2.  Now as to the point that the writings going the round as mine are not mine at all, the angry feeling felt against me so confuses their reason that they cannot see what is profitable.  Nevertheless, if the question were put to them by yourselves, I do think that they would not reach such a pitch of obstinate perversity as to dare to utter the lie with their own lips, and allege the document in question to be mine.  And if it is not mine, why am I being judged for other men’s writings?  But they will urge that I am in communion with Apollinarius, and cherish in my heart perverse doctrines of this kind.  Let them be asked for proof.  If they are able to search into a man’s heart, let them say so; and do you admit the truth of all that they say about everything.  If on the other hand, they are trying to prove my being in communion on plain and open grounds, let them produce either a canonical letter written by me to him, or by him to me.  Let them shew that I have held intercourse with his clergy, or have ever received any one of them into the communion of prayer.  If they adduce the letter written now five and twenty years ago, written by layman to layman, and not even this as I wrote it, but altered (God knows by whom), then recognise their unfairness.  No bishop is accused if, while he was a layman, he wrote something somewhat incautiously on an indifferent matter; not anything concerning the Faith, but a mere word of friendly greeting.  Possibly even my opponents are known to have written to Jews and to Pagans, without incurring any blame.  Hitherto no one has ever been judged for any such conduct as that on which I am being condemned by these strainers-out of gnats. cf. Matt. xxiii. 24.  God, who knows men’s hearts, knows that I never wrote these things, nor sanctioned them, but that I anathematize all who hold the vile opinion of the confusion of the hypostases, on which point the most impious heresy of Sabellius has been revived.  And all the brethren who have been personally acquainted with my insignificant self know it equally well.  Let those very men who now vehemently accuse me, search their own consciences, and they will own that from my boyhood I have been far removed from any doctrine of the kind.