Nigra, was the foremost of these Numidian malcontents, and from him the
sect of Donatists took its name; they denied the orders of those
ordained by Cæcilianus, and hence the validity of the Sacraments
administered by them. Excommunicated themselves, "they boldly
excommunicated the rest of mankind who had embraced the impious party of
Cæcilianus, and of the traditors, from whom he derived his pretended
ordination. They asserted with confidence, and almost with exultation,
that the apostolical succession was interrupted, that _all_ the bishops
of Europe and Asia were infected by the contagion of guilt and schism,
and that the prerogatives of the Catholic Church were confined to the
chosen portion of the African believers, who alone had preserved
inviolate the integrity of their faith and discipline. This rigid theory
was supported by the most uncharitable conduct. Whenever they acquired a
proselyte, even from the distant provinces of the east, they carefully
repeated the sacred rites of baptism and ordination; as they rejected
the validity of those which he had already received from the hands of
heretics or of schismatics" (Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," vol. iii. pp.
5, 6). A number of Donatists, known as Circumcelliones, "maintained
their cause by the force of arms, and overrunning all Africa, filled
that province with slaughter and rapine, and committed the most enormous
acts of perfidy and cruelty against the followers of Caecilianus" (p.
109). To complete the darkly terrible picture of the Church in the
fourth century, we need only note the various orders of fanatical monks,
filthy in their habits, densely ignorant, hopelessly superstitious,
amongst whom may be numbered the travelling mendicants called
Sarabaites. "Many of the Coenobites were chargeable with vicious and
scandalous practices. This order, however, was not so universally
corrupt as that of the Sarabaites, who were, for the most part,
profligates of the most abandoned kind" (p. 102). The pen wearies over
the list of scandals of these early Christian ages; we can but sketch