To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem

⁶ The questions for you to answer were arranged, as I shall presently show, under eight heads. You touch only three, and pass on. As regards the rest, you maintain a magnificent silence. If you had with perfect frankness replied to seven, I should still cling to the charge which remained; and what you said nothing about, that I should hold to be the truth. But as things are, you have caught the wolf by the ears; you can neither hold fast, nor dare let go. With a sort of careless security and an air of abstraction, you skim over and touch the surface of three in which there is nothing or but little of importance. And your procedure is so dark and close that you confess more by your silence than you rebut by your arguments. Every one has the right immediately to say to you, “If the light that is in you be darkness, how great is the darkness.” Even in answering three little questions, respecting which you seemed to say something, you are not clear from suspicion and from blame, but your replies are and you were therefore unable to cheat your hearers, you preferred to maintain unbroken silence rather than openly confess what had been covered in obscurity?