthage accused of being a traditor, whether they are false or certainly unknown? How do you separate yourselves by such a wicked crime from the Catholic unity, as if from the Lord’s threshing floor A reference to the biblical metaphor for the Church, which must contain both wheat and chaff until the final judgment., which, until the time of winnowing, must necessarily have both the wheat to be stored in the barn and the chaff to be consumed by fire?" And thus, a reason was given to some, such that others crossed over to Catholic unity, prepared to endure even the enmities of those lost men. But many, although they wished to do so, did not dare to make enemies of those men who had such great license for cruelty; indeed, some suffered most cruelly after they had crossed over to us.

17 It also happened that at Carthage, a certain deacon of theirs named Maximianus leader of a splinter group within Donatism was puffed up against his own bishop. Certain bishops of the same party made a schism and, in the divided populace of Carthage, ordained a bishop against a bishop of the party of Donatus the namesake and leader of the Donatist schism. Because this displeased many of them, they condemned the same Maximianus along with twelve others who were present at his ordination, while they gave a set day for others belonging to the same society of schism to return. But later, they accepted some of those twelve and some of those to whom the delay had been granted—returning after the appointed day—back into their own honors for the sake of their own peace, and they did not dare to rebaptize those whom the condemned party had baptized outside their own communion.

Scriptural references: Matt 3:12; Luke 3:17.