ABSTRACT
We have seen that in the early Church the principal recorded need for the granting of economy or dispensation was in the reception into the Church of those who had been separated from it by heresy or schism. There were two distinct approaches to this – the rigorous approach characterised by the rulings of Cyprian of Carthege and the more generous approach, which had become the practice in the Roman Church in the fourth and fifth centuries and which spread to North Africa (which was ecclesiastically on the border between east and west) in the fifth and sixth centuries, not least through the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo.
