My Friendly Letter

You imagine that I have contrived yet another falsehood: that I have composed a letter to you in my own name, pretending it was written long ago, in which I make myself appear kind and courteous, but which you never received. The truth can easily be found out. Many people at Rome have had copies of this letter for the last three years; but they refused to send it to you, knowing that you were throwing out insinuations against my reputation and making up stories of the most shameful kind, unworthy of our Christian profession. I wrote in ignorance of all this, as to a friend; but they would not pass the letter on to an enemy, as they knew you to be. So they spared me the effects of my mistakes, and you the reproaches of your conscience. You next bring arguments to show that if I had written such a letter, I had no right to write another full of reproaches against you. But here is the error that runs through all you say, and of which I have a right to complain: whatever I say against the heretics, you imagine is said against you. What! Am I refusing you bread because I give the heretics a stone to crush their brains? But in order to justify your disbelief in my letter, you are forced to make out that the letter of Pope Anastasius rests on a similar fraud. On this point I have answered you before. If you really suspect that it is not his writing, you have the means of convicting me of the forgery. But if it is his writing, as his letters of this present year, also written against you, prove, then you will use your false reasoning in vain to prove my letter false, since I can show from his genuine letter that mine is genuine too. [a]