To Florus 4.75

For if, with your faith entirely intact, you were attempting to shake what cannot be defeated merely to show the strength of your learning, in the manner of a school exercise, while intending to award the victory to those you opposed once the playful contest ended, I would approve your literary enthusiasm but rebuke your irreligious example. Instead, you follow with the ugliest stubbornness a doctrine that lacks even the false coloring of plausibility and that you cannot defend by any testimonies of the Law, since these never count against reason. It bristles with impiety and lies prostrate in foolishness, existing nowhere except amid the groins of human desires, pierced through by decency, argument, and sacred law. One of three conclusions therefore follows: either your understanding is leaden, or you suffer the chains of that sorcery we have heard is contained in the Manichaean mysteries, or both at once.