The Books Against Jovinian

If your reply to him had been put in terms like these, would you not have brought grace and edification both to him, since he has been initiated into the fear of God, and to all your other readers? As it is, these invectives of yours are a cause of sadness and confusion to all who fear God, since they see you a prey to this hideous lust for running others down, and me driven to the wretched necessity of answering charge with charge. But, as I have said, this proof was not needed. In the books you published against Jovinian you yourself, as can be shown, at one moment assert the very things you blamed in him, and at another fall into the opposite extreme, and declare marriage so disgraceful a state that its stain cannot be washed away even by the blood of martyrdom. [a]

But if it seemed an easy thing to you for your friend to obtain what amounts to a correction of the teaching of the Manichaeans, as it was first set out in those books, and that when they had already been published and put into the hands of many people to copy, what difficulty would there have been in my correcting a work that was not my own, but a translation of another man’s? That is, if any mistakes in it could be pointed out, I will not say by reason, but even by envy. And all the more so when it was still in rough sheets, which I had not yet read over or corrected, and which had not been published when your friends got hold of them. Was it impossible to have these writings corrected, when they were still uncorrected? But the sting does not come from that quarter; he would have found nothing to blame there. It comes wholly from his fear that it might come to light what the source is of everything he says, and where he gets his reputation as a learned man and a great expounder of the Scriptures.