Since, therefore, to see Christ is to rejoice, and we cannot have joy unless when we shall see Christ, what blindness of mind or what folly is it to love the world's afflictions, and punishments, and tears, and not rather to hasten to the joy which can never be taken away! (On the Mortality, 5).

The fear and faith of God ought to make you prepared for everything, although it should be the loss of private estate, although the constant and cruel harassment of your limbs by agonizing disorders, although the deadly and mournful wrench from wife, from children, from departing dear ones; Let not these things be offences to you, but battles: nor let them weaken nor break the Christian's faith, but rather show forth his strength in the struggle, since all the injury inflicted by present troubles is to be despised in the assurance of future blessings (On the Mortality, 12).

This, in short, is the difference between us and others who know not God, that in misfortune they complain and murmur, while adversity does not call us away from the truth of virtue and faith, but strengthens us by its suffering (On the Mortality, 13).

I myself was held in bonds by the innumerable errors of my previous life, from which I did not believe that I could by possibility be delivered, so I was disposed to acquiesce in my clinging vices; and because I despaired of better things, I used to indulge my sins as if they were actually parts of me, and indigenous to me. But after that, by the help of the water of new birth, the stain of former years had been washed away, and a light from above, serene and pure, had been infused into my reconciled heart ... I was enabled to acknowledge that what previously, being born of the flesh, had been living in the practice of sins, was of the earth earthly, but had now begun to be of God, and was animated by the Spirit of holiness (Epistle 1.4).

Removed from earthly contacts, - you will at once begin to feel compassion for the world, and with self-recollection and increasing gratitude to God, you will rejoice with all the greater joy that you have escaped it (Epistle 1.6).

But after considering the public roads full of pitfalls, after battles of many kinds scattered abroad over the whole world, after exhibitions either bloody or infamous, after the abominations of lust, whether exposed for sale in brothels or hidden within the domestic walls - abominations, the audacity of which is greater in proportion to the secrecy of the crime,- possibly you may think that the Forum at least is free from such things, that it is neither exposed to exasperating wrongs, nor polluted by the association of criminals. Then turn your gaze in that direction: there you will discover things more odious than ever (Epistle 1.10).

In respect of what you regard as honours, of what you consider the fasces, what you count affluence in riches, what you think power in the camp, the glory of the purple in the magisterial office, the power of licence in the chief command, - there is hidden the virus of ensnaring mischief, and an appearance of smiling wickedness, joyous indeed, but the treacherous deception of hidden calamity. Just as some poison, in which the flavour having been medicated with sweetness, craftily mingled in its deadly juices, seems, when taken, to be an ordinary draught, but when it is drunk up, the destruction that you have swallowed assails you. You see, forsooth, that man distinguished by his brilliant dress, glittering, as he thinks, in his purple. Yet with what baseness has he purchased this glitter! (Epistle 1.11).

Or think you that even those are secure, - that those at least are safe with some stable permanence among the chaplets of honour and vast wealth, whom, in the glitter of royal palaces, the safeguard of watchful arms surrounds? They have greater fear than others (Epistle 1.13).

Hence, then, the one peaceful and trustworthy tranquillity, the one solid and firm and constant security, is this, for a man to withdraw from these eddies of a distracting world, and, anchored on the ground of the harbour of salvation, to lift his eyes from earth to heaven ... He who is actually greater than the world can crave nothing, can desire nothing, from the world. How stable, how free from all shocks is that safeguard; how heavenly the protection in its perennial blessings, - to be loosed from the snares of this entangling world, and to be purged from earthly dregs, and fitted for the light of eternal immortality! (Epistle 1.14).

When that revelation shall come, when that glory of God shall shine upon us, we shall be as happy and joyful, honoured with the condescension of God, as they will remain guilty and wretched, who, either as deserters from God or rebels against Him, have done the will of the devil, so that it is necessary for them to be tormented with the devil himself in unquenchable fire (Epistle 55.10).

Cyprian was a Carthaginian bishop who deserted his flock no sooner Decius initiated his clampdown on the Christian communities; although the Decian decree was not long enforced, he never regained office. His alleged letters obscurely reported that when a disturbance arose the Lord bade him withdraw. An exile or else a concealed fugitive, his patrimony and his episcopal power stood nonetheless undiminished throughout the epistolary narrative. Both absent and present, he imperturbably ruled the African Church, presided over large councils and played an outstanding role in Roman, Gallic or Iberian conflicts. Sometimes he solemnly declared that bishops were only accountable to God, but on other occasions he urged other prelates, or even the laity, to remove them. A Novatus whom he often mistook for Novatian ruthlessly resisted him. Entirely unaware of the existence of any previous African martyrs –not even in Tertullian’s time– when Valerian selectively persecuted upright churchmen while sparing his schismatic opponents, he proclaimed that such dire events had long been foretold. 

An entirely different perspective is submitted in Did Tertullian really exist? Did Cyprian? Did Hippolytus? , which contends that the aforesaid apologists were no more than literary champions brought down from the preceding century to uphold either of the religious factions that struggled for the control of the churches after Diocletian’s resignation. Whereas 4^th-century African and Roman rigorists denounced an entrenched clergy intent on preserving its former pre-eminence despite the reprehensible conduct of many of its members, the hierarchical organization under attack disparaged them as raging and unmerciful apostates. Caecilian and Donatus fought each other through the writings of Cyprian and Tertullian.

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