To Florus 1.22

Let us listen, then, in astonishment to what he has written against me. He says: 'He quoted these words from the book I sent you, which you know very well, and attempted to refute them: “They shout with the utmost malice that we condemn marriage and God's work, by which God creates human beings from males and females, because we say that those born from such a union inherit original sin. We do not deny that, whatever parents they are born from, they remain under the devil unless they are reborn in Christ (compare John 3:3–5)”' (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.2). Augustine continues: 'From these words of mine he omitted the apostle's testimony that I had inserted, because he felt himself crushed by its great weight. For when I said that human beings inherit original sin, I immediately added: “Of this the apostle says, Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death; and so it passed to all human beings, in whom all sinned” (Romans 5:12). After omitting that testimony, as we have said, he joined together the other statements mentioned above. He knows how the hearts of faithful catholics commonly receive these apostolic words that he omitted, words so straightforward and shining with such light, which new heretics try to obscure and distort through dark and twisted interpretations. He then appended other words of mine where I said: “They do not notice that the good of marriage cannot be blamed because of the original evil inherited from it, just as the evil of adultery and fornication cannot be excused because of the natural good born from them. For just as sin, whether infants inherit it from the one source or the other, is the devil's work, so a human being, whether born from the one or the other, is God's work.” Here too he omitted what he feared catholic ears would hear. Before arriving at these words, we had said: “Because we say this, which is contained in the most ancient and firmly established rule of the catholic faith, these advocates of a new and perverse doctrine, who say that there is no sin in infants to be washed away in the bath of rebirth (compare Titus 3:5), slander us faithlessly or ignorantly, as though we condemned marriage and called God's work, the human being born from it, the devil's work” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). After these omitted words of ours come those of ours that he quoted, as written above' (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.3–4). How long will you who say these things persist in mocking the simplicity of devout hearts and uneducated ears? How far will your unbridled shamelessness flaunt itself? When you wrote this, were you not moved at all by the judgment of learned men, by reverence for the coming judgment, or by the written records themselves? Do you not see that your deceit already lies exposed, caught and held fast? Which of us do you suppose does not know what you wrote in your first and second works? I have deliberately chosen, and rightly chosen, to address you in the terms in which the eloquent consul thundered against a traitor to his country (Cicero, Against Catiline 1.1).