To Florus 1.52

I will now go on to examine the testimonies by which you try to establish what the faith of the devout demolishes. But since I have undertaken to answer your second book, the one Alypius brought, I must answer a few more things before my discussion reaches the apostolic testimony on which you think you can chiefly rely. Otherwise the sequence of my reply would become confused. To the words I quoted above you add the following: “In what he omitted, then, he feared this point, because it addresses every heart in the catholic Church. It calls out, as it were, in a clear voice to the faith itself, handed down and firmly established from ancient times, and stirs it powerfully against them: we said that ‘they say there is no sin in infants to be washed away in the bath of rebirth (compare Titus 3:5)’ (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.1). Everyone hurries to the Church with infants for no other reason than that original sin, contracted through the generation of their first birth, may be cleansed through the regeneration of their second birth. Then he returns to our earlier words, which I do not know why he repeats: ‘We say that those born from such a union inherit original sin, and 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 1.1). He had quoted these words of ours a little earlier. Then he adds what we said about Christ: ‘Who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes.’ But here too he omitted what I wrote: ‘So that through his grace, rescued from the power of darkness, they may be transferred into the kingdom of him who did not wish to be born from that same union of the two sexes.’ See, I beg you, what words of ours he avoided, as a complete enemy of God's grace, which came through Jesus Christ our Lord (compare John 1:17). For he knows that it is utterly wicked and impious to exclude infants from the apostle's statement about God the Father: ‘Who rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son’ (Colossians 1:13). That is undoubtedly why he preferred to omit those words rather than quote them” (Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 2.4–5).

Am I an enemy of God's grace, you most shameless of all men? In my first book, from which you snatched these statements away from their context so that you could chatter without reason, I condemned with a pure and complete confession that mouth of yours, dripping with the mysteries of the Manichaeans and your own.