For another question of great importance which her guidance determined was that concerning the rebaptisation of heretics; and in this she went against the judgment of Cyprian with his council, of Firmilian, and of other bishops. It had been the custom that those who had received baptism among heretics, provided it was with the proper rite, should, when they sought admission into the Church, be received only by an imposition of hands, not by the iteration of baptism. And though Cyprian and a great majority of African bishops, through their horror of schism and heresy, wished to modify this rule, and to insist that baptism given outside the Church was invalid, Pope Stephen resisted, and maintained the ancient rule, with the decision that nothing save what had been handed down should be done. It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself. In fact, the right decision as to both these questions involved the right conception of the Church herself, her constitution, power, and prerogatives. The rigorism(299) with which some had endeavoured to exclude certain sinners from the faculty of receiving penance, and the view which led them to confine the validity itself of baptism to its reception within the one Church, led when fully developed in the following century to the obstinate schism and heresy of the Donatists. These dangerous tendencies were resisted, when they first appeared, by the Roman See, and we owe to such resistance the application by Tertullian to the Pope of the title of “Pontifex Maximus” and “Bishop of Bishops,” about the year 202, as the expression of the power which he then claimed and exercised. Another question likewise touching the whole Christian society, which the Roman Pontiff had already decided against the practice of the influential and ancient churches of Asia Minor, was the time of holding Easter. Pope Victor insisted that the practice of the Roman Church must be followed, which kept the day of the Crucifixion invariably on the Friday, and that of the Resurrection on the Sunday, and not the Jewish practice of the Asiatics, which took the 14th and the 16th days of the month Nisan, on whatever days of the week they might fall, for that purpose. And here in the peremptory tone of Pope Victor, and in the threat of excommunication which he issued, the consciousness was shown that the right to determine lay with him, while subsequent times justified his judgment and followed it. Nor was it of little importance that the greatest festival of the Church should be celebrated by all her children both on the same day and in the same spirit.