§1
Zeal for peace and concord sometimes leads prudent men who love the state to prefer even a disgraceful and dangerous peace to discord, and to judge that what they see done advantageously in political matters must also be adapted to religion. While arms have been laid aside and embassies concerning peace are conducted under a truce, at the first meeting each party generally seeks what it thinks it demands by the highest right; they often even demand unjust things so that they may obtain what is equitable. Yet by negotiating, yielding, conceding, and entreating they come to the point of making peace, when each party judges what was agreed to be just or tolerable, or at least such as must be preferred to war. The same method is observed in arbitral judgments and private agreements, and I do not know whether any pacification has been established without such moderation. They demand religious concord and unity in this manner: let this be conceded to the Lutherans, that to the Calvinists, another thing to the Anabaptists; and let them in turn concede many things both to Catholics and to others; let a rigorous examination of the questions be discontinued; let there be peace in our days.
§2
They say that in this way the world can be reduced to concord; that by a remission of their qualities contrary elements are thus tempered into firm and solid bodies; that from dissimilar sounds a most delightful harmony is thus made; and that nothing becomes food for animals unless it has departed from its native rigidity and been tempered to an alien nature. If you strike hard things against hard things on both sides, they say, all are broken; gentleness and indulgence accomplish more among the obstinate. They will concede more if the beginning is made by you. The highest right is the highest injury; all extremes, even in good things, are dangerous.
§3
These and other things are said either by malicious plotters, by simple men, or by men slightly instructed in piety and swollen with an opinion of their civil prudence. If theologians follow them, after the example of Marcion of Pontus they will abolish the whole of Christianity in a short time. Marcion selected from every heresy all that was foul, cruel, mad, and impious and forged one monster from so many evils. If we now mingle all things into one, it will be more detestable and destructive than the Marcionite monster in proportion as the heresies from which this poison will be compounded are fouler and more pestilential. Whatever is most capital and virulent in each heresy will pour all its corruption into this σορὸν φάρμακον [compound drug], and this will be the supreme evil of evils, sublimated from the marrow of all evils.
Let us see the matter itself. It must be conceded to the Calvinists that God destines, incites, impels, and compels us to sins; ubiquity must be conceded to the Lutherans; to the Osiandrians, that we are just by the essential justice of God; to the Memnonist Anabaptists, Anabaptism, and to the same men fornications and adulteries in nocturnal assemblies; to the Libertines, shameful acts, and it must be said, “Not I, but God did it.” I have named a few things; they themselves confess that they are infinite. What moderation, what religion will be made from these?
Musonius rightly says in Strabo, Discourse VII, that wicked men cannot nourish concord. Crooked wood does not fit straight wood, nor another crooked piece of wood; light does not agree with darkness, but as much light as approaches, so much darkness withdraws. That peace therefore cannot exist, nor that moderation which leads us away from the moderator of all things. We possess the true religion and cannot without crime pollute it with the errors of others. Shall I lie so that some Calvinist or Osiandrian may learn from my lie to speak truth? Shall I adore God as author of sin, confess an ubiquitous Christ, abjure with the Socinians the price of his blood, and deny ten articles lest they continue in their manner to trifle about purgatory, indulgences, and holy water? Shall I deny the whole Christ with Vorstius and Osiander so that by their kindness I may possess half a Christ—the whole of whom I possessed and betrayed to them?
Nor must the method observed in making treaties of kings be followed here. There, to remit one’s own right, yield an estate, and relinquish things acquired by war belongs to humanity, and excessive firmness in retaining one’s right is imputed to obstinacy. But when religion is disputed, it does not lie in the power of the litigants to bargain about victory; for the cause of truth is pleaded, and of that truth concerning which we possess the eternal decree of the highest and uncreated Truth. Whatever you alter from that truth is sacrilege; whatever you add is abomination. “For I testify to everyone hearing the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone shall add to these things, God shall add upon him the plagues written in this book. And if anyone shall diminish the words of the prophecy of this book, God shall take away his part from the book of life and from the holy city and from the things written in this book.” These words must be received concerning the whole economy of Christian doctrine and rule of belief as well as concerning the Apocalypse of John, since they were dictated by the same authority. Whoever changes these things corrects the Holy Spirit; whoever moderates the sentence of the supreme judge by human ingenuity denies divine wisdom.
§4
Therefore every true Christian who seeks the account of sacred dogmas from God and does not manufacture it from himself understands sufficiently that the least voluntary departure from heavenly truth is a fall into death, since he accuses God of error when he presumes to moderate by his own teaching the doctrine delivered by God.
Nor is the peace of those who err thus served if you indulge those who err; rather, spirit is added so that they undertake greater things and, having pursued the bird, hasten more confidently toward destruction. Truth is the one goal; one does not reach it by wandering. Eternal salvation is the one end of believers; one does not attain it by denying God and agreeing with errors. You will fall into the abyss
if you allow yourself to be moved from the summit of right doctrine; you will not be able to stand upon the slope if you did not stand at the top. You believe God in nothing if you judge him false in one thing. No reason for believing remains to you if you have either repudiated the authority of the revealer or surrendered it to the deadly peace of heretics. That is not peace but a compact with perfidy, sacrilege, impiety, and hell itself. Simulated religion is a double impiety, for a man both is impious and simulates piety.
§5
He who covers impiety with paint therefore labors under a double evil and is consequently incurable. But experience has also taught here how useless that counsel of mixing religion is. The contests of the preachers in the federated Netherlands are known. Grotius, a learned man, politician, and jurist, interposed himself as mediator and pacificator among them; but what did Bogermannus the preacher do? He attacked Grotius the pacificator. Caspar Barlaeus attacked Bogermannus in his τὴν Βογερημαννομαχίαν [Bogermannomachy]. The whole question turns upon the fact that Sibrandus and Bogermannus accuse the Estates of Holland, who commanded mutual toleration among dissenters, of INJURED PIETY.
Sibrandus explains in what matter they injured piety. He writes that the Estates of Holland wished to be deceived by an ignorant and stupid man; that they allowed the churches to be torn apart and disturbed; that after the bishops were expelled they all transferred political power to themselves; that they patronized evasive men; maintained a heresiarch at public expense; wished to introduce the heresies of Socinus into the churches; and many similar things, which he poured out audaciously and fearlessly. These are Sibrandus’s words. But Bogermannus is so far from disapproving them that he instead defines them as an Apostolic Paroxysm.
It is therefore impossible for the Rigid to agree to any moderation or mixture; and assuredly it cannot be done. Why, then, do political men judge that the eternal law must be moderated by their prudence? Because they think themselves to be without law and therefore prefer their decrees to the declarations of the creator; because they lack the faith by which alone the Majesty of him who is offended is esteemed.
The Apostle Peter calls them sects of perdition, 2 Peter 2. Who, then, is so mad as to communicate with those sects and expect salvation from a source from which only destruction can be drawn? Heretics—I speak of true heretics, not of those who err and incautious followers of heretics—are false prophets, ravenous wolves, false Christs, thieves, and robbers, Matthew 7 and 24, John 10. They are false apostles, deceitful workers, men who love themselves, greedy, proud, blasphemous, wicked, without affection, 2 Corinthians 11, 1 Timothy 1 and 3. They are false prophets, lying teachers, slaves of corruption, unlearned and unstable, 2 Peter 2; antichrists and seducers, 1 John 2. Such they remain even if they cast away one or another error while remaining obstinate in the rest. Catholics cannot enter into association with them unless they embrace fellowship in such great crimes. I mean that association sought in the moderation of religion, by which truth is commanded to be tempered to falsehood.
§6
Therefore we shall rather hear Saint Cyprian, Epistle 55 to Cornelius: “Let our most beloved brothers resolutely shun and avoid the words and conversations of those whose speech creeps like a cancer.” Not merely conversations on any occasion for approving their error, but also the other means by which men are customarily drawn into communion with heresy. “Let no intercourse, no banquets, no conversations be mingled with such men, and let us be as separate from them as they are fugitives from the Church.” Let them avoid these things when there is danger of contagion; let them seek them when there is hope of converting others.
The great Antony, as the great Athanasius testifies in his life, never granted friendly words to Manichaeans or other heretics, declaring that their friendship and discourses were the destruction of the soul. But he detested the Arians, so that he said to all: “One must not even approach near them.” And Antony himself, now about to die, said: “Avoid the poisons of heretics and schismatics, and follow my hatred toward them. You yourselves know that I never had peaceful discourse with them.” If we cannot, and sometimes ought not, avoid these things, let us act earnestly lest our conversation confirm them in their errors while they think themselves either approved by us or judged tolerable.