To Florus 6.6

They now hurl their accusing weapons at God himself, reaching the same conclusion from different beginnings. Mani says: God is good and does no evil. But he adds that God consigns souls to eternal fire for natural faults—an act of obvious cruelty. Thus, at the end of his opinion, he stains with plain injustice the one he had called good.

Augustine, however, as though trusting the man he addresses as his patron, is bolder. He despises his teacher’s hesitation and does not hesitate to begin where Mani ended. He pronounces that God makes and creates evil—that is, sin. This plainly cannot fit the God worshiped by the catholic faith. Let this above all remain fixed in the reader’s mind: no believer has ever had a greater cause for struggle than ours, and anyone who considers nature itself a necessity for crime has no share in worshiping the Christians’ God. Since this has often been stressed—the usefulness of the central case required repetition—let us now examine the first humans, whose indictment the Numidian carries like a light shield when he meets our battle line.