Letter 54: I read your letter, dearest brother — full of fraternal love, church discipline, and a bishop's rightful severity.

Cyprian to his brother Cornelius, greetings. I read your letter, dearest brother — full of fraternal love, church discipline, and a bishop's rightful severity. In it you told me that Felicissimus — no new enemy of Christ, but long since excommunicated for numerous and grave offenses, condemned not only by my judgment but by that of many of our fellow bishops — has been rejected by you in Rome. When he arrived with his band of desperate followers, he was driven from the Church with the full rigor a bishop should exercise. Good. It was long past time. From the Church he was already cast out: the author of schism and division, the man who embezzled funds entrusted to him, the violator of virgins, the wrecker of marriages. The bride of Christ — hitherto uncorrupt, holy, and modest — could not be allowed any further contact with his contaminating presence. But then I read your second letter, and I was considerably surprised. You wrote that you were shaken — even disturbed — by the threats and terrors of those who came with Felicissimus. They attacked you with the most desperate audacity, threatening that if you would not receive their letters, they would read them publicly and spew out all manner of vile and disgraceful things — the kind of filth that comes naturally to their mouths. Brother, if this is how things stand — if we are now to be frightened by the audacity of the worst people, so that what they cannot accomplish by right they achieve by sheer recklessness and intimidation — then there is an end to the authority of bishops, an end to the sublime and God-given power of governing the Church. We might as well stop being Christians entirely, if it has come to this: that we tremble before the threats of the wicked. Even the Gentiles and the Jews threaten us. Heretics and schismatics do the same, every day. But should the bishop's chair be shaken by threats? The threats of men are nothing. God is the one who makes bishops. The one who fears God need not fear men. Stand firm, brother. The more fiercely they rage, the more calmly we must hold our ground.

Epistle 54