Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Further, if he rebukes dissensions and schisms, which are without doubt evils, and immediately attaches heresies to them, [2] then in attaching them to evils he is certainly professing them to be an evil too—and indeed a greater one, since he says he believed the reports about schisms and dissensions precisely because he knew that heresies too had to exist. [3] For he shows that, in view of the graver evil, he readily believed the lesser reports; certainly he did not believe the evil reports because heresies were something good, but rather so as to give advance warning about temptations of an even worse stamp, saying they tend toward showing up all who are approved—namely, those whom heresy could not corrupt. [4] Finally, if the whole passage has in view the preserving of unity and the checking of divisions, then heresies pull people away from oneness just as much as schisms and dissensions ever do. Without doubt he sets heresies too under that same condition of censure in which he places schisms and dissensions. [5] And by this he does not make approved those who have turned aside into heresies—since he especially rebukes such turning aside, teaching that all should speak the same thing and be of the same mind, which heresies simply do not allow.