The Maximianist case exposes Donatist inconsistency

My brothers, every time we raised this case of the Maximianists against them in the conference—the case I have laid out for you as best I could—he was more silent about it then than he is now about everything. Let them not hide themselves with a quibbling not-defense but flight. For they say that they gave them a grace period and received them back within the grace period. This is false. Twelve men were condemned with Maximianus, but the rest were not present at his ordination when hands were laid on him. They gave those others a grace period. For these are his own words: 'And not only him,' he says, 'does a just death condemn for his crime; the chain of sacrilege drags very many others into partnership in the offense, of whom it is written: the poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery are in their paths, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes' (Psalm 13:3 LXX; cf. Romans 3:13-18). 'We would not wish, of course, to cut the joint as if it were our own body. But since the pestilential rottenness of a wasting wound has more relief in cutting off than in the application of medicine, a more wholesome course was found, so that the pestilent virus should not creep through all the limbs: that the wound, once formed, should fall away by brief pain.' So he names twelve men as guilty of a notorious crime, among them Felicianus and Praetextatus—though the names of all of them do not come to my mind—and then he concludes: 'Know that those who by the deadly work of destruction defiled a filthy vessel with gathered dregs, and also the clerics of the church of Carthage at one time, who by taking part in the crime offered pandering to an illicit incest, have been condemned by the judgment of the presiding God through the truth-speaking mouth of the universal council. But those whom the shoots of the sacrilegious one did not pollute as young plants—that is, those who drew back their own hands from Maximianus's head with the shame of a reverent faith—we have permitted to return to mother church.' They wanted to pumice their face, because they were pardoning sacrilegious men and openly granting schismatics a way to return. What is this, I ask? Let him now deign to explain to me how the shoots of the sacrilegious one did not pollute them as young plants. Why do you give them a grace period, if they could have had no part in Maximianus's schism? But if they are partners in the faction, even though they were not present at the ordination, how does Maximianus not defile them, while Caecilian—once condemned in his absence, and for the third time acquitted in his presence—defiles the whole world? An African does not defile Africans, a living man the living, a known man the known, a participant his partners—and Caecilian defiles those across the sea, defiles those far away, defiles the unknown, defiles those not yet born? Felicianus sat with you after being condemned by you, and he did not defile you? I never saw him; you knew him. I believe him innocent; you condemned him as guilty. Or if you admit that you received an innocent man, you admit that you condemned an innocent man.