To Florus 6.16

I do not know whether, now driven by lack of resources, you might attempt something so foolish and weak as saying you cannot prove by any reasons that God created Adam good, but are satisfied to believe it solely on the authority of the reading. After humanity was formed on the sixth day, it says of all creatures together: ‘God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good’ (Genesis 1:31). You would thus judge Adam to have been established without injustice, not because of the maker’s dignity or a weighing of his justice, but because of the testimony calling all created things well made.

Yet although this strikes Mani so lightly that he laughs, it exposes the advocate of inherited sin bound before us. We need gather no crowd of divine testimonies here. The apostle’s authority alone supplies our ruling: foreseeing this foul error, he thundered against you in lofty speech, ‘Every creature of God is good’ (1 Timothy 4:4).

If Moses’ statement that God made everything well suffices to prove the first human was formed with a good nature, and you therefore insist Adam could not have been created by God with sin because he is read to have been made good among the rest, we will answer along exactly the same lines: no one can be born with sin, because the apostle defends every creature of God as good.

What have these arguments accomplished? The choice offered you in the contest declared between you and Mani has publicly revealed what reason discovered. Once the contest was proposed, you could not hurl even one weapon at your teacher without destroying yourself. Thus it shines still more clearly that you and the Manichaeans have fused through obscene agreement into a single body of impiety. What could be more closely joined than what not even the arrival of danger can separate? In every destruction of Mani, the doctrine of inherited sin dies with him. Nothing strikes him and leaves you intact. Your principles, mysteries, and dangers are one—and you resent being called old Mani’s offspring?