20.—Pelagius Provides a Refuge for His Falsehood in Ambiguous Subterfuges.

And then observe how he makes his answer, how he provides in the obscure mazes of his double sense retreats for his false doctrine, quenching the truth in his dark mist of error; so that even we, on our first perusal of his words, almost rejoiced at their propriety and correctness. But the fuller discussions in his books, in which he is generally forced, in spite of all his efforts at concealment, to explain his meaning, have made even his better statements suspicious to us, lest on a closer inspection of them we should detect them to be ambiguous. For, after saying that “he had never heard even an impious heretic say this” (namely, what he set forth as the objection) “about infants,” he goes on to ask: “Who indeed is so unacquainted with Gospel lessons, as not only to attempt to make such an affirmation, but even to be able to lightly say it or even let it enter his thought? And then who is so impious as to wish to exclude infants from the kingdom of heaven, by forbidding them to be baptized and to be born again in Christ?”

20. Denique quomodo respondeat advertite, et videte latebras ambiguitatis falsitati praeparare refugia. offundendo caliginem veritati; ita ut etiam nos cum primum ea legimus, recta vel correcta propemodum gauderemus. Sed latiores disputationes ejus in libris, 0395 ubi se quantumlibet operiat, plerumque aperire compellitur, fecerunt nobis et ista suspecta, ut attentius intuentes inveniremus ambigua. Cum enim dixisset, «nunquam se vel impium aliquem haereticum audisse, qui hoc» quod proposuit «de parvulis diceret;» deinde subjecit atque ait: «Quis enim ita evangelicae lectionis ignarus est, qui hoc non modo affirmare conetur, sed qui vel leviter dicere, aut etiam sentire possit? Deinde quis tam impius, qui parvulos exsortes regni coelorum esse velit, dum eos baptizari et in Christo renasci vetat .»