Letters

⁸ But, behold, we do what you have desired; we treat with you as if your bishops had not said: “No case forecloses the investigation of another case, and no person compromises the position of another person.” Discover, if you can, what they ought, rather than this, to have said in reply, when there was alleged against them the case and the person of Primianus, who, notwithstanding his joining the rest of the bishops in passing sentence of condemnation on those who had passed sentence of condemnation upon him, nevertheless received back into their former honours those whom he had condemned and denounced, and chose to acknowledge and accept rather than despise and repudiate the baptism administered by these men while they were “dead” (for of them it was said in the notable decree [of the Council of Bagai], that “the shores were full of dead men”), and by so doing swept away the argument which you are accustomed to rest on a perverse interpretation of the words: “Qui baptizatur a mortuo quid ei prodest lavacrum ejus?” If, therefore, your bishops had not said: “No case forecloses the investigation of another case, and no person compromises the position of another person,” they would have been compelled to plead guilty in the case of Primianus; but, in saying this, they declared the Catholic Church to be, as we mentioned, not guilty in the case of Cæcilianus.