Manuscripts Hidden and Published

“But why,” you ask, “did you accept my manuscripts when they had been falsified? And why, when I had translated On First Principles, did you dare to put your pen to the same work? If I had erred, as any man may, ought you not to have called me to answer by a private letter, and to have spoken gently to me, as I am speaking gently in my present letter?” My whole fault is this: when accusations were brought against me in the guise of insincere praise, I tried to clear myself of them, and I did it without bringing in your name to stir up ill will. I wanted to spread over many people a charge that you alone had brought, not so as to turn the charge of heresy back on you, but to push it away from myself. Could I know that you would be angry if I wrote against the heretics? You had said that you had removed the heretical passages from the works of Origen. So I aimed my attacks not at you but at the heretics, for I did not believe that you favored heresy. Forgive me if I did this too vehemently. I thought I would please you. You say that it was through the dishonest tricks of my agents that your manuscripts were brought before the public, when they were kept secretly in your room, or were held only by the man who had wanted the translation made for him. But how does this square with your earlier statement that no one, or very few, had them? If they were kept secret in your room, how could they be in the hands of the man who had wanted the translation made for him? If the one man for whom the manuscripts were written had obtained them in order to conceal them, then they were not kept secret in your room, and they were not in the hands of those few who, as you now declare, had them. You accuse us of stealing them; and then again you reproach us with having bought them for a great sum of money and an enormous bribe. In a single matter, and in one little letter, what a tissue of varied and conflicting falsehoods! You have full freedom to accuse, but I have none to defend myself. When you bring a charge, you give no thought to friendship; when I begin to reply, your mind is full of the rights of friendship. Let me ask you: did you write these manuscripts to be hidden or to be published? If to be hidden, why were they written? If to be published, why did you hide them? [a]