that is, to compromise on something regarding the Catholic religion for the sake of peace, and Gelasius elegantly mocked his petition: “While you say that we should bend down to you, you reveal that you meanwhile are lowering yourself further down, or that you have already done so. So I ask, what is this slippery slope [descensio]? Surely you see, you understand, you do not deny that you have been lowered from a superior place to an inferior one, that you have fallen from the Catholic and Apostolic communion to the heretical and condemned one, and you wish us, who remain in the superior place, to be persuaded to descend with you; you invite us from the highest to the lowest, but we ask you to ascend with us from the lowest to the highest.”
Fifth, one cannot be free to believe in one doctrine without, for the same reason, having a similar freedom in all doctrines, even those contained in the Apostles’ Creed, because there is one rule of faith that is undoubted and certain for everything in which one believes, that is, the word of God as explained through the Church. If, therefore, I trust that the Church is delivering the Apostles’ Creed to me, because I do not know what the apostles said from any other source than what the Church says, then I must for the same reason believe that I should invoke the saints, because the same Church says so; or, if I cannot believe this, then for the same reason I cannot believe that that Creed was indeed the Apostles’ Creed.
Sixth, Cassander’s opinion is a novelty, first devised by him, as he himself says at the beginning, and therefore it must be considered suspicious. For, as Vincent of Lérins teaches beautifully in his Commonitorium adversus profanas novitates, what is new cannot be without suspicion, since the true faith is one and is very ancient.
Seventh, this opinion makes the true Church completely hidden and invisible; indeed, it makes it composed of flatterers and feigners only, for Cassander says that two things are required by the true Church, faith in Christ and peace with men, and hence he deduces that those who persecute Catholics and Lutherans with hostility are not part of the Church, but only those are who are at peace with everybody. Therefore those who are part of the Church must be hidden and must simulate with the Catholics that they are enemies of the Lutherans, and with the Lutherans that they are enemies of the Catholics, for the Catholics do not allow in their group those who show any external sign of favor toward the Lutherans. And even if in the Lutheran provinces all sects are permitted, nevertheless no sect allows in its own group those who are friendly to the other sects, as is well known. So those pious and peaceful men are necessarily fake and feigning when they say one thing with their mouth and hide another thing in their heart, just like Herod, who was a pagan with the pagans, and a Jew with the Jews, for he built simultaneously temples for Caesar and the true God, as Josephus reports in Antiquitates, book 15, chapters 13 [10] and 14 [11].
Note furthermore that Cassander says that his associates are few and hidden. But hence it is clear that they cannot constitute the Church, as the Church is so manifest and visible that it is said by the Lord in Matthew 5 to be a city on a hill. Finally, the true Church cannot exist without pastors (Ephesians 4);179 but those hidden men have no pastor, nor can they while they remain hidden, and therefore they have no Church.
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