“Death is the wages of sin.” is related to “Pride goeth before a fall.” Those who leave the Catholic Church show the truth in both sayings.
The persecutions of Diocletian, from 303-305 AD were brutal. Many Catholics gave in to torture, pain , and threats. Some, who did not, survived. Rather than being grateful to God for the strength to withstand the horrors, the Donatists preferred to condemn their weaker neighbors.
They refused to accept Catholic Sacraments from any who had given in to Diocletian’s torturers. The Catholic Church in Rome realized that forgiveness was necessary.
The Donatists refused.
Even Constantine could not get them to give up their separate churches and dioceses. These Protestants had their own priests, bishops, and churches throughout North Africa.
When the Vandals swept East across North Africa in the 400s, Protestant Donatists vying with loyal Catholics kept Christians from defending themselves. Vandals raped, looted, murdered, and enslaved without opposition. Even after that lesson, the Donatists preferred Protestantism. So, the scourge of God fell upon them, again.
When Moslem invaders moved Westward across North Africa a couple of hundred years later, the same, self-righteous schism of Donatists made it impossible for the Christians to stop the Moslems.
Anti-Catholics were too proud and stubborn to learn, even learn from those lessons.
God provided another lesson. Nearly a thousand years after North Africa fell again, the Greek’s Protestant structure collapsed beneath Moslem attacks on Constantinople. God tired of getting them to understand need to accept Petrine authority. He had Catholic Europe, already sick of their stubborn intransigence, ignore their pleas for help and pretenses of unity.
Today, the same scourge of God gathers strength against a Christendom splintered into thousands of stubborn, self-righteous schisms. Protestants are still to prideful to learn.
Yet again, for perhaps the final time, Protestant pride prefers destruction than turning to the only Church Jesus founded by saying only to Peter and to no one else, “Thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Truly, “Pride goeth before a fall.” Three examples of Protestants preferring pride to obedience. We may study the facts and change. Or, bury our heads in the sand.
We see that excessive Protestant pride went before falls in North Africa and Constantinople. Soon, it seems, another fall will come from that deep vein of vanity.
