Section 295
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264 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. aspired to the episcopate, and secretly concealed within himself this precipitate ambition, making use of those confessors that adhered to him from the beginning, as a cloak for his own folly I will proceed to relate : Maximus, a presbyter of our church, and Urbanus, twice obtained the highest reputation for their con fessions. Sidonius also, and Celerinus, a man who, by the mercy of God, bore every kind of torture in the most heroic manner, and by the firmness of his owii faith strengthened the weakness of the flesh, completely worsted the adversary. These men, therefore, as they knew him, and had well sounded his artifice and dupli city, as also his perjuries and falsehoods, his dissocial and savage character, returned to the holy church, and announced all his devices and wickedness, which he had for a long time dissembled withia himself, and this too in the presence of many bishops ; and the same also, in the presence of many presbyters, and a great number of laymen, at the same time lamenting and sorrowing that they had been seduced, and had abandoned the church for a short time, through the agency of that artful and malicious beast." After a little, he further says : " We have seen, beloved brother, within a short time, an extraordinary conversion and change in him. For this most illustrious man, and he who af firmed with the most dreadful oaths, that he never aspired to the episcopate, has suddenly appeared a bishop, as thrown among us by some machine. For this dogmatist, this (pretended) cham pion of ecclesiastical discipline, when he attempted to seize and usurp the episcopate not given him from above, selected two desperate characters as his associates, to send them to some small, and that the smallest, part of Italy, and from thence, by some ficti tious plea, to impose upon three bishops there, men altogether ig norant and simple, affirming and declaring, that it was necessary for them to come to Rome in all haste, that all the dissension which had there arisen might be removed through their media tion, in conjunction with the other bishops. When these men had come, being, as before observed, but simple and plain in dis cerning the artifices and villany of the wicked, and when shut up with men of the same stamp with himself, at the tenth hour, when heated with wine and surfeiting, they forced them by a kind of