Note 96 — BOOK SECOND.

The general Council, on whose authority Augustine relies in many places in this work, was either that of Arles, in 314 A.D., or of Nicæa, in 325 A.D., both of them being before his birth, in 354 A.D. He quotes the decision of the same council, contra Parmenianum, ii. 13, 30; de Hœresibus, 69; Ep. xliii. 7, 19. Migne brings forward the following passages in favour of its being the Council of Arles to which Augustine refers, since in them he ascribes the decision of the controversy to "the authority of the whole world." Contra Parmenianum, iii. 4, 21: "They condemned," he says, "some few in Africa, by whom they were in turn vanquished by the judgment of the whole world;" and he adds, that "the Catholics trusted ecclesiastical judges like these in preference to the defeated parties in the suit." Ib. 6, 30: He says that the Donatists, "having made a schism in the unity of the Church, were refuted, not by the authority of 310 African bishops, but by that of the whole world." And in the sixth chapter of the first book of the same treatise, he says that the Donatists, after the decision at Arles, came again to Constantine, and there were defeated "by a final decision," i.e. at Milan, as is seen from Ep. xliii. 7, 20, in the year 316 A.D.