Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
These, brothers, are the devices of the spiritual forces of wickedness with which we must wrestle -- rightly to be weighed, necessary to belief, so that those who are approved may be shown plainly and the disqualified laid bare. And so they have both the power and the facility for devising and equipping errors -- a facility not so remarkable as to seem difficult or beyond explaining, since even secular literature offers a ready example of just such facility. You can see today a wholly different story assembled out of Virgil, its material fitted to the verses and the verses fitted to the material. Thus Hosidius Geta drained out of Virgil, down to the last drop, a tragedy on Medea. Some relative of mine, out of that same poet, among the other idle amusements of his pen, worked out the Tablet of Cebes. There are also those commonly called Homer-patchers, who stitch together, in the manner of a patchwork quilt, a single body of their own composition out of many pieces gathered here and there from Homer's poems. And of course divine literature is far more fertile still, adaptable to the demands of any material whatever. Nor do I risk saying too much when I say that the Scriptures themselves have been so arranged by the will of God as to supply material for the heretics, since I read that heresies simply must exist, and cannot exist without the Scriptures.