To Florus 2.126

What necessity, then, was there for so many blasphemies, if even the necessity you embraced did not exist? Although it had no real weight, it at least seemed like a plank you were holding amid so great a shipwreck. Now, though late, your defeated arms have let it go. To make the matter clear by repetition: all sorts of fools thought you should be tolerated as a Manichaean lest Christ’s grace seem not to have one effect in everyone. Yet without any compulsion from us, the progress of your own explanation has now led you to this: you say that the apostle’s statement, ‘But grace is from many offenses to justification’ (Romans 5:16), can be fulfilled in older people but cannot be fulfilled in infants. In infants there is something else, smaller, thinner, poorer—something which, although you invent it, you confess the apostle never said.