To Florus 1.19

Let him nevertheless use the evidence of the letter from which he learned, or invented, that I had set out a reply in four volumes against the new Manichaeans, since he disdains to be regarded as an old one. Why did he not take care to learn what objections we had made? Why did he not make an effort to know the person he was going to engage? Instead, driven by the most disgraceful frivolity, he entered a mighty contest with his eyes covered, like a blindfolded gladiator. He defends this behavior by saying that he wanted his hasty reply to imitate the haste with which his patron had sent the sheets. As though he could not most honorably have explained that he needed some time to obtain and read the published work! Among educated people it is disgraceful to fail in the seriousness writing demands and, through an unwillingness to deliberate, to attack something you do not know. Moreover, while planning to make us hated for the alleged cunning with which we had shortened the sequence of his words, he trusted excerpts that seem more likely to have been composed through his own falsehood and malice than through anyone on our side being innocently unskilled. Whatever the motive, and whoever the author, the occurrence supports us in two ways. It has revealed at once both the frivolity and the weakness of truth's enemy. He has shown that he cannot keep silent even when he ought not to speak, and that a few incomplete sentences, torn apart rather than assembled, drawn only from my first book, defeated and broke him so thoroughly that he tried to stir up the populace against us with thoroughly womanish cries. The course of our discussion will make this clear.