far as physical evil is dissociated from moral evil that its existence is a problem and a perplexity;" and even so it can be largely accounted for, as a means to a good end in a creation subjected to vanity. In the words of the poet above quoted

"What says your prophet? Why was evil sent?

God will redress? Why did not God prevent? .
Faith answers, Sin and pain obtained their place,
To serve man's freedom and display God's grace," etc.

APPENDIX XVI.

It is an instance of the irony of history that the main question of fact, as distinct from the question of principle, between the African Catholics and the Donatists arose out of a forged paragraph added by a Christian, from motives of personal spite, to a letter addressed by an honest Pagan gentleman, under false representations, to a bishop. The story opens at the beginning of the Great Persecution in 303. We find Alfius Cæcilianus (whom, to avoid confusion with Cæcilian of Carthage, we may conveniently designate by his first name) acting as duumvir or chief magistrate in the city of Aptunga, in the province of Proconsular Africa. After some communication with his Christian fellow-townsmen, he anticipates the

expected imperial edict by causing the episcopal chair, and some "letters of salutation" from neighbouring prelates to Felix, the bishop, then absent, to be taken out of the Christian church, the doors of which are afterwards burned. Years pass away, and peace has been restored to the Church, when Alfius, then at breakfast with his workmen, sees a visitor in the doorway: it is a Christian named Ingentius, holding the respectable position of a "decurio," or town councillor, at Zigga, in the same province. "I have come," he said, "to ask whether any copy of the Scriptures was burned in. the year of your duumvirate.” Alfius, who had

begun by an offer of hospitality, resented a question which might put him to inconvenience. "You are a trouble to me, you have been suborned; take yourself off (laxa hinc te a me)." Ingentius departs, but returns with Augentius, who had served with Alfius as ædile, and under whom Ingentius had then acted as secretary. They explain their errand by producing a supposed letter from Felix to Ingentius; would he ask the ex-duumvir to certify in writing that eleven valuable copies of Scripture had been burned in his year of office, and so to relieve Felix from the necessity of restoring them to the owner, who was now reclaiming what he had long ago lent? The description of this

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owner as perditus nescio qui" appears to be part of an oral comment by Ingentius on the pretended message. Alfius, as an upright man, is shocked. "Is this," he asks, "what Christians call honesty?" He is, however, persuaded to dictate a note for Felix. In it he confines himself to the fact, that at the time in question a Christian removed some "letters" from the "basilica ;" and, after saying this, he concludes, "I hope, dear and venerable sir (parens), that you may keep your health for many years." He then entrusts the note to Ingentius, little suspecting that this man had a vindictive purpose of his own. Felix had publicly denounced, as a simoniac, Bishop Maurus of Utica, who had shown kindness to Ingentius when he fled from his own town in the persecution. Ingentius retorted, "And you are a traditor!" i.e. “you betrayed your trust by giving up the sacred books to be destroyed." This charge required to be substantiated: Ingentius determined to make evidence; and he did so by first concocting a letter as from Felix, and then by adding to Alfius's letter to Felix a passage of which the main point was a reminder: "You know you sent me word to take the key of the church, and to remove any books or manuscripts which I might find there." The double fraud succeeded; great pains were

taken to circulate the calumny; it became a stock argument on the part of the Donatists--"Who consecrated Cæcilian, the 'Catholic' bishop of Carthage ?—who but Felix-Felix 'the traditor'?" "Wearied," as Augustine expresses it, by such representations, Constantine ordered the question of fact, "Had Felix surrendered the Scriptures ?" to be formally tried by the proconsul Ælianus at Carthage. Before his tribunal the ex-duumvir, then an elderly man, appeared as a witness, and repeatedly affirmed that he had dictated up to the farewell greeting in the letter, and that the postscript, so to call it, was a forgery by Ingentius, who, when actually fastened on the rack, and momentarily expecting to be tortured, admitted that he "had done wrong, had added the words in question to the letter, out of anger on account of his host Maurus." Elianus, while interrogating him, bore significant testimony to the reputation of Christians for truthfulness; "Do not tell lies-that seems foreign to Christians!" The end of it was that the proconsul pronounced Felix to be wholly innocent of the charge of traditorship. "Felix was not in Aptunga at the time; he had no knowledge of, he never ordered, anything of the kind." The sentence is quoted by Augustine in his third book against Cresconius the Donatist. In another work

he says, "The minutes of the proconsular trial are extant; any one can take and read them: " De Unico Baptismo, 28. Some twelve years earlier, he had referred to that "most careful inquiry" as having established the innocence of Felix : Ep. 43. 5. The Donatists handed down in their sect a version of the story which came out at the Conference of Carthage in 4II. "The judge, of course, was partial-the evidence had been cooked." They also ventured on the statement that when, after the proconsular trial, Constantine sent for Ingentius (whom Ælianus had ordered to be detained as a prisoner), his representations actually changed the Emperor's view of the case: Ep. 141. II. It seems as if they were recklessly ready to say anything in defiance of evidence; as Augustine drily remarks, they urged "whatever men are wont to throw out, in the way of highly suspicious objection, against records which overthrow their case: Brevic. Collat. 42.

Those records, the "Gesta Purgationis Felicis," contained in the appendix to the ninth volume of St. Augustine, are reprinted with conjectural emendations in the fourth volume of Routh's "Reliquiæ Sacræ." Canon Mason has rendered nearly the whole document into racy English, in his vivid narrative of the "Diocletian Persecution."