33. I now come to the most
serious charge of all, that in which you accuse me of having been
unfaithful after the restoration of our friendship. I confess that, of
all the reproaches which you bring against me or threaten me with,
there is none which I would so much deprecate as that of fraud, deceit
and breach of faith. To sin is human, to lay snares is diabolical.
What! Was it for this that I joined hands with you over the slain lamb
in the Church of the Resurrection, that I might ‘steal your
manuscripts at Rome’? or that I might ‘send out my dogs to
gnaw away your papers before they were corrected’? Can any one
believe that we made ready the accusers before you had committed the
crime? Is it supposed that we knew what plans you were meditating in
your heart? or what another man had been dreaming? or how the Greek
proverb was having its fulfilment in your case, “the pig teaches
Minerva”? If I sent Eusebius to bark against you, who then
stirred up the passion of Aterbius and others against you? Is it not
the fact that he thought that I also was a heretic because of my
friendship with you? And, when I had given him satisfaction as to the
heresies of Origen, you shut yourself up at home, and never dared to
meet him, for fear you should have to condemn what you wished not to
condemn, or by openly resisting him should subject yourself to the
reproach of heresy. Do you think that he cannot be called as a witness
against you because he is your accuser? Before ever the reverend bishop
Epiphanius came to Jerusalem, and gave you the signs of peace by word
and kiss, ‘yet having evil thoughts and guile in his
heart’; before I translated for him that letter31993199 which was such a reproof to you, and in
which he wrote you down a heretic though he had before approved you as
orthodox; Aterbius was barking against you at Jerusalem, and, if he had
not speedily taken himself off, would have felt not your literary
cudgel but the stick you flourish in your right hand to drive the dogs
away.32003200