presided, and was to pass the decisive judgment. This arrangement was obviously partial, and secured the triumph of the Catho- lics. The discussions related to two points : (1) Whether the Catholic bishops Caecilian and Felix of Aptunga were tradi- tors ; (2) Whether the church lose her nature and attributes by fellowship with heinous sinners. The balance of skill and aro-ument was on the side of Auo;ustine, thouo-li the Donatists brought much that was forcible against compulsion in religion, and against the confusion of the temporal and the spiritual powers. The imperial commissioner, as might be expected, decided in favor of the Catholics, The separatists neverthe- less persisted in their view, but their appeal to the emperor continued unsuccessful. More stringent civil laws were now enacted against them, banishing the Donatist clergy from their country, imposing fines on the laity, and confiscating the churches. In 415 they were even forbidden to hold religious assemblies, upon pain of death. Augustine himself, who had previously consented only to spiritual measures against heretics, now advocated force, to bring them into the fellowship of the church, out of which there was no salvation. He appealed to the command in the parable of the supjDer, Luke, xiv. 23, to " compel them to come in ; " where, however, the " compel " {avd'yKaaov) is evidently but a vivid hyperbole for the holy zeal in the conversion of the heathen, which we find, for example, in the apostle Paul.' New eruptions of fanaticism ensued. A bishop Gaudentius threatened, that if the attempt were made to deprive him of his church by force, he would burn himself with his congre- gation in it, and vindicated this intended suicide by the ex- ample of Rhazis, in the second book of Maccabees (ch. xiv.). The conquest of Africa by the Arian Yandals in 428 dev- astated the African church, and put an end to the controversy, as the French Revolution swept both Jesuitism and Jansenism away. Yet a remnant of the Donatists, as we learn from the ' On Augustine's view conip. § 27, toward the close. r § 71> INTERNAL HI8T0KY OF DONATISM. 365 letters of Gregory I., perpetuated itself into the seventh cen- tury, still proving in their ruins the power of a mistaken puri- tanic zeal and the responsibility and guilt of state-church persecution. In the seventh century the entire African church sank under the Saracenic conquest. § 71. Internal History of the Donatist Schism. Dogma of the Church. The Donatist controversy was a conflict between separatism and Catholicism ; between ecclesiastical purism and ecclesias- tical eclecticism ; between the idea of the church as an exclu- sive community of regenerate saints and the idea of the church as the general Christendom of state and people. It revolved around the doctrine of the essence of^he Christian church, and, in particular, of the predicate of holiness. It resulted in the completion by Augustine of the catholic dogma of the church, which had been partly developed