(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all mistakes found.)

Transliteration of Greek words: All phonetical except: w = omega; h serves
three puposes: 1. = Eta; 2. = rough breathing, when appearing intially
before a vowel; 3. = in the aspirated letters theta = th, phi = ph, chi =
ch. Accents are given immediately after their corresponding vowels: acute =
' , grave = `, circumflex = ^. The character ' doubles as an apostrophe,
when necessary.

TERTULLIAN

APOLOGY.(1)

[TRANSLATED BY THE REV. S. THELWALL, LATE SCHOLAR OF CHRIST'S COLLEGE,
CANTAB.]

CHAP. I.

   Rulers of the Roman Empire, if, seated for the administration of
justice on your lofty tribunal, under the gaze of every eye, and occupying
there all but the highest position in the state, you may not openly inquire
into and sift before the world the real truth in regard to the charges made
against the Christians; if in this case alone you are afraid or ashamed to
exercise your authority in making public inquiry with the carefulness which
becomes justice; if, finally, the extreme severities inflicted on our
people in recently private judgments, stand in the way of our being
permitted to defend ourselves before you, you cannot surely forbid the
Truth to reach your ears by the secret pathway of a noiseless book.(2) She
has no appeals to make to you in regard of her condition, for that does not
excite her wonder. She knows that she is but a sojourner on the earth, and
that among strangers she naturally finds foes; and more than this, that her
origin, her dwelling-place, her hope, her recompense, her honours, are
above. One thing, meanwhile, she anxiously desires of earthly rulers--not
to be condemned unknown. What harm can it do to the laws, supreme in their
domain, to give her a hearing? Nay, for that part of it, will not their
absolute supremacy be more conspicuous in their condemning her, even after
she has made her plea? But if, unheard, sentence is pronounced against her,
besides the odium of an unjust deed, you will incur the merited suspicion
of doing it with some idea that it is unjust, as not wishing to hear what
you may not be able to hear and condemn. We lay this before you as the
first ground on which we urge that your hatred to the name of Christian is
unjust. And the very reason which seems to excuse this injustice (I mean
ignorance) at once aggravates and convicts it. For what is there more
unfair than to hate a thing of which you know nothing, even though it
deserve to be hated? Hatred is only merited when it is known to be merited.
But without that knowledge, whence is its justice to be vindicated? for
that is to be proved, not from the mere fact that an aversion exists, but
from acquaintance with the subject. When men, then, give way to a dislike
simply because they are entirely ignorant of the nature of the thing
disliked, why may it not be precisely the very sort of thing they should
not dislike? So we maintain that they are both ignorant while they hate us,
and hate us unrighteously while they continue in ignorance, the one thing
being the result of the other either way of it. The proof of their
ignorance, at once condemning and excusing their injustice, is this, that
those who once hated Christianity because they knew nothing about it, no
sooner come to know it than they all lay down at once their enmity. From
being its haters they become its disciples. By simply getting acquainted
with it, they begin now to hate what they had formerly been, and to profess
what they had formerly hated; and their numbers are as great as are laid to
our charge. The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians--that
they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands: they make
lamentation, as for some calamity, that both sexes, every age and
condition, even high rank, are passing over to the profession of the
Christian faith; and yet for all, their minds are not awakened to the
thought of some good they have failed to notice in it. They must not allow
any truer suspicions to cross their minds; they have no desire to make
closer trial. Here alone the curiosity of human nature slumbers. They like
to be ignorant, though to others the knowledge has been bliss. Anacharsis
reproved the rude venturing to criticise the cultured; how much more this
judging of those who know, by men who are entirely ignorant, might he have
denounced X Because they already dislike, they want to know no more. Thus
they prejudge that of which they are ignorant to be such, that, if they
came to know it, it could no longer be the object of their aversion; since,
if inquiry finds nothing worthy of dislike, it is certainly proper to cease
from an unjust dislike, while if its bad character comes plainly out,
instead of the detestation entertained for it being thus diminished, a
stronger reason for perseverance in that detestation is obtained, even
under the authority of justice itself. But, says one, a thing is not good
merely because multitudes go over to it; for how many have the bent of
their nature towards whatever is bad! how many go astray into ways of
error! It is undoubted. Yet a thing that is thoroughly evil, not even those
whom it carries away venture to defend as good. Nature throws a veil either
of fear or shame over all evil. For instance, you find that criminals are
eager to conceal themselves, avoid appearing in public, are in trepidation
when they are caught, deny their guilt, when they are accused; even when
they are put to the rack, they do not easily or always confess; when there
is no doubt about their condemnation, they grieve for what they have done.
In their self-communings they admit their being impelled by sinful
dispositions, but they lay the blame either on fate or on the stars. They
are unwilling to acknowledge that the thing is theirs, because they own
that it is wicked. But what is there like this in the Christian's case? The
only shame or regret he feels, is at not having been a Christian earlier.
If he is pointed out, he glories in it; if he is accused, he offers no
defence; interrogated, he makes voluntary confession; condemned he renders
thanks. What sort of evil thing is this, which wants all the ordinary
peculiarities of evil--fear, shame, subterfuge, penitence, lamenting? What!
is that a crime in which the criminal rejoices? to be accused of which is
his ardent wish, to be punished for which is his felicity? You cannot call
it madness, you who stand convicted of knowing nothing of the matter.

CHAP. II.

   If, again, it is certain that we are the most wicked of men, why do you
treat us so differently from our fellows, that is, from other criminals,it
being only fair that the same crime should get the same treatment? When the
charges made against us are made against others, they are permitted to make
use both of their own lips and of hired pleaders to show their innocence.
They have full opportunity of answer and debate; in fact, it is against the
law to condemn anybody undefended and unheard. Christians alone are
forbidden to say anything in exculpation of themselves, in defence of the
truth, to help the judge to a righteous decision; all that is cared about
is having what the public hatred demands--the confession of the name, not
examination of the charge: while in your ordinary judicial investigations,
on a man's confession of the crime of murder, or sacrilege, or incest, or
treason, to take the points of which we are accused, you are not content to
proceed at once to sentence,--you do not take that step till you thoroughly
examine the circumstances of the confession--what is the real character of
the deed, how often, where, in what way, when he has done it, who were
privy to it, and who actually took part with him in it. Nothing like this
is done in our case, though the falsehoods disseminated about us ought to
have the same sifting, that it might be found how many murdered children
each of us had tasted; how many incests each of us had shrouded in
darkness; what cooks, what dogs had been witness of our deeds. Oh, how
great the glory of the ruler who should bring to light some Christian who
had devoured a hundred infants! But, instead of that, we find that even
inquiry in regard to our case is forbidden. For the younger Pliny, when he
was ruler of a province, having condemned some Christians to death, and
driven some from their stedfastness, being still annoyed by their great
numbers, at last sought the advice of Trajan,(1) the reigning emperor, as
to what he was to do with the rest, explaining to his master that, except
an obstinate disinclination to offer sacrifices, he found in the religious
services nothing but meetings at early morning for singing hymns to Christ
and(2) God, and sealing home their way of life by a united pledge to be
faithful to their religion, forbidding murder, adultery, dishonesty, and
other crimes. Upon this Trajan wrote back that Christians were by no means
to be sought after; but if they were brought before him, they should be
punished. O miserable deliverance,--under the necessities of the case, a
self-contradiction! It forbids them to be sought after as innocent, and it
commands them to be punished as guilty. It is at once merciful and cruel;
it, passes by, and it punishes. Why dost thou play a game of evasion upon
thyself, O Judgment? If thou condemnest, why dost thou not also inquire. If
thou does not inquire, why dost thou not also absolve? Military stations
are distributed through all the provinces for tracking robbers. Against
traitors and public foes every man is a soldier; search is made even for
their confederates and accessories. The Christian alone must not be sought,
though he may be brought and accused before the judge; as if a search had
any other end than that in view And so you condemn the man for whom nobody
wished a search to be made when he is presented to you, and who even now
does not deserve punishment, I suppose, because of his guilt, but because,
though forbidden to be sought, he was found. And then, too, you do not in
that case deal with us in the ordinary way of judicial proceedings against
offenders; for, in the case of others denying, you apply the torture to
make them confess--Christians alone you torture, to make them deny;
whereas, if we were guilty of any crime, we should be sure to deny it, and
you with your tortures would force us to confession. Nor indeed should you
hold that our crimes require no i such investigation merely on .the ground
that you are convinced by our confession of the name that the deeds were
done,--you who are daily wont, though you know well enough what murder is,
none the less to extract from the confessed murderer a full account of how
the crime was perpetrated. So that with all the greater perversity you act,
when, holding our crimes proved by our confession of the name of Christ,
you drive us by torture to fall from our confession, that, repudiating the
name, we may in like manner repudiate also the crimes with which, from that
same confession, you had assumed that we were chargeable. I suppose, though
you believe us to be the worst of mankind, you do not wish us to perish.
For thus, no doubt, you are in the habit of bidding the murderer deny, and
of ordering the man guilty of sacrilege to the rack if he persevere in his
acknowledgment! Is that the way of it? But if thus you do not, deal with us
as criminals, you declare us thereby innocent, when as innocent you are
anxious that we do not persevere in a confession which you know will bring
on us a condemnation of necessity, not of justice, at your hands. "I am a
Christian," the man cries out. He tells you what he is; you wish to hear
from him what he is not. Occupying your place of authority to extort the
truth, you do your utmost to get lies from us. "I am," he says, "that which
you ask me if I am. Why do you torture me to sin? I confess, and you put me
to the rack. What would you do if I denied? Certainly you give no ready
credence to others when they deny. When we deny, you believe at once. Let
this perversity of yours lead you to suspect that there is some hidden
power in the case under whose influence you act against the forms, against
the nature of public justice, even against the very laws themselves. For,
unless I am greatly mistaken, the laws enjoin offenders to be searched out,
and not to be hidden away. They lay it down that persons who own a crime
are to be condemned, not acquitted. The decrees of the senate, the commands
of your chiefs, lay this clearly down. The power of which you are servants
is a civil, not a tyrannical domination. Among tyrants, indeed, torments
used to be inflicted even as punishments: with you they are mitigated to a
means of questioning alone. Keep to your law in these as necessary till
confession is obtained; and if the torture is anticipated by confession,
there will be no occasion for it: sentence should be passed; the criminal
should be given over to the penalty which is his due, not released.
Accordingly, no one is eager for the acquittal of the guilty; it is not
right to desire that, and so no one is ever compelled to deny. Well, you
think the Christian a man of every crime, an enemy of the gods, of the
emperor, of the laws, of good morals, of all nature; yet you compel him to
deny, that you may acquit him, which without him denial you could not do.
You play fast and loose with the laws. You wish him to deny his guilt, that
you may, even against his will, bring him out blameless and free from all
guilt in reference to the past! Whence is this strange perversity on your
part? How is it you do not reflect that a spontaneous confession is greatly
more worthy of credit than a compelled denial; or consider whether, when
compelled to deny, a man's denial may not be in good faith, and whether
acquitted, he may not, then and there, as soon as the trial is over, laugh
at your hostility, a Christian as much as ever? Seeing, then, that in
everything you deal differently with us than with other criminals, bent
upon the one object of taking from us our name (indeed, it is ours no more
if we do what Christians never do), it is made perfectly clear that there
is no crime of any kind in the case, but merely a name which a certain
system, ever working against the truth, pursues with its enmity, doing this
chiefly with the object of securing that men may have no desire to know for
certain what they know for certain they are entirely ignorant of. Hence,
too, it is that they believe about us things of which they have no proof,
and they are disinclined to have them looked into, lest the charges, they
would rather take on trust, are all proved to have no foundation, that the
name so hostile to that rival power--its crimes presumed, not proved--may
be condemned simply on its own confession. So we are put to the torture if
we confess, and we are punished if we persevere, and if we deny we are
acquitted, because all the contention is about a name. Finally, why do you
read out of your tablet-lists that such a man is a Christian? Why not also
that he is a murderer? And if a Christian is a murderer, why not guilty,
too, of incest, or any other vile thing you believe of us? In our case
alone you are either ashamed or unwilling to mention the very names of our
crimes-If to be called a "Christian" does not imply any crime, the name is
surely very hateful, when that of itself is made a crime.

CHAP. III.

   What are we to think of it, that most people so blindly knock their
heads against the hatred of the Christian name; that when they bear
favourable testimony to any one, they mingle with it abuse of the name he
bears? "A good man," says one, "is Gaius Seius, only that he is a
Christian." So another, "I am astonished that a wise man like Lucius should
have suddenly become a Christian." Nobody thinks it needful to consider
whether Gaius is not good and Lucius wise, on this very account that he is
a Christian; or a Christian, for the reason that he is wise and good. They
praise what they know, they abuse what they are ignorant of, and they
inspire their knowledge with their ignorance; though in fairness you should
rather judge of what is unknown from what is known, than what is known from
what is unknown. Others, in the case of persons whom, before they took the
name of Christian, they had known as loose, and vile, and wicked, put on
them a brand from the very thing which they praise. In the blindness of
their hatred, they fall foul of their own approving judgment! "What a woman
she was! how wanton! how gay! What a youth he was! how profligate! how
libidinous!--they have become Christians!" So the hated name is given to a
reformation of character. Some even barter away their comforts for that
hatred, content to bear injury, if they are kept free at home from the
object of their bitter enmity. The wife, now chaste, the husband, now no
longer jealous, casts out of his house; the son, now obedient, the father,
who used to be so patient, disinherits; the servant, now faithful, the
master, once so mild, commands away from his presence; it is a high offence
for any one to be reformed by the detested name. Goodness is of less value
than hatred of Christians. Well now, if there is this dislike of the name,
what blame can you attach to names? What accusation can you bring against
mere designations, save that something in the word sounds either barbarous,
or unlucky, or scurrilous, or unchaste? But Christian, so far as the
meaning of the word is concerned, is derived from anointing. Yes, and even
when it is wrongly pronounced by you "Chrestianus" (for you do not even
know accurately the name you hate), it comes from sweetness and benignity.
You hate, therefore, in the guiltless, even a guiltless name. But the
special ground of dislike to the sect is, that it bears the name of its
Founder. Is there anything new in a religious sect getting for its
followers a designation from its master? Are not the philosophers called
from the founders of their systems--Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans?
Are not the Stoics and Academics so called also from the places in which
they assembled and stationed themselves? and are not physicians named from
Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, cooks even from Apicius? And
yet the bearing of the name, transmitted from the original institutor with
whatever he has instituted, offends no one. No doubt, if it is proved that
the sect is a bad one, and so its founder bad as well, that will prove that
the name is bad and deserves our aversion, in respect of the character both
of the sect and its author. Before, therefore, taking up a dislike to the
name, it behoved you to consider the sect in the author, or the author in
the sect. But now, without any sifting and knowledge of either, the mere
name is made matter of accusation, the mere name is assailed, and a sound
alone brings condemnation on a sect and its author both, while of both you
are ignorant, because they have such and such a designation, not because
they are convicted of anything wrong.

CHAP. IV.

   And so, having made these remarks as it were by way of preface, that I
might show in its true colours the injustice of the public hatred against
us, I shall now take my stand on the plea of our blamelessness; and I shall
not only refute the things which are objected to us, but I shall also
retort them on the objectors, that in this way all may know that Christians
are free from the very crimes they are so well aware prevail among
themselves, that they may at the same time be put to the blush for their
accusations against us,--accusations I shall not say of the worst of men
against the best, but now, as they will have it, against those who are only
their fellows in sin. We shall reply to the accusation of all the various
crimes we are said to be guilty of in secret, such as we find them
committing in the light of day, and as being guilty of which we are held to
be wicked, senseless, worthy of punishment, deserving of ridicule. But
since, when our truth meets you successfully at all points, the authority
of the laws as a last resort is set up against it, so that it is either
said that their determinations are absolutely conclusive, or the necessity
of obedience is, however unwillingly, preferred to the truth, I shall
first, in this matter of the laws grapple with you as with their chosen
protectors. Now first, when you sternly lay it down in your sentences, "It
is not lawful for you to exist," and with unhesitating rigour you enjoin
this to be carried out, you exhibit the violence and unjust domination of
mere tyranny, if you deny the thing to be lawful, simply on the ground that
you wish it to be unlawful, not because it ought to be. But if you would
have it unlawful because it ought not to be lawful, without doubt that
should have no permission of law which does harm; and on this ground, in
fact, it is already determined that whatever is beneficial is legitimate.
Well, if I have found what your law prohibits to be good, as one who has
arrived at such a previous opinion, has it not lost its power to debar me
from it, though that very thing, if it were evil, it would justly forbid to
me? If your law has gone wrong, it is of human origin, I think; it has not
fallen from heaven. Is it wonderful that man should err in making a law, or
come to his senses in rejecting it? Did not the Lacedaemonians amend the
laws of Lycurgus himself, thereby inflicting such pain on their author that
he shut himself up, and doomed himself to death by starvation? Are you not
yourselves every day, in your efforts to illumine the darkness of
antiquity, cutting and hewing with the new axes of imperial rescripts and
edicts, that whole ancient and rugged forest of your laws? Has not Severus,
that most resolute of rulers, but yesterday repealed the ridiculous Papian
laws(1) which compelled people to have children before the Julian laws
allow matrimony to be contracted, and that though they have the authority
of age upon their side? There were laws, too, in old times, that parties
against whom a decision had been given might be cut in pieces by their
creditors; however, by common consent that cruelty was afterwards erased
from the statutes, and the capital penalty turned into a brand of shame. By
adopting the plan of confiscating a debtor's goods, it was sought rather to
pour the blood in blushes over his face than to pour it out. How many laws
lie hidden out of sight which still require to be reformed! For it is
neither the number of their years nor the dignity of their maker that
commends them, but simply that they are just; and therefore, when their
injustice is recognized, they are deservedly condemned, even though they
condemn. Why speak we of them as unjust? nay, if they punish mere names, we
may well call them irrational. But if they punish acts, why in our case do
they punish acts solely on the ground of a name, while in others they must
have them proved not from the name, but from the wrong done? I am a
practiser of incest (so they say); why do they not inquire into it? I am an
infant-killer; why do they not apply the torture to get from me the truth?
I am guilty of crimes against the gods, against the Caesars; why am I, who
am able to clear myself, not allowed to be heard on my own behalf? No law
forbids the sifting of the crimes which it prohibits, for a judge never
inflicts a righteous vengeance if he is not well assured that a crime has
been committed; nor does a citizen render a true subjection to the law, if
he does not know the nature of the thing on which the punishment is
inflicted. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should
be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should
have that conviction too. Nay, a law lies under strong suspicions which
does not care to have itself tried and approved: it is a positively wicked
law, if, unproved, it tyrannizes over men.

CHAP. V.

   To say a word about the origin of laws of the kind to which we now
refer, there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by the
emperor till first approved by the senate. Marcus AEmilius had experience
of this in reference to his god Alburnus. And this, too, makes for our
case, that among you divinity is allotted at the judgment of human beings.
Unless gods give satisfaction to men, there will be no deification for
them: the god will have to propitiate the man. Tiberius(1) accordingly, in
whose days the Christian name made its entry into the world, having himself
received intelligence from Palestine of events which had clearly shown the
truth of Christ's divinity, brought the matter before the senate, with his
own decision in favour of Christ. The senate, because it had not given the
approval itself, rejected his proposal. Caesar held to his opinion,
threatening wrath against all accusers of the Christians. Consult your
histories; you will there find that Nero was the first who assailed with
the imperial sword the Christian sect, making profess then especially at
Rome. But we glory in having our condemnation hallowed by the hostility of
such a wretch. For any one who knows him, can understand that not except as
being of singular excellence did anything bring on it Nero's condemnation.
Domitian, too, a man of Nero's type in cruelty, tried his hand at
persecution; but as he had something of the human in him, he soon put an
end to what he had begun, even restoring again those whom he had banished.
Such as these have always been our persecutors,--men unjust, impious, base,
of whom even you yourselves have no good to say, the sufferers under whose
sentences you have been wont to restore. But among so many princes from
that time to the present day, with anything of divine and human wisdom in
them, point out a single persecutor of the Christian name. So far from
that, we, on the contrary, bring before you one who was their protector, as
you will see by examining the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave
of emperors, in which he bears his testimony that that Germanic drought was
removed by the rains obtained through the prayers of the Christians who
chanced to be fighting under him. And as he did not by public law remove
from Christians their legal disabilities, yet in another way he put them
openly aside, even adding a sentence of condemnation, and that of greater
severity, against their accusers. What sort of laws are these which the
impious alone execute against us--and the unjust, the vile, the bloody, the
senseless, the insane? which Trajan to some extent made naught by
forbidding Christians to be sought after; which neither a Hadrian, though
fond of searching into all things strange and new, nor a Vespasian, though
the subjugator of the Jews, nor a Pius, nor a Verus, ever enforced? It
should surely be judged more natural for bad men to be eradicated by good
princes as being their natural enemies, than by those of a spirit kindred
with their own.

CHAP. VI.

   I would now have these most religious protectors and vindicators of the
laws and institutions of their fathers, tell me, in regard to their own
fidelity and the honour, and submission they themselves show to ancestral
institutions, if they have departed from nothing--if they have in nothing
gone out of the old paths--if they have not put aside whatsoever is most
useful and necessary as rules of a virtuous life. What has become of the
laws repressing expensive and ostentatious ways of living? which forbade
more than a hundred asses to be expended on a supper, and more than one
fowl to be set on the table at a time, and that not a fatted one; which
expelled a patrician from the senate on the serious ground, as it was
counted, of aspiring to be too great, because he had acquired ten pounds of
silver; which put down the theatres as quickly as they arose to debauch the
manners of the people; which did not permit the insignia of official
dignities or of noble birth to be rashly or with impunity usurped? For I
see the Centenarian suppers must now bear the name, not from the hundred
asses, but from the hundred sestertia(1) expended on them; and that mines
of silver are made into dishes (it were little if this applied only to
senators, and not to freedmen or even mere whip-spoilers(2)). I see, too,
that neither is a single theatre enough, nor are theatres unsheltered: no
doubt it was that immodest pleasure might not be torpid in the wintertime,
the Lacedaemonians invented their woollen cloaks for the plays. I see now
no difference between the dress of matrons and prostitutes. In regard to
women, indeed, those laws of your fathers, which used to be such an
encouragement to modesty and sobriety, have also fallen into desuetude,
when a woman had yet known no gold upon her save on the finger, which, with
the bridal ring, her husband had sacredly pledged to himself; when the
abstinence of women from wine was carried so far, that a matron, for
opening the compartments of a wine cellar, was starved to death by her
friends,--while in the times of Romulus, for merely tasting wine, Mecenius
killed his wife, and suffered nothing for the deed. With reference to this
also, it was the custom of women to kiss their relatives, that they might
be detected by their breath. Where is that happiness of married life, ever
so desirable, which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result of
which for about 600 years there was not among us a single divorce? Now,
women have every member of the body heavy laden with gold; wine-bibbing is
so common among them, that the kiss is never offered with their will; and
as for divorce, they long for it as though it were the natural consequence
of marriage. The laws, too, your fathers in their wisdom had enacted
concerning the very gods themselves, you their most loyal children have
rescinded, The consuls, by the authority of the senate, banished Father
Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from the city, but from the whole of
Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius, no Christians surely, forbade
Serapis, and Isis, and Arpocrates, with their dogheaded friend,(1)
admission into the Capitol--in the act casting them out from the assembly
of the gods--overthrow their altars, and expelled them from the country,
being anxious to prevent the vices of their base and lascivious religion
from spreading. These, you have restored, and conferred highest honours on
them. What has come to your religion--of the veneration due by you to your
ancestors? In your dress, in your food, in your style of life, in your
opinions, and last of all in your very speech, you have renounced your
progenitors. You are always praising antiquity, and yet every day you have
novelties in your way of living. From your having failed to maintain what
you should, you make it clear, that, while you abandon the good ways of
your fathers, you retain and guard the things you ought not. Yet the very
tradition of your fathers, which you still seem so faithfully to defend,
and in which you find your principal matter of accusation against the
Christians--I mean zeal in the worship of the gods, the point in which
antiquity has mainly erred--although you have rebuilt the altars of
Serapis, now a Roman deity, and to Bacchus, now become a god of Italy, you
offer up your orgies,--I shall in its proper place show that you despise,
neglect, and overthrow, casting entirely aside the authority of the men of
old. I go on meantime to reply to that infamous charge of secret crimes,
clearing my way to things of open day.

CHAP. VII.

   Monsters of wickedness, we are accused of observing a holy rite in
which we kill a little child and then eat it; in which, after the feast, we
practise incest, the dogs--our pimps, forsooth, overturning the lights and
getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our impious lusts. This is
what is constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take no pains to elicit
the truth of what we have been so long accused. Either bring, then, the
matter to the light of day if you believe it, or give it no credit as
having never inquired into it. On the ground of your double dealing, we are
entitled to lay it down to you that there is no reality in the thing which
you dare not expiscate. You impose on the executioner, in the case of
Christians, a duty the very opposite of expiscation: he is not to make them
confess what they do, but to make them deny what they are. We date the
origin of our religion, as we have mentioned before, from the reign of
Tiberius. Truth and the hatred of truth come into our world together. As
soon as truth appears, it is regarded as an enemy. It has as many foes as
there are strangers to it: the Jews, as was to be looked for, from a spirit
of rivalry; the soldiers, out of a desire to extort money; our very
domestics, by their nature. We are daily beset by foes, we are daily
betrayed; we are oftentimes surprised in our meetings and congregations.
Whoever happened withal upon an infant wailing, according to the common
story? Whoever kept for the judge, just as he had found them, the gory
mouths of Cyclops and Sirens? Whoever found any traces of uncleanness in
their wives? Where is the man who, when he had discovered such atrocities,
concealed them; or, in the act of dragging the culprits' before the judge,
was bribed into silence? If we always keep our secrets, when were our
proceedings made known to the world? Nay, by whom could they be made known?
Not, surely, by the guilty parties themselves; even from the very idea of
the thing, the fealty of silence being ever due to mysteries. The
Samothracian and Eleusinian make no disclosures--how much more will silence
be kept in regard to such as are sure, in their unveiling, to call forth
punishment from man at once, while wrath divine is kept in store for the
future? If, then, Christians are not themselves the publishers of their
crime, it follows of course it must be strangers. And whence have they
their knowledge, when it is also a universal custom in religious
initiations to keep the profane aloof, and to beware of witnesses, unless
it be that those who are so wicked have less fear than their neighbors?
Every one knows what sort of thing rumour is. It is one of your own
sayings, that "among all evils, none flies so fast as rumour." Why is
rumour such an evil thing? Is it because it is fleet? Is it because it
carries information? Or is it because it is in the highest degree
mendacious?--a thing, not even when it brings some truth to us, without a
taint of falsehood, either detracting, or adding, or changing from the
simple fact? Nay more, it is the very law of its being to continue only
while it lies, and to live but so long as there is no proof; for when the
proof is given, it ceases to exist; and, as having done its work of merely
spreading a report, it delivers up a fact, and is henceforth held to be a
fact, and called a fact. And then no one says, for instance, "They say that
it took place at Rome," or, "There is a rumour that he has obtained a
province," but, "He has got a province," and, "It took place at Rome."
Rumour, the very designation of uncertainty, has no place when a thing is
certain. Does any but a fool put his trust in it? For a wise man never
believes the dubious. Everybody knows, however zealously it is spread
abroad, on whatever strength of asseveration it rests, that some time or
other from some one fountain it has its origin. Thence it must creep into
propagating tongues and ears; and a small seminal blemish so darkens all
the rest of the story, that no one can determine whether the lips, from
which it first came forth, planted the seed of falsehood, as often happens,
from a spirit of opposition, or from a suspicious judgment, or from a
confirmed, nay, in the case of some, an inborn, delight in lying. It is
well that time brings all to light, as your proverbs and sayings testify,
by a provision of Nature, which has so appointed things that nothing long
is hidden, even though rumour has not disseminated it. It is just then as
it should be, that fame for so long a period has been alone aware of the
crimes of Christians. This is the witness you bring against us--one that
has never been able to prove the accusation it some time or other sent
abroad, and at last by mere continuance made into a settled opinion in the
world; so that I confidently appeal to Nature herself, ever true, against
those who groundlessly hold that such things are to be credited.

CHAP. VIII.

   See now, we set before you the reward of these enormities. They give
promise of eternal life. Hold it meanwhile as your own belief. I ask you,
then, whether, so believing, you think it worth attaining with a conscience
such as you will have. Come, plunge your knife into the babe, enemy of
none, accused of none, child of all; or if that is another's work, simply
take your place beside a human being dying before he has really lived,
await the departure of the lately given soul, receive the fresh young
blood, saturate your bread with it, freely partake. The while as you
recline at table, take note of the places which your mother and your sister
occupy; mark them well, so that when the dog-made darkness has fallen on
you, you may make no mistake, for you will be guilty of a crime--unless you
perpetrate a deed of incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these,
you have life everlasting. Tell me, I pray you, is eternity worth it? If it
is not, then these things are not to be credited. Even although you had the
belief, I deny the will; and even if you had the will, I deny the
possibility. Why then can others do it, if you cannot? why cannot you, if
others can? I suppose we are of a different nature--are we Cynopae or
Sciapodes?(1) You are a man yourself as well as the Christian: if you
cannot do it, you ought not to believe it of others, for a Christian is a
man as well as you. But the ignorant, forsooth, are deceived and imposed
on. They were quite unaware of anything of the kind being imputed to
Christians, or they would certainly have looked into it for themselves, and
searched the matter out. Instead of that, it is the custom for persons
wishing initiation into sacred rites, I think, to go first of all to the
master of them, that he may explain what preparations are to be made. Then,
in this case, no doubt he would say, "You must have a child still of tender
age, that knows not what it is to die, and can smile under thy knife;
bread, too, to collect the gushing blood; in addition to these,
candlesticks, and lamps, and dogs--with tid-bits to draw them on to the
extinguishing of the lights: above all things, you will require to bring
your mother and your sister with you." But what if mother and sister are
unwilling? or if there be neither the one nor the other? What if there are
Christians with no Christian relatives? He will not be counted, I suppose,
a true follower of Christ, who has not a brother or a son. And what now, if
these things are all in store for them without their knowledge? At least
afterwards they come to know them; and they bear with them, and pardon
them. They fear, it may be said, lest they have to pay for it if they let
the secret out: nay, but they will rather in that case have every claim to
protection; they will even prefer, one might think, dying by their own
hand, to living under the burden of such a dreadful knowledge. Admit that
they have this fear; yet why do they still persevere? For it is plain
enough that you will have no desire to continue what you would never have
been, if you had had previous knowledge of it.

CHAP. IX.

   That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will show that in
part openly, in part secretly, practices prevail among you which have led
you perhaps to credit similar things about us. Children were openly
sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the proconsulship of Tiberius,
who exposed to public gaze the priests suspended on the sacred trees
overshadowing their temple--so many crosses on which the punishment which
justice craved overtook their crimes, as the soldiers of our country still
can testify who did that very work for that proconsul. And even now that
sacred. crime still continues to be done in secret. It is not only
Christians, you see, who despise you; for all that you do there is neither
any crime thoroughly and abidingly eradicated, nor does any of your gods
reform his ways. When Saturn did not spare his own children, he was not
likely to spare the children of others; whom indeed the very parents
themselves were in the habit of offering, gladly responding to the call
which was made on them, and keeping the little ones pleased on the
occasion, that they might not die in tears. At the same time, there is a
vast difference between homicide and parricide. A more advanced age was
sacrificed to Mercury in Gaul. I hand over the Tauric fables to their own
theatres. Why, even in that most religious city of the pious descendants of
AEneas, there is a certain Jupiter whom in their games they lave with human
blood. It is the blood of a beast-fighter, you say. Is it less, because of
that, the blood of a man?(1) Or is it viler blood because it is from the
veins of a wicked man? At any rate it is shed in murder. O Jove, thyself a
Christian, and in truth only son of thy father in his cruelty! But in
regard to child murder, as it does not matter whether it is committed for a
sacred object, or merely at one's own self-impulse--although there is a
great difference, as we have said, between parricide and homicide--I shall
turn to the people generally. How many, think you, of those crowding around
and gaping for Christian blood,--how many even of your rulers, notable for
their justice to you and for their severe measures against us, may I charge
in their own consciences with the sin of putting their offspring to death?
As to any difference t in the kind of murder, it is certainly the more
cruel way to kill by drowning, or by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs.
A maturer age has always preferred death by the sword. In our case, murder
being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the foetus in the
womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the
body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-
killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or
destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be
one; you have the fruit already in its seed. As to meals of blood and such
tragic dishes, read--I am not sure where it is told (it is in Herodotus, I
think)--how blood taken from the arms, and tasted by both parties, has been
the treaty bond among some nations. I am not sure what it was that was
tasted in the time of Catiline. They say, too, that among some Scythian
tribes the dead are eaten by their friends. But I am going far from home.
At this day, among ourselves, blood consecrated to Bellona, blood drawn
from a punctured thigh and then partaken of, seals initiation into the
rites of that goddess. Those, too, who at the gladiator shows, for the cure
of epilepsy, quaff with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain in the
arena, as it flows fresh from the wound, and then rush off--to whom do they
belong? those, also, who make meals on the flesh of wild beasts at the
place of combat--who have keen appetites for bear and stag? That bear in
the struggle was bedewed with the blood of the man whom it lacerated: that
stag rolled itself in the gladiator's gore. The entrails of the very bears,
loaded with as yet undigested human viscera, are in great request. And you
have men rifting up man-fed flesh? If you partake of food like this, how do
your repasts differ from those you accuse us Christians of? And do those,
who, with savage lust, seize on human bodies, do less because they devour
the living? Have they less the pollution of human blood on them because
they only lick up what is to turn into blood? They make meals, it is plain,
not so much of infants, as of grown-up men. Blush for your vile ways before
the Christians, who have not even the blood of animals at their meals of
simple and natural food; who abstain from things strangled and that die a
natural death, for no other reason than that they may not contract
pollution, so much as from blood secreted in the viscera. To clench the
matter with a single example, you tempt Christians with sausages of blood,
just because you are perfectly aware that the thing by which you thus try
to get them to transgress they hold unlawful.(2) And how unreasonable it is
to believe that those, of whom you are convinced that they regard with
horror the idea of tasting the blood of oxen, are eager after blood of men;
unless, mayhap, you have tried it, and found it sweeter to the taste! Nay,
in fact, there is here a test you should apply to discover Christians, as
well as the fire-pan and the censer. They should be proved by their
appetite for human blood, as well as by their refusal to offer sacrifice;
just as otherwise they should be affirmed to be free of Christianity by
their refusal to taste of blood, as by their sacrificing; and there would
be no want of blood of men, amply supplied as that would be in the trial
and condemnation of prisoners. Then who are more given to the crime of
incest than those who have enjoyed the instruction of Jupiter himself?
Ctesias tells us that the Persians have illicit intercourse with their
mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspected on this point; for on first
hearing the tragedy of OEdipus they made mirth of the incest-doer's grief,
exclaiming, h'laune eis th`n mhte'ra. Even now reflect what opportunity
there is for mistakes leading to incestuous comminglings--your promiscuous
looseness supplying the materials. You first of all expose your children,
that they may be taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are
quite unknown; or you give them away, to be adopted by those who will do
better to them the part of parents. Well, some time or other, all memory of
the alienated progeny must be lost; and when once a mistake has been made,
the transmission of incest thence will still go on--the race and the crime
creeping on together. Then, further, wherever you are--at home, abroad,
over the seas--your lust is an attendant, whose general indulgence, or even
its indulgence in the most limited scale, may easily and unwittingly
anywhere beget children, so that in this way a progeny scattered about in
the commerce of life may have intercourse with those who are their own kin,
and have no notion that there is any incest in the case. A persevering and
stedfast chastity has protected us from anything like this: keeping as we
do from adulteries and all post-matrimonial unfaithfulness, we are not
exposed to incestuous mishaps. Some of us, making matters still more
secure, beat away from them entirely the power of sensual sin, by a virgin
continence, still boys in this respect when they are old. If you would but
take notice that such sins as I have mentioned prevail among you, that
would lead you to see that they have no existence among Christians. The
same eyes would tell you of both facts. But the two blindnesses are apt to
go together; so that those who do not see what is, think they see what is
not. I shall show it to be so in everything. But now let me speak of
matters which are more dear.

CHAP. X.

   "You do not worship the gods," you say; " and you do not offer
sacrifices for the emperors." Well, we do not offer sacrifice for others,
for the same reason that we do not for ourselves,--namely, that your gods
are not at all the objects of our worship. So we are accused of sacrilege
and treason. This is the chief ground of charge against us--nay, it is the
sum-total of our offending; and it is worthy then of being inquired into,
if neither prejudice nor injustice be the judge, the one of which has no
idea of discovering the truth, and the other simply and at once rejects it.
We do not worship your gods, because we know that there are no such beings.
This, therefore, is what you should do: you should call on us to
demonstrate their non-existence, and thereby prove that they have no claim
to adoration; for only if your gods were truly so, would there be any
obligation to render divine homage to them. And punishment even were due to
Christians, if it were made plain that those to whom they refused all
worship were indeed divine. But you say, They are gods. We protest and
appeal from yourselves to your knowledge; let that judge us; let that
condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were but men. If
even it venture to deny that, it will be confuted by its own books of
antiquities, from which it has got its information about them, bearing
witness to this day, as they plainly do, both of the cities in which they
were born, and the countries in which they have left traces of their
exploits, as well as where also they are proved to have been buried. Shall
I now, therefore, go over them one by one, so numerous and so various, new
and old, barbarian, Grecian,Roman, foreign, captive and adopted, private
and common, male and female, rural and urban, naval and military? It were
useless even to hunt out all their names: so I may content myself with a
compend; and this not for your information, but that you may have what you
know brought to your recollection, for undoubtedly you act as if you had
forgotten all about them. No one of your gods is earlier than Saturn: from
him you trace all your deities, even those of higher rank and better known.
What, then, can be proved of the first, will apply to those that follow. So
far, then, as books give us information, neither the Greek Diodorus or
Thallus, neither Cassius Severus or Cornelius Nepos, nor any writer upon
sacred antiquities, have ventured to say that Saturn was any but a man: so
far as the question depends on facts, I find none more trustworthy than
those --that in Italy itself we have the country in which, after many
expeditions, and after having partaken of Attic hospitalities, Saturn
settled, obtaining cordial welcome from Janus, or, as the Salii will have
it, Janis. The mountain on which he dwelt was called Saturnius; the city he
founded is called Saturnia to this day; last of all, the whole of Italy,
after having borne the name of Oenotria, was called Saturnia from him. He
first gave you the art of writing, and a stamped coinage, and thence it is
he presides over the public treasury. But if Saturn were a man, he had
undoubtedly a human origin; and having a human origin, he was not the
offspring of heaven and earth. As his parents were unknown, it was not
unnatural that he should be spoken of as the son of those elements from
which we might all seem to spring. For who does not speak of heaven and
earth as father and mother, in a sort of way of veneration and honour? or
from the custom which prevails among us of saying that persons of whom we
have no knowledge, or who make a sudden appearance, have fallen from the
skies? In this way it came about that Saturn, everywhere a sudden and
unlooked-for guest, got everywhere the name of the Heaven-born. or even the
common folk call persons whose stock is unknown, sons of earth. I say
nothing of how men in these rude times were wont to act, when they were
impressed by the look of any stranger happening to appear among them, as
though it were divine, since even at this day men of culture make gods of
those whom, a day or two before, they acknowledged to be dead men by their
public mourning for them. Let these notices of Saturn, brief as they are,
suffice. It will thus also be proved that Jupiter is as certainly a man, as
from a man he sprung; and that one after another the whole swarm is mortal
like the primal stock.

CHAP. XI.

   And since, as you dare not deny that these deities of yours once were
men, you have taken it on you to assert that they were made gods after
their decease, let us consider what necessity there was for this. In the
first place, you must concede the existence of one higher God--a certain
wholesale dealer in divinity, who has made gods of men. For they could
neither have assumed a divinity which was not theirs, nor could any but one
himself possessing it have conferred it on them. If there was no one to
make gods, it is vain to, dream of gods being made when thus you have no
god-maker. Most certainly, if they could have deified themselves, with a
higher state at their command, they never would have been men. If, then,
there be one who is able to make gods, I turn back to an examination of any
reason there may be for making gods at all; and I find no other reason than
this, that the great God has need of their ministrations and aids in
performing the offices of Deity. But first it is an unworthy idea that He
should need the help of a man, and in fact a dead man, when, if He was to
be in want of this assistance from the dead, He might more fittingly have
created some one a god at the beginning. Nor do I see any place for his
action. For this entire world-mass--whether self-existent and uncreated, as
Pythagoras maintains, or brought into being by a creator's hands, as Plato
hold--was manifestly, once for all in its original construction, disposed,
and furnished, and ordered, and supplied with a government of perfect
wisdom. That cannot be imperfect which has made all perfect. There was
nothing waiting on for Saturn and his race to do. Men will make fools of
themselves if they refuse to believe that from the very first ram poured
down from the sky, and stars gleamed, and light shone, and thunders roared,
and Jove himself dreaded the lightnings you put in his hands; that in like
manner before Bacchus, and Ceres, and Minerva, nay before the first man,
whoever that was, every kind of fruit burst forth plentifully from the
bosom of the earth, for nothing provided for the support and sustenance of
man could be introduced after his entrance on the stage of being.
Accordingly, these necessaries of life are said to have been discovered,
not created. But the thing you discover existed before; and that which had
a pre-existence must be regarded as belonging not to him who discovered it,
hut to him who made it, for of course it had a being before it could be
found. But if, on account of his being the discoverer of the vine, Bacchus
is raised to godship, Lucullus, who first introduced the cherry from Pontus
into Italy, has not been fairly dealt with; for as the discoverer of a new
fruit, he has not, as though he were its creator, been awarded divine
honours. Wherefore, if the universe existed from the beginning, thoroughly
furnished with its system working under certain laws for the performance of
its functions, there is, in this respect, an entire absence of all reason
for electing humanity to divinity; for the positions and powers which you
have assigned to your deities have been from the beginning precisely what
they would have been, although you had never deified them. But you turn to
another reason, telling us that the conferring of deity was a way of
rewarding worth. And hence you grant, I conclude, that the god-making God
is of transcendent righteousness,--one who will neither rashly, improperly;
nor needlessly bestow a reward so great. I would have you then consider
whether the merits of your deities are of a kind to have raised them to the
heavens, and not rather to have sunk them down into lowest depths of
Tartarus,--the place which you regard, with many, as the prison-house of
infernal punishments. For into this dread place are wont to be cast all who
offend against filial piety, and such as are guilty of incest with sisters,
and seducers of wives, and ravishers of virgins, and boy-polluters,and men
of furious tempers, and murderers, and thieves, and deceivers; all, in
short, who tread in the footsteps of your gods, not one of whom you can
prove free from crime or vice, save by denying that they had ever a human
existence. But as you cannot deny that, you have those foul blots also as
an added reason for not believing that they were made gods afterwards. For
if you rule for the very purpose of punishing such deeds; if every virtuous
man among you rejects all correspondence, converse, and intimacy with the
wicked and base, while, on the other hand, the high God has taken up their
mates to a share of His majesty, on what ground is it that you thus condemn
those whose fellow-actors you adore? Your goodness is an affront in the
heavens. Deify your vilest criminals, if you would please your gods. You
honour them by giving divine honours to their fellows. But to say no more
about a way of acting so unworthy, there have been men virtuous, and pure,
and good. Yet how many of these nobler men you have left in the regions of
doom! as Socrates, so renowned for his wisdom, Aristides for his justice,
Themistocles for his warlike genius, Alexander for his sublimity of soul,
Polycrates for his good fortune, Croesus for his wealth, Demosthenes for
his eloquence. Which of these gods of yours is more remarkable for gravity
and wisdom than Cato, more just and warlike than Scipio? which of them more
magnanimous than Pompey, more prosperous than Sylla, of greater wealth than
Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius? How much better it would have been for
the God Supreme to have waited that He might have taken such men as these
to be His heavenly associates, prescient as He must have surely been of
their worthier character! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and straightway
shut heaven's gates; and now He must surely feel ashamed at these worthies
murmuring over their lot in the regions below.

CHAP. XII.

   But I pass from these remarks, for I know and I am going to show what
your gods are not, by showing what they are. In reference, then, to these,
I see only names of dead men of ancient times; I hear fabulous stories; I
recognize sacred rites rounded on mere myths. As to the actual images, I
regard hem as simply pieces of matter akin to the vessels and utensils in
common use among is, or even undergoing in their consecration a hapless
change from these useful articles at the hands of reckless art, which in
the transforming process treats them with utter contempt, nay, in the very
act commits sacrilege; so that it might be no slight solace to us in all
our punishments, suffering as we do because of these same gods, that in
their making they suffer as we do themselves. You put Christians on crosses
and stakes:(1) what image is not formed from the clay in the first
instance, set on cross and stake? The body of your god is first consecrated
on the gibbet. You tear the sides of Christians with your claws; but in the
case of your own gods, axes, and planes, and rasps are put to work more
vigorously on every member of the body. We lay our heads upon the block;
before the lead, and the glue, and the nails are put in requisition, your
deities are headless. We are cast to the wild beasts, while you attach them
to Bacchus, and Cybele, and Caelestis. We are burned in the flames; so,
too, are they in their original lump. We are condemned to the mines; from
these your gods originate. We are banished to islands; in islands it is a
common thing for your gods to have their birth or die. If it is in this way
a deity is made, it will follow that as many as are punished are deified,
and tortures will have to be declared divinities. But plain it is these
objects of your worship have no sense of the injuries and disgraces of
their consecrating, as they are equally unconscious of the honours paid to
them. O impious words! O blasphemous reproaches! Gnash your teeth upon us--
foam with maddened rage against us--ye are the persons, no doubt, who
censured a certain Seneca speaking of your superstition at much greater
length and far more sharply! In a word, if we refuse our homage to statues
and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which
hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit
praise instead of penalty, that we have rejected what we have come to see
is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those who we are certain
are nonentities. What does not exist, is in its nonexistence secure from
suffering.

CHAP. XIII.

   "But they are gods to us," you say. And how is it, then, that in utter
inconsistency with this, you are convicted of impious, sacrilegious, and
irreligious conduct to them, neglecting those you imagine to exist,
destroying those who are the objects of your fear, making mock of those
whose honour you avenge? See now if I go beyond the truth. First, indeed,
seeing you worship, some one god, and some another, of course you give
offence to those you do not worship. You cannot continue to give preference
to one without slighting another, for selection implies rejection. You
despise, therefore, those whom you thus reject; for in your rejection of
them, it is plain you have no dread of giving them offence. For, as we have
already shown, every god depended on the decision of the senate for his
godhead. No god was he whom man in his own counsels did not wish to be so,
and thereby condemned. The family deities you call Lares, you exercise a
domestic authority over, pledging them, selling them, changing them--making
sometimes a cooking-pot of a Saturn, a firepan of a Minerva, as one or
other happens to be worn done, or broken in its long sacred use, or as the
family head feels the pressure of some more sacred home necessity. In like
manner, by public law you disgrace your state gods, putting them in the
auction-catalogue, and making them a source of revenue. Men seek to get the
Capitol, as they seek to get the herb market, under the voice of the crier,
under the auction spear, under the registration of the quaestor. Deity is
struck off and farmed out to the highest bidder. But indeed lands burdened
with tribute are of less value; men under the assessment of a poll-tax are
less noble; for these things are the marks of servitude. In the case of the
gods, on the other hand, the sacredness is great in proportion to the
tribute which they yield; nay, the more sacred is a god, the larger is the
tax he pays. Majesty is made a source of gain. Religion goes about the
taverns begging. You demand a price for the privilege of standing on temple
ground, for access to the sacred services; there is no gratuitous knowledge
of your divinities permitted--you must buy their favours with a price. What
honours in any way do you render to them that you do not render to the
dead? You have temples in the one case just as in the other; you have
altars in the one case as in the other. Their statues have the same dress,
the same insignia. As the dead man had his age, his art, his occupation, so
it is with the deity. In what respect does the funeral feast differ from
the feast of Jupiter? or the bowl of the gods from the ladle of the manes?
or the undertaker from the soothsayer, as in fact this latter personage
also attends upon the dead? With perfect propriety you give divine honours
to your departed emperors, as you worship them in life. The gods will count
themselves indebted to you; nay, it will be matter of high rejoicing among
them that their masters are made their equals. But when you adore
Larentina, a public prostitute --I could have wished that it might at least
have been Lais or Phryne--among your Junos, and Cereses, and Dianas; when
you instal in your Pantheon Simon Magus,(1) giving him a statue and the
title of Holy God; when you make an infamous court page a god of the sacred
synod, although your ancient deities are in reality no better, they will
still think themselves affronted by you, that the privilege antiquity
conferred on them alone, has been allowed to others.

CHAP. XIV.

   I wish now to review your sacred rites; and I pass no censure on your
sacrificing, when you offer the worn-out, the scabbed, the corrupting; when
you cut off from the fat and the sound the useless parts, such as the head
and the hoofs, which in your house you would have assigned to the slaves or
the dogs; when of the tithe of Hercules you do not lay a third upon his
altar (I am disposed rather to praise your wisdom in rescuing something
from being lost); but turning to your books, from which you get your
training in wisdom and the nobler duties of life, what utterly ridiculous
things I find!--that for Trojans and Greeks the gods fought among
themselves like pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a man,
because she would rescue her son Aeneas when he was in peril of his life
from the same Diomede; that Mars was almost wasted away by a thirteen
months' imprisonment; that Jupiter was saved by a monster's aid from
suffering the same violence at the hands of the other gods; that he now
laments the fate of Sarpedon, now foully makes love to his own sister,
recounting (to her) former mistresses, now for a long time past not so dear
as she. After this, what poet is not found copying the example of his
chief, to be a disgracer of the gods? One gives Apollo to king Admetus to
tend his sheep; another hires out the building labours of Neptune to
Laomedon. A well-known lyric poet, too--Pindar, I mean--sings of
Aesculapius deservedly stricken with lightning for his greed in practising
wrongfully his art. A wicked deed it was of Jupiter--if he hurled the bolt-
-unnatural to his grandson, and exhibiting envious feeling to the
Physician. Things like these should not be made public if they are true;
and if false, they should not be fabricated among people professing a great
respect for religion. Nor indeed do either tragic or comic writers shrink
from setting forth the gods as the origin of all family calamities and
sins. I do not dwell on the philosophers, contenting myself with a
reference to Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, was in the habit of
swearing by an oak, and a goat, and a dog. In fact, for this very thing
Socrates was condemned to death, that he overthrew the worship of the gods.
Plainly, at one time as well as another, that is, always truth is disliked.
However, when rueing their judgment, the Athenians inflicted punishment on
his accusers, and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the
condemnation was in the very act rescinded, and his witness was restored to
its former value. Diogenes, too, makes utter mock of Hercules and the Roman
cynic Varro brings forward three hundred Joves, or Jupiters they should be
called, all headless.

CHAP. XV.

   Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even minister to your
pleasures by vilifying the gods. Examine those charming farces of your
Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in the jokes and tricks it is the buffoons or
the deities which afford you merriment; such farces I mean as Anubis the
Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine gender, and Diana under the lash, and
the reading the will of Jupiter deceased, and the three famishing
Herculeses held up to ridicule. Your dramatic literature, too, depicts all
the vileness of your gods. The Sun mourns his offspring(1) cast down from
heaven, and you are full of glee; Cybele sighs after the scornful swain,(2)
and you do not blush; you brook the stage recital of Jupiter's misdeeds,
and the shepherd(3) judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the
likeness of a god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch,
when one impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a
Minerva or a Hercules, is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and their
deity dishonored? Yet you not merely look on, but applaud. You are, I
suppose, more devout in the arena, where after the same fashion your
deities dance on human blood, on the pollutions caused by inflicted
punishments, as they act their themes and stories, doing their turn for the
wretched criminals, except that these, too, often put on divinity and
actually play the very gods. We have seen in our day a representation of
the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of Pessinus, and a man burnt alive
as Hercules. We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday
exhibition, at Mercury examining the bodies of the dead with his hot iron;
we have witnessed Jove's brother,(4) mallet in hand, dragging out the
corpses of the gladiators. But who can go into everything of this sort? If
by such things as these the honour of deity is assailed, if they go to blot
out every trace of its majesty, we must explain them by the contempt in
which the gods are held, alike by those who actually do them, and by those
for whose enjoyment they are done. This it will be said, however, is all in
sport. But if I add--it is what all know and will admit as readily to be
the fact--that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the altars
pimping is practised, that often in the houses of the temple-keepers and
priests, under the sacrificial fillets, and the sacred hats,(5) and the
purple robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds of licentiousness are done,
I am not sure but your gods have more reason to complain of you than of
Christians. It is certainly among the votaries of your religion that the
perpetrators of sacrilege are always found, for Christians do not enter
your temples even in the day-time. Perhaps they too would be spoilers of
them, if they worshipped in them. What then do they worship, since their
objects of worship are different from yours? Already indeed it is implied,
as the corollary from their rejection of the lie, that they render homage
to the truth; nor continue longer in an error which they have given up in
the very fact of recognizing it to be an error. Take this in first of all,
and when we have offered a preliminary refutation of some false opinions,
go on to derive from it our entire religious system.

CHAP. XVI.

   For, like some others, you are under the delusion that our god is an
ass's head.(6) Cornelius Tacitus first put this notion into people's minds.
In the fifth book of his histories, beginning the (narrative of the) Jewish
war with an account of the origin of the nation; and theorizing at his
pleasure about the origin, as well as the name and the religion of the
Jews, he states that having been delivered, or rather, in his opinion,
expelled from Egypt, in crossing the vast plains of Arabia, where water is
so scanty, they were in extremity from thirst; but taking the guidance of
the wild asses, which it was thought might be seeking water after feeding,
they discovered a fountain, and thereupon in their gratitude they
consecrated a head of this species of animal. And as Christianity is nearly
allied to Judaism, from this, I suppose, it was taken for granted that we
too are devoted to the worship of the same image. But the said Cornelius
Tacitus (the very opposite of tacit in telling lies) informs us in the work
already mentioned, that when Cneius Pompeius captured Jerusalem, he entered
the temple to see the arcana of the Jewish religion, but found no image
there. Yet surely if worship was rendered to any visible object, the very
place for its exhibition would be the shrine; and that all the more that
the worship, however unreasonable, had no need there to fear outside
beholders. For entrance to the holy place was permitted to the priests
alone, while all vision was forbidden to others by an outspread curtain.
You will not, however, deny that all beasts of burden, and not parts of
them, but the animals entire, are with their goddess Epona objects of
worship with you. It is this, perhaps, which displeases you in us, that
while your worship here is universal, we do homage only to the ass. Then,
if any of you think we render superstitious adoration to the cross, in that
adoration he is sharer with us. If you offer homage to a piece of wood at
all, it matters little what it is like when the substance is the same: it
is of no consequence the form, if you have the very body of the god. And
yet how far does the Athenian Pallas differ from the stock of the cross, or
the Pharian Ceres as she is put up uncarved to sale, a mere rough stake and
piece of shapeless wood? Every stake fixed in an upright position is a
portion of the cross; we render our adoration, if you will have it so, to a
god entire and complete. We have shown before that your deities are derived
from shapes modelled from the cross. But you also worship victories, for in
your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy.(1) The camp religion of
the Romans is all through a worship of the standards, a setting the
standards above all gods. Well, as those images decking out the standards
are ornaments of crosses. All those hangings of your standards and banners
are robes of crosses. I praise your zeal: you would not consecrate crosses
unclothed and unadorned. Others, again, certainly with more information and
greater verisimilitude, believe that the sun is our god. We shall be
counted Persians perhaps, though we do not worship the orb of day painted
on a piece of linen cloth, having himself everywhere in his own disk. The
idea no doubt has originated from our being known to turn to the east in
prayer.(1) But you, many of you, also under pretence sometimes of
worshipping the heavenly bodies, move your lips in the direction of the
sunrise. In the same way, if we devote Sun-day to rejoicing, from a far
different reason than Sun-worship, we have some resemblance to those of you
who devote the day of Saturn to ease and luxury, though they too go far
away from Jewish ways, of which indeed they are ignorant. But lately a new
edition of our god has been given to the world in that great city: it
originated with a certain vile man who was wont to hire himself out to
cheat the wild beasts, and who exhibited a picture with this inscription:
The God of the Christians, born of an ass.(2) He had the ears of an ass,
was hoofed in one foot, carried a book,(3) and wore a toga. Both the name
and the figure gave us amusement. But our opponents ought straightway to
have done homage to this biformed divinity, for they have acknowledged gods
dog-headed and lion-headed, with horn of buck and ram, with goat-like
loins, with serpent legs, with wings sprouting from back or foot. These
things we have discussed ex abundanti, that we might not seem willingly to
pass by any rumor against us unrefuted. Having thoroughly cleared
ourselves, we turn now to an exhibition of what our religion really is.

CHAP. XVII.

   The object of our worship is the One God,(4) He who by His commanding
word, His arranging wisdom, His mighty power, brought forth from nothing
this entire mass of our world, with all its array of elements, bodies,
spirits, for the glory of His majesty; whence also the Greeks have bestowed
on it the name of Ko'smos. The eye cannot see Him, though He is
(spiritually) visible. He is incomprehensible, though in grace He is
manifested. He is beyond our utmost thought, though our human faculties
conceive of Him. He is therefore equally real and great. But that which, in
the ordinary sense, can be seen and handled and conceived, is inferior to
the eyes by which it is taken in, and the hands by which it is tainted, and
the faculties by which it is discovered; but that which is infinite is
known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet
beyond all our conceptions--our very incapacity of fully grasping Him
affords us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in
His transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown. And this is the
crowning guilt of men, that they will not recognize One, of whom they
cannot possibly be ignorant. Would you have the proof from the works of His
hands, so numerous and so great, which both contain you and sustain you,
which minister at once to your enjoyment, and strike you with awe; or would
you rather have it from the testimony of the soul itself? Though under the
oppressive bondage of the body, though led astray by depraving customs,
though enervated by lusts and passions, though in slavery to false gods;
yet, whenever the soul comes to itself, as out of a surfeit, or a sleep, or
a sickness, and attains something of its natural soundness, it speaks of
God; using no other word, because this is the peculiar name of the true
God. "God is great and good"--"Which may God give," are the words on every
lip. It bears witness, too, that God is judge, exclaiming, "God sees," and,
"I commend myself to God," and, "God will repay me." O noble testimony of
the soul by nature(1) Christian! Then, too, in using such words as these,
it looks not to the Capitol, but to the heavens. It knows that there is the
throne of the living God, as from Him and from thence itself came down.

CHAP. XVIII.

   But, that we might attain an ampler and more authoritative knowledge at
once of Himself, and of His counsels and will, God has added a written
revelation for the behoof of every one whose heart is set on seeking Him,
that seeking he may find, and finding believe, and believing obey. For from
the first He sent messengers into the world,--men whose stainless
righteousness made them worthy to know the Most High, and to reveal Him,--
men abundantly endowed with the Holy Spirit, that they might proclaim that
there is one God only who made all things, who formed man from the dust of
the ground (for He is the true Prometheus who gave order to the world by
arranging the seasons and their course),--these have further set before us
the proofs He has given of His majesty in His judgments by floods and
fires, the rules appointed by Him for securing His favour, as well as the
retribution in store for the ignoring, forsaking and keeping them, as being
about at the end of all to adjudge His worshippers to everlasting life, and
the wicked to the doom of fire at once without ending and without break,
raising up again all the dead from the beginning, reforming and renewing
them with the object of awarding either recompense. Once these things were
with us, too, the theme of ridicule. We are of your stock and nature: men
are made, not born, Christians. The preachers of whom we have spoken are
called prophets, from the office which belongs to them of predicting the
future. Their words, as well as the miracles which they performed, that men
might have faith in their divine authority, we have still in the literary
treasures they have left, and which are open to all. Ptolemy, surnamed
Philadelphus, the most learned of his race, a man of vast acquaintance with
all literature, emulating, I imagine, the book enthusiasm of Pisistratus,
among other remains of the past which either their antiquity or something
of peculiar interest made famous, at the suggestion of Demetrius Phalereus,
who was renowned above all grammarians of his time, and to whom he had
committed the management of these things, applied to the Jews for their
writings--I mean the writings peculiar to them and in their tongue, which
they alone possessed, for from themselves, as a people dear to God for
their fathers' sake, their prophets had ever sprung, and to them they had
ever spoken. Now in ancient times the people we call Jews bare the name of
Hebrews, and so both their writings and their speech were Hebrew. But that
the understanding of their books might not be wanting, this also the Jews
supplied to Ptolemy; for they gave him seventy-two interpreters-men whom
the philosopher Menedemus, the well-known asserter of a Providence,
regarded with respect as sharing in his views. The same account is given by
Aristaeus. So the king left these works unlocked to all, in the Greek
language.(2) To this day, at the temple of Serapis, the libraries of
Ptolemy are to be seen, with the identical Hebrew originals in them. The
Jews, too, read them publicly. Under a tribute-liberty, they are in the
habit of going to hear them every Sabbath. Whoever gives ear will find God
in them; whoever takes pains to understand, will be compelled to believe.

CHAP. XIX.

   Their high antiquity, first of all, claims authority for these
writings. With you, too, it is a kind of religion to demand belief on this
very ground. Well, all the substances, all the materials, the origins,
classes, contents of your most ancient writings, even most nations and
cities illustrious in the records of the past and noted for their antiquity
in books of annals,--the very forms of your letters, those revealers and
custodiers of events, nay (I think I speak still within the mark), your
very gods themselves, your very temples and oracles, and sacred rites, are
less ancient than the work of a single prophet, in whom you have the
thesaurus of the entire Jewish religion, and therefore too of ours. If you
happen to have heard of a certain Moses, I speak first of him: he is as far
back as the Argive Inachus; by nearly four hundred years--only seven less--
he precedes Danaus, your most ancient name; while he antedates by a
millennium the death of Priam. I might affirm, too, that he is five hundred
years earlier than Homer, and have supporters of that view. The other
prophets also, though of later date, are, even the most recent of them, as
far back as the first of your philosophers, and legislators, and
historians. It is not so much the difficulty of the subject, as its
vastness, that stands in the way of a statement of the grounds on which
these statements rest; the matter is not so arduous as it would be tedious.
It would require the anxious study of many books, and the fingers busy
reckoning. The histories of the most ancient nations, such as the
Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians, would need to be ransacked; the
men of these various nations who have information to give, would have to be
called in as witnesses. Manetho the Egyptian, and Berosus the Chaldean, and
Hieromus the Phoenician king of Tyre; their successors too, Ptolemy the
Mendesian, and Demetrius Phalereus, and King Juba, and Apion, and Thallus,
and their critic the Jew Josephus, the native vindicator of the ancient
history of his people, who either authenticates or refutes the others. Also
the Greek censors' lists must be compared, and the dates of events
ascertained, that the chronological connections may be opened up, and thus
the reckonings of the various annals be made to give forth light. We must
go abroad into the histories and literature of all nations. And, in fact,
we have already brought the proof in part before you, in giving those hints
as to how it is to be effected. But it seems better to delay the full
discussion of this, lest in our haste we do not sufficiently carry it out,
or lest in its thorough handling we make too lengthened a digression.

CHAP. XX.

   To make up for our delay in this, we bring under your notice something
of even greater importance; we point to the majesty of our Scriptures, if
not to their antiquity. If you doubt that they are as ancient as we say, we
offer proof that they are divine. And you may convince yourselves of this
at once, and without going very far. Your instructors, the world, and the
age, and the event, are all be fore you. All that is taking place around
you I was fore-announced; all that you now see with your eye was previously
heard by the ear. The swallowing up of cities by the earth; the theft of
islands by the sea; wars, bringing external and internal convulsions; the
collision of kingdoms with kingdoms; famines and pestilences, and local
massacres, and widespread desolating mortalities; the exaltation of the
lowly, and the humbling of the proud; the decay of righteousness, the
growth of sin, the slackening interest in all good ways; the very seasons
and elements going out of their ordinary course, monsters and portents
taking the place of nature's forms--it was all foreseen and predicted
before it came to pass. While we suffer the calamities, we read of them in
the Scriptures; as we examine, they are proved. Well, the truth of a
prophecy, I thinks is the demonstration of its being from above. Hence
there is among us an assured faith in regard to coming events as things
already proved to us, for they were predicted along with what we have day
by day fulfilled. They are uttered by the same voices, they are written in
the same books--the same Spirit inspires them. All time is one to prophecy
foretelling the future. Among men, it may be, a distinction of times is
made while the fulfilment is going on: from being future we think of it as
presents and then from being present we count it as belonging to the past.
How are we to blame, I pray you, that we believe in things to come as
though they already were, with the grounds we have for our faith in these
two steps?

CHAP. XXI.

   But having asserted that our religion is supported by the writings of
the Jews, the oldest which exist, though it is generally known, and we
fully admit that it dates from a comparatively recent period--no further
back indeed than the reign of Tiberius--a question may perhaps be raised on
this ground about its standing, as if it were hiding something of its
presumption under shadow of an illustrious religion, one which has at any
rate undoubted allowance of the law, or because, apart from the question of
age, we neither accord with the Jews in their peculiarities in regard to
food, nor in their sacred days, nor even in their well-known bodily sign,
nor in the possession of a common name, which surely behoved to be the case
if we did homage to the same God as they. Then, too, the common people have
now some knowledge of Christ, and think of Him as but a man, one indeed
such as the Jews condemned, so that some may naturally enough have taken up
the idea that we are worshippers of a mere human being. But we are neither
ashamed of Christ --for we rejoice to be counted His disciples, and in His
name to suffer--nor do we differ from the Jews concerning God. We must
make, therefore, a remark or two as to Christ's divinity. In former times
the Jews enjoyed much of God's favour, when the fathers of their race were
noted for their righteousness and faith. So it was that as a people they
flourished greatly, and their kingdom attained to a lofty eminence; and so
highly blessed were they, that for their instruction God spake to them in
special revelations, pointing out to them beforehand how they should merit
His favor and avoid His displeasure. But how deeply they have sinned,
puffed up to their fall with a false trust in their noble ancestors,
turning from God's way into a way of sheer impiety, though they themselves
should refuse to admit it, their present national ruin would afford
sufficient proof. Scattered abroad, a race of wanderers, exiles from their
own land and clime, they roam over the whole world without either a human
or a heavenly king, not possessing even the stranger's right to set so much
as a simple footstep in their native country. The sacred writers withal, in
giving previous warning of these things, all with equal clearness ever
declared that, in the last days of the world, God would, out of every
nation, and people, and country, choose for Himself more faithful
worshippers, upon whom He would bestow His grace, and that indeed in ampler
measure, in keeping with the enlarged capacities of a nobler dispensation.
Accordingly, He appeared among us, whose coming to renovate and illuminate
man's nature was pre-announced by God--I mean Christ, that Son of God. And
so the supreme Head and Master of this grace and discipline, the
Enlightener and Trainer of the human race, God's own Son, was announced
among us, born--but not so born as to make Him ashamed of the name of Son
or of His paternal origin. It was not His lot to have as His father, by
incest with a sister, or by violation of a daughter or another's wife, a
god in the shape of serpent, or ox, or bird, or lover, for his vile ends
transmuting himself into the gold of Danaus. They are your divinities upon
whom these base deeds of Jupiter were done. But the Son of God has no
mother in any sense which involves impurity; she, whom men suppose to be
His mother in the ordinary way, had never entered into the marriage
bond.(1) But, first, I shall discuss His essential nature, and so the
nature of His birth will be understood. We have already asserted that God
made the world, and all which it contains, by His Word, and Reason, and
Power. It is abundantly plain that your philosophers, too, regard the
Logos--that is, the Word and Reason--as the Creator of the universe. For
Zeno lays it down that he is the creator, having made all things according
to a determinate plan; that his name is Fate, and God, and the soul of
Jupiter, and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes ascribes all this to
spirit, which he maintains pervades the universe. And we, in like manner,
hold that the Word, and Reason, and Power, by which we have said God made
all, have spirit as their proper and essential substratum, in which the
Word has inbeing to give forth utterances, and reason abides to dispose and
arrange, and power is over all to execute. We have been taught that He
proceeds forth from God, and in that procession He is generated; so that He
is the Son of God, and is called God from unity of substance with God. For
God, too, is a Spirit. Even when the ray is shot from the sun, it is still
part of the parent mass; the sun will still be in the ray, because it is a
ray of the sun--there is no division of substance, but merely an extension.
Thus Christ is Spirit of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is
kindled.(2) The material matrix remains entire and unimpaired, though you
derive from it any number of shoots possessed of its qualities; so, too,
that which has come forth out of God is at once God and the Son of God, and
the two are one. In this way also, as He is Spirit of Spirit and God of
God, He is made a second in manner of existence--in position, not in
nature; and He did not withdraw from the original source, but went forth.
This ray of God, then, as it was always foretold in ancient times,
descending into a certain virgin, and made flesh in her womb, is in His
birth God and man united. The flesh formed by the Spirit is nourished,
grows up to manhood, speaks, teaches, works, and is the Christ. Receive
meanwhile this fable, if you choose to call it so--it is like some of your
own--while we go on to show how Christ's claims are proved, and who the
parties are with you by whom such fables have been set agoing to overthrow
the truth, which they resemble. The Jews, too, were well aware that Christ
was coming, as those to whom the prophets spake. Nay, even now His advent
is expected by them; nor is there any other contention between them and us,
than that they believe the advent has not yet occurred. For two comings of
Christ having been revealed to us: a first, which has been fulfilled in the
lowliness of a human lot; a second, which impends over the world, now near
its close, in all the majesty of Deity unveiled; and, by misunderstanding
the first, they have concluded that the second--which, as matter of more
manifest prediction, they set their hopes on--is the only one. It was the
merited punishment of their sin not to understand the Lord's first advent:
for if they had, they would have believed; and if they had believed, they
would have obtained salvation. They themselves read how it is written of
them that they are deprived of wisdom and understanding--of the use of eyes
and ears.(1) As, then, under the force of their pre-judgment, they had
convinced themselves from His lowly guise that Christ was no more than man,
it followed from that, as a necessary consequence, that they should hold
Him a magician from the powers which He displayed,--expelling devils from
men by a word, restoring vision to the blind, cleansing the leprous,
reinvigorating the paralytic, summoning the dead to life again, making the
very elements of nature obey Him, stilling the storms and walking on the
sea; proving that He was the Logos of God, that primordial first-begotten
Word, accompanied by power and reason, and based on Spirit,--that He who
was now doing all things by His word, and He who had done that of old, were
one and the same. But the Jews were so exasperated by His teaching, by
which their rulers and chiefs were convicted of the truth, chiefly because
so many turned aside to Him, that at last they brought Him before Pontius
Pilate, at that time Roman governor of Syria; and, by the violence of their
outcries against Him, extorted a sentence giving Him up to them to be
crucified. He Himself had predicted this; which, however, would have
signified little had not the prophets of old done it as well. And yet,
nailed upon the cross, He exhibited many notable signs, by which His death
was distinguished from all others. At His own free-will, He with a word
dismissed from Him His spirit, anticipating the executioner's work. In the
same hour, too, the light of day was withdrawn, when the sun at the very
time was in his meridian blaze. Those who were not aware that this had been
predicted about Christ, no doubt thought it an eclipse. You yourselves have
the account of the world-portent still in your archives.(2) Then, when His
body was taken down from the cross and placed in a sepulchre, the Jews in
their eager watchfulness surrounded it with a large military guard, lest,
as He had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the third day, His
disciples might remove by stealth His body, and deceive even the
incredulous. But, lo, on the third day there a was a sudden shock of
earthquake, and the stone which sealed the sepulchre was rolled away, and
the guard fled off in terror: without a single disciple near, the grave was
found empty of all but the clothes of the buried One. But nevertheless, the
leaders of the Jews, whom it nearly concerned both to spread abroad a lie,
and keep back a people tributary and submissive to them from the faith,
gave it out that the body of Christ had been stolen by His followers. For
the Lord, you see, did not go forth into the public gaze, lest the wicked
should be delivered from their error; that faith also, destined to a great
reward, might hold its ground in difficulty. But He spent forty days with
some of His disciples down in Galilee, a region of Judea, instructing them
in the doctrines they were to teach to others. Thereafter, having given
them commission to preach the gospel through the world, He was encompassed
with a cloud and taken up to heaven,--a fact more certain far than the
assertions of your Proculi concerning Romulus.(3) All these things Pilate
did to Christ; and now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent
word of Him to the reigning Caesar, who was at the time Tiberius. Yes, and
the Caesars too would have believed on Christ, if either the Caesars had
not been necessary for the world, or if Christians could have been Caesars.
His disciples also, spreading over the world, did as their Divine Master
bade them; and after suffering greatly themselves from the persecutions of
the Jews, and with no unwilling heart, as having faith undoubting in the
truth, at last by Nero's cruel sword sowed the seed of Christian blood at
Rome.(1) Yes, and we shall prove that even your own gods are effective
witnesses for Christ. It is a great matter if, to give you faith in
Christians, I can bring forward the authority of the very beings on account
of whom you refuse them credit. Thus far we have carried out the plan we
laid down. We have set forth this origin of our sect and name, with this
account of the Founder of Christianity. Let no one henceforth charge us
with infamous wickedness; let no one think that it is otherwise than we
have represented, for none may give a false account of his religion. For in
the very fact that he says he worships another god than he really does, he
is guilty of denying the object of his worship, and transferring his
worship and homage to another; and, in the transference, he ceases to
worship the god he has repudiated. We say, and before all men we say, and
torn and bleeding under your tortures, we cry out, "We worship God through
Christ." Count Christ a man, if you please; by Him and in Him God would be
known and be adored. If the Jews object, we answer that Moses, who was but
a man, taught them their religion; against the Greeks we urge that Orpheus
at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia,
imposed religious rites; turning to yourselves, who exercise sway over the
nations, it was the man Numa Pompilius who laid on the Romans a heavy load
of costly superstitions. Surely Christ, then, had a right to reveal Deity,
which was in fact His own essential possession, not with the object of
bringing boers and savages by the dread of multitudinous gods, whose favour
must be won into some civilization, as was the case with Numa; but as one
who aimed to enlighten men already civilized, and under illusions from
their very culture, that they might come to the knowledge of the truth.
Search, then, and see if that divinity of Christ be true. If it be of such
a nature that the acceptance of it transforms a man, and makes him truly
good, there is implied in that the duty of renouncing what is opposed to it
as false; especially and on every ground that which, hiding itself under
the names and images of dead, the labours to convince men of its divinity
by certain signs, and miracles, and oracles.

CHAP. XXII.

   And we affirm indeed the existence of certain spiritual essences; nor
is their name unfamiliar. The philosophers acknowledge there are demons;
Socrates himself waiting on a demon's will. Why not? since it is said an
evil spirit attached itself specially to him even from his childhood--
turning his mind no doubt from what was good. The poets are all acquainted
with demons too; even the ignorant common people make frequent use of them
in cursing. In fact, they call upon Satan, the demon-chief, in their
execrations, as though from some instinctive soul-knowledge of him. Plato
also admits the existence of angels. The dealers in magic, no less, come
forward as witnesses to the existence of both kinds of spirits. We are
instructed, moreover, by our sacred books how from certain angels, who fell
of their own flee-will, there sprang a more wicked demon-brood, condemned
of God along with the authors of their race, and that chief we have
referred to. It will for the present be enough, however, that some account
is given of their work. Their great business is the ruin of mankind. So,
from the very first, spiritual wickedness sought our destruction. They
inflict, accordingly, upon our bodies diseases and other grievous
calamities, while by violent assaults they hurry the soul into sudden and
extraordinary excesses. Their marvellous subtleness and tenuity give them
access to both parts of our nature. As spiritual, they can do no harm; for,
invisible and intangible, we are not cognizant of their action save by its
effects, as when some inexplicable, unseen poison in the breeze blights the
apples and the grain while in the flower, or kills them in the bud, or
destroys them when they have reached maturity; as though by the tainted
atmosphere in some unknown way spreading abroad its pestilential
exhalations. So, too, by an influence equally obscure, demons and angels
breathe into the soul, and rouse up its corruptions with furious passions
and vile excesses; or with cruel lusts accompanied by various errors, of
which the worst is that by which these deities are commended to the favour
of deceived and deluded human beings, that they may get their proper food
of flesh-fumes and blood when that is offered up to idol-images. What is
daintier food to the spirit of evil, than turning men's minds away from the
true God by the illusions of a false divination? And here I explain how
these illusions are managed. Every spirit is possessed of wings. This is a
common property of both angels and demons. So they are everywhere in a
single moment; the whole world is as one place to them; all that is done
over the whole extent of it, it is as easy for them to know as to report.
Their swiftness of motion is taken for divinity, because their nature is
unknown. Thus they would have themselves thought sometimes the authors of
the things which they announce; and sometimes, no doubt, the bad things are
their doing, never the good. The purposes of God, too, they took up of old
from the lips of the prophets, even as they spoke them; and they gather
them still from their works, when they hear them read aloud. Thus getting,
too, from this source some intimations of the future, they set themselves
up as rivals of the true God, while they steal His divinations. But the
skill with which their responses are shaped to meet events, your Croesi and
Pyrrhi know too well. On the other hand, it was in that way we have
explained, the Pythian was able to declare that they were cooking a
tortoise(1) with the flesh of a lamb; in a moment he had been to Lydia.
From dwelling in the air, and their nearness to the stars, and their
commerce with the clouds, they have means of knowing the preparatory
processes going on in these upper regions, and thus can give promise of the
rains which they already feel. Very kind too, no doubt, they are in regard
to the healing of diseases. For, first of all, they make you ill; then, to
get a miracle out of it, they command the application of remedies either
altogether new, or contrary to those in use, and straightway withdrawing
hurtful influence, they are supposed to have wrought a cure. What need,
then, to speak of their other artifices, or yet further of the deceptive
power which they have as spirits: of these Castor apparitions,(2) of water
carried by a sieve, and a ship drawn along by a girdle, and a beard
reddened by a touch, all done with the one object of showing that men
should believe in the deity of stones, and not seek after the only true
God?

CHAP. XXIII.

   Moreover, if sorcerers call forth ghosts, and even make what seem the
souls of the dead to appear; if they put boys to death, in order to get a
response from the oracle; if, with their juggling illusions, they make a
pretence of doing various miracles; if they put dreams into people's minds
by the power of the angels and demons whose aid they have invited, by whose
influence, too, goats and tables are made to divine,--how much more likely
is this power of evil to be zealous in doing with all its might, of its own
inclination, and for its own objects, what it does to serve the ends of
others! Or if both angels and demons do just what your gods do, where in
that case is the pre-eminence of deity, which we must surely think to be
above all in might? Will it not then be more reasonable to hold that these
spirits make themselves gods, giving as they do the very proofs which raise
your gods to godhead, than that the gods are the equals of angels and
demons? You make a distinction of places, I suppose, regarding as gods in
their temple those whose divinity you do not recognize elsewhere; counting
the madness which leads one man to leap from the sacred houses, to be
something different from that which leads another to leap from an adjoining
house; looking on one who cuts his arms and secret pans as under a
different furor from another who cuts his throat. The result of the frenzy
is the same, and the manner of instigation is one. But thus far we have
been dealing only in words: we now proceed to a proof of facts, in which we
shall show that under different names you have real identity. Let a person
be brought before your tribunals, who is plainly under demoniacal
possession. The wicked spirit, bidden to speak by a follower of Christ,(3)
will as readily make the truthful confession that he is a demon, as
elsewhere he has falsely asserted that he is a god. Or, if you will, let
there be produced one of the god-possessed, as they are supposed, who,
inhaling at the altar, conceive divinity from the fumes, who are delivered
of it by retching, who vent it forth in agonies of gasping. Let that same
Virgin Caelestis herself the rain-promiser, let Aesculapius discoverer of
medicines, ready to prolong the life of Socordius, and Tenatius, and
Asclepiodotus, now in the last extremity, if they would not confess, in
their fear of lying to a Christian, that they were demons, then and there
shed the blood of that most impudent follower of Christ. What clearer than
a work like that? what more trustworthy than such a proof? The simplicity
of truth is thus set forth; its own worth sustains it; no ground remains
for the least suspicion. Do you say that it is done by magic, or some trick
of that sort? You will not say anything of the sort, if you have been
allowed the use of your ears and eyes. For what argument can you bring
against a thing that is exhibited to the eye in its naked reality? If, on
the one hand, they are really gods, why do they pretend to be demons? Is it
from fear of us? In that case your divinity is put in subjection to
Christians; and you surely can never ascribe deity to that which is under
authority of man, nay (if it adds aught to the disgrace)of its very
enemies. If, on the other hand, they are demons or angels, why,
inconsistently with this, do they presume to set themselves forth as acting
the pan of gods? For as beings who put themselves out as gods would never
willingly call themselves demons, if they were gods indeed, that they might
not thereby in fact abdicate their dignity; so those whom you know to be no
more than demons, would not dare to act as gods, if those whose names they
take and use were really divine. For they would not dare to treat with
disrespect the higher majesty of beings, whose displeasure they would feel
was to be dreaded. So this divinity of yours is no divinity; for if it
were, it would not be pretended to by demons, and it would not be denied by
gods. But since on beth sides there is a concurrent acknowledgment that
they are not gods, gather from this that there is but a single race--I mean
the race of demons, the real race in both cases. Let your search, then, now
be after gods; for those whom you had imagined to be so you find to be
spirits of evil. The truth is, as we have thus not only shown from our own
gods that neither themselves nor any others have claims to deity, you may
see at once who is really God, and whether that is He and He alone whom we
Christians own; as also whether you are to believe in Him, and worship Him,
after the manner of our Christan faith and discipline. But at once they
will say, Who is this Christ with his fables? is he an ordinary man? is he
a sorcerer? was his body stolen by his disciples from its tomb? is he now
in the realms below? or is he not rather up in the heavens, thence about to
come again, making the whole world shake, filling the earth with dread
alarms, making all but Christians wail--as the Power of God, and the Spirit
of God, as the Word, the Reason, the Wisdom, and the Son of God? Mock as
you like, but get the demons if you can to join you in your mocking; let
them deny that Christ is coming to judge every human soul which has existed
from the world's beginning, clothing it again with the body it laid aside
at death; let them declare it, say, before your tribunal, that this work
has been allotted to Minos and Rhadamanthus, as Plato and the poets agree;
let them put away from them at least the mark of ignominy and condemnation.
They disclaim being unclean spirits, which yet we must hold as indubitably
proved by their relish for the blood and fumes and foetid carcasses of
sacrificial animals, and even by the vile language of their ministers. Let
them deny that, for their wickedness condemned already, they are kept for
that very judgment-day, with all their worshippers and their works. Why,
all the authority and power we have over them is from our naming the name
of Christ, and recalling to their memory the woes with which God threatens
them at the hands of Christ as Judge, and which they expect one day to
overtake them. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they become
subject to the servants of God and Christ. So at our touch and breathing,
overwhelmed bY the thought and realization of those judgment fires, they
leave at our command the bodies they have entered, unwilling, and
distressed, and before your very eyes put to an open shame. You believe
them when they lie; give credit to them, then, when they speak the truth
about themselves. No one plays the liar to bring disgrace upon his own
head, but for the sake of honour rather. You give a readier confidence to
people making confessions against themselves, than denials in their own
behalf. It has not been an unusual thing, accordingly, for those
testimonies of your deities to convert men to Christianity; for in giving
full belief to them, we are led to believe in Christ. Yes, your very gods
kindle up faith in our Scriptures, they build up the confidence of our
hope. You do homage, as I know, to them also with the blood of Christians.
On no account, then, would they lose those who are so useful and dutiful to
them, anxious even to hold you fast, lest some day or other as Christians
you might put them to the rout,--if under the power of a follower of
Christ, who desires to prove to you the Truth, it were at all possible for
them to lie.

CHAP. XXIV.

   This whole confession of these beings, in which they declare that they
are not gods, and in which they tell you that there is no God but one, the
God whom we adore, is quite sufficient to clear us from the crime of
treason, chiefly against the Roman religion. For if it is certain the gods
have no existence, there is no religion in the case. If there is no
religion, because there are no gods, we are assuredly not guilty of any
offence against religion. Instead of that, the charge recoils on your own
head: worshipping a lie, you are really guilty of the crime you charge on
us, not merely by refusing the true religion of the true God, but by going
the further length of persecuting it. But now, granting that these objects
of your worship are really gods, is it not generally held that there is one
higher and more potent, as it were the world's chief ruler, endowed with
absolute power and majesty? For the common way is to apportion deity,
giving an imperial and supreme domination to one, while its offices are put
into the hands of many, as Plato describes great Jupiter in the heavens,
surrounded by an array at once of deities and demons. It behooves us,
therefore, to show equal respect to the procurators, prefects, and
governors of the divine empire. And yet how great a crime does he commit,
who, with the object of gaining higher favour with the Caesar, transfers
his endeavours and his hopes to another, and does not confess that the
appellation of God as of Emperor belongs only to the Supreme Head, when it
is held a capital offence among us to call, or hear called, by the highest
title any other than Caesar himself! Let one man worship God, another
Jupiter; let one lift suppliant hands to the heavens, another to the altar
of Fides; let one--if you choose to take this view of it--count in prayer
the clouds, and another the ceiling panels; let one consecrate his own life
to his God, and another that of a goat. For see that you do not give a
further ground for the charge of irreligion, by taking away religious
liberty,(1) and forbidding free choice of deity, so that I may no longer
worship according to my inclination, but am compelled to worship against
it. Not even a human being would care to have unwilling homage rendered
him; and so the very Egyptians have been permitted the legal use of their
ridiculous superstition, liberty to make gods of birds and beasts, nay, to
condemn to death any One who kills a god of their sort. Every province
even, and every city, has its god. Syria has Astarte, Arabia has Dusares,
the Norici have Belenus, Africa has its Caelestis, Mauritania has its own
princes. I have spoken, I think, of Roman provinces, and yet I have not
said their gods are Roman; for they are not worshipped at Rome any more
than others who are ranked as deities over Italy itself by municipal
consecration, such as Delventinus of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia,
Ancharia of Asculum, Nortia of Volsinii, Valentia of Ocriculum, Hostia of
Satrium, Father Curls of Falisci, in honour of whom, too, Juno got her
surname. In, fact, we alone are prevented having a religion of our own. We
give offence to the Romans, we are excluded from the rights and privileges
of Romans, because we do not worship the gods of Rome. It is well that
there is a God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or no. But with
you liberty is given to worship any god but the true God, as though He were
not rather the God all should worship, to whom all belong.

CHAP. XXV.

   I think I have offered sufficient proof upon the question of false and
true divinity, having shown that the proof rests not merely on debate and
argument, but on the witness of the very beings whom you believe are gods,
so that the point needs no further handling. However, having been led thus
naturally to speak of the Romans, I shall not avoid the controversy which
is invited by the groundless assertion of those who maintain that, as a
reward of their singular homage to religion, the Romans have been raised to
such heights of power as to have become masters of the world; and that so
certainly divine are the beings they worship, that those prosper beyond all
others, who beyond all others honour them.(2) This, forsooth, is the wages
the gods have paid the Romans for their devotion. The progress of the
empire is to be ascribed to Sterculus, the Mutunus, and Larentina! For I
can hardly think that foreign gods would have been disposed to show more
favour to an alien race than to their own, and given their own fatherland,
in which they had their birth, grew up to manhood, became illustrious, and
at last were buried, over to invaders from another shore! As for Cybele, if
she set her affections on the city of Rome as sprung of the Trojan stock
saved from the arms of Greece, she herself forsooth being of the same
race,--if she foresaw her transference(3) to the avenging people by whom
Greece the conqueror of Phrygia was to be subdued, let her look to it (in
regard of her native country's conquest by Greece). Why, too, even in these
days the Mater Magna has given a notable proof of her greatness which she
has conferred as a boon upon the city; when, after the loss to the State of
Marcus Aurelius at Sirmium, on the sixteenth before the Kalends of April,
that most sacred high priest of hers was offering, a week after, impure
libations of blood drawn from his own arms, and issuing his commands that
the ordinary prayers should be made for the safety of the emperor already
dead. O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches! through whose fault Cybele
had not an earlier knowledge of the imperial decease, that the Christians
might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy. Jupiter, again,
would surely never have permitted his own Crete to fall at once before the
Roman Fasces, forgetful of that Idean cave and the Corybantian cymbals, and
the sweet odour of her who nursed him there. Would he not have exalted his
own tomb above the entire Capitol, that the land which covered the ashes of
Jove might rather be the mistress of the world? Would Juno have desired the
destruction of the Punic city, beloved even to the neglect of Samos, and
that by a nation of AEneadae? As to that I know, "Here were her arms, here
was her chariot, this kingdom, if the Fates permit, the goddess tends and
cherishes to be mistress of the nations."(1) Jove's hapless wife and sister
had no power to prevail against the Fates! "Jupiter himself is sustained by
fate." And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates, which
gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the
abandoned harlot Larentina. It is undoubted that not a few of your gods
have reigned on earth as kings. If, then, they now possess the power of
bestowing empire, when they were kings themselves, from whence had they
received their kingly honours? Whom did Jupiter and Saturn worship? A
Sterculus, I suppose. But did the Romans, along with the native-born
inhabitants, afterwards adore also some who were never kings? In that case,
however, they were under the reign of others, who did not yet bow down to
them, as not yet raised to godhead. It belongs to others, then, to make
gift of kingdoms, since there were kings before these gods had their names
on the roll of divinities. But how utterly foolish it is to attribute the
greatness of the Roman name to religious merits, since it was after Rome
became an empire, or call it still a kingdom, that the religion she
professes made its chief progress! Is it the case now? Has its religion
been the source of the prosperity of Rome? Though Numa set agoing an
eagerness after superstitious observances, yet religion among the Romans
was not yet a matter of images or temples. It was frugal in its ways, its
rites were simple, and there were no capitols struggling to the heavens;
but the altars were offhand ones of turf, and the sacred vessels were yet
of Samian earthen-ware, and from these the odours rose, and no likeness of
God was to be seen. For at that time the skill of the Greeks and Tuscans in
image-making had not yet overrun the city with the products of their art.
The Romans, therefore, were not distinguished for their devotion to the
gods before they attained to greatness; and so their greatness was not the
result of their religion. Indeed, how could religion make a people great
who have owed their greatness to their irreligion? For, if I am not
mistaken, kingdoms and empires are acquired by wars, and are extended by
victories. More than that, you cannot have wars and victories without the
taking, and often the destruction, of cities. That is a thing in which the
gods have their share of calamity. Houses and temples suffer alike; there
is indiscriminate slaughter of priests and citizens; the hand of rapine is
laid equally upon sacred and on common treasure. Thus the sacrileges of the
Romans are as numerous as their trophies. They boast as many triumphs over
the gods as over the nations; as many spoils of battle they have still, as
there remain images of captive deities. And the poor gods submit to be
adored by their enemies, and they ordain illimitable empire to those whose
injuries rather than their simulated homage should have had retribution at
their hands. But divinities unconscious are with impunity dishonoured, just
as in vain they are adored. You certainly never can believe that devotion
to religion has evidently advanced to greatness a people who, as we have
put it, have either grown by injuring religion, or have injured religion by
their growth. Those, too, whose kingdoms have become part of the one great
whole of the Roman empire, were not without religion when their kingdoms
were taken from them.

CHAP. XXVI.

   Examine then, and see if He be not the dispenser of kingdoms, who is
Lord at once of the world which is ruled, and of man himself who rules; if
He have not ordained the changes of dynasties, with their appointed
seasons, who was before all time, and made the world a body of times; if
the rise and the fall of states are not the work of Him, under whose
sovereignty the human race once existed without states at all. How do you
allow yourselves to fall into such error? Why, the Rome of rural simplicity
is older than some of her gods; she reigned before her proud, vast Capitol
was built. The Babylonians exercised dominion, too, before the days of the
Pontiffs; and the Medes before the Quindecemvirs; and the Egyptians before
the Salii; and the Assyrians before the Luperci; and the Amazons before the
Vestal Virgins. And to add another point: if the religions of Rome give
empire, ancient Judea would never have been a kingdom, despising as it did
one and all these idol deities; Judea, whose God you Romans once honoured
with victims, and its temple with gifts, and its people with treaties; and
which would never have been beneath your sceptre but for that last and
crowning offence against God, in rejecting and crucifying Christ.

CHAP. XXVII.

   Enough has been said in these remarks to confute the charge of treason
against your religion; for we cannot be held to do harm to that which has
no existence. When we are called therefore to sacrifice, we resolutely
refuse, relying on the knowledge we possess, by which we are well assured
of the real objects to whom these services are offered, under profaning of
images and the deification of human names. Some, indeed, think it a piece
of insanity that, when it is in our power to offer sacrifice at once, and
go away unharmed, holding as ever our convictions we prefer an obstinate
persistence in our confession to our safety. You advise us, forsooth, to
take unjust advantage of you; but we know whence such suggestions come, who
is at the bottom of it all, and how every effort is made, now by cunning
suasion, and now by merciless persecution, to overthrow our constancy. No
other than that spirit, half devil and half angel, who, hating us because
of his own separation from God, and stirred with envy for the favour God
has shown us, turns your minds against us by an occult influence, moulding
and instigating them to all that perversity in judgment, and that
unrighteous cruelty, which we have mentioned at the beginning of our work,
when entering on this discussion. For, though the whole power of demons and
kindred spirits is subject to us, yet still, as ill-disposed slaves
sometimes conjoin contumacy with fear, and delight to injure those of whom
they at the same time stand in awe, so is it here. For fear also inspires
hatred. Besides, in their desperate condition, as already under
condemnation, it gives them some comfort, while punishment delays, to have
the usufruct of their malignant dispositions. And yet, when hands are laid
on them, they are subdued at once, and submit to their lot; and those whom
at a distance they oppose, in close quarters they supplicate for mercy. So
when, like insurrectionary workhouses, or prisons, or mines, or any such
penal slaveries, they break forth against us their masters, they know all
the while that they are not a match for us, and just on that account,
indeed, rush the more recklessly to destruction. We resist them,
unwillingly, as though they were equals, and contend against them by
persevering in that which they assail; and our triumph over them is never
more complete than when we are condemned for resolute adherence to our
faith.

CHAP. XXVIII.

   But as it was easily seen to be unjust to compel freemen against their
will to offer sacrifice (for even in other acts of religious service a
willing mind is required), it should be counted quite absurd for one man to
compel another to do honour to the gods, when he ought ever voluntarily,
and in the sense of his own need, to seek their favour, lest in the liberty
which is his right he should be ready to say, "I want none of Jupiter's
favours; pray who art thou? Let Janus meet me with angry looks, with
whichever of his faces he likes; what have you to do with me?" You have
been led, no doubt, by these same evil spirits to compel us to offer
sacrifice for the well-being of the emperor; and you are under a necessity
of using force, just as we are under an obligation to face the dangers of
it. This brings us, then, to the second ground of accusation, that we are
guilty of treason against a majesty more august; for you do homage with a
greater dread and an intenser reverence to Caesar, than Olympian Jove
himself. And if you knew it, upon sufficient grounds. For is not any living
man better than a dead one, whoever he be? But this is not done by you on
any other ground than regard to a power whose presence you vividly realize;
so that also in this you are convicted of impiety to your gods, inasmuch as
you show a greater reverence to a human sovereignty than you do to them.
Then, too, among you, people far more readily swear a false oath in the
name of all the gods, than in the name of the single genius of Caesar.

CHAP. XXIX.

   Let it be made clear, then, first of all, if those to whom sacrifice is
offered are really able to protect either emperor or anybody else, and so
adjudge us guilty of treason, if angels and demons, spirits of most wicked
nature, do any good, if the lost save, if the condemned give liberty, if
the dead (I refer to what you know well enough) defend the living. For
surely the first thing they would look to would be the protection of their
statues, and images, and temples, which rather owe their safety, I think,
to the watch kept by Caesar's guards. Nay, I think the very materials of
which these are made come from Caesar's mines, and there is not a temple
but depends on Caesar's will. Yes, and many gods have felt the displeasure
of the Caesar. It makes for my argument if they are also partakers of his
favour, when he bestows on them some gift or privilege. How shall they who
are thus in Caesar's power, who belong entirely to him, have Caesar's
protection in their hands, so that you can imagine them able to give to
Caesar what they more readily get from him? This, then, is the ground on
which we are charged with treason against the imperial majesty, to wit,
that we do not put the emperors under their own possessions; that we do not
offer a mere mock service on their behalf, as not believing their safety
rests in leaden hands. But you are impious in a high degree who look for it
where it is not, who seek it from those who have it not to give, passing by
Him who has it entirely in His power. Besides this, you persecute those who
know where to seek for it, and who, knowing where to seek for it, are able
as well to secure it.

CHAP. XXX.

   For we offer prayer for the safety of our princes to the eternal, the
true, the living God, whose favour, beyond all others, they must themselves
desire. They know from whom they have obtained their power; they know, as
they are men, from whom they have received life itself; they are convinced
that He is God alone, on whose power alone they are entirely dependent, to
whom they are second, after whom they occupy the highest places, before and
above all the gods. Why not, since they are above all living men, and the
living, as living, are superior to the dead? They reflect upon the extent
of their power, and so they come to understand the highest; they
acknowledge that they have all their might from Him against whom their
might is nought. Let the emperor make war on heaven; let him lead heaven
captive in his triumph; let him put guards on heaven; let him impose taxes
on heaven! He cannot. Just because he is less than heaven, he is great. For
he himself is His to whom heaven and every creature appertains. He gets his
sceptre where he first got his humanity; his power where he got the breath
of life. Thither we lift our eyes, with hands outstretched, because free
from sin; with head uncovered, for we have nothing whereof to be ashamed;
finally, without a monitor, because it is from the heart we supplicate.
Without ceasing, for all our emperors we offer prayer. We pray for life
prolonged; for security to the empire; for protection to the imperial
house; for brave armies, a faithful senate, a virtuous people, the world at
rest, whatever, as man or Caesar, an emperor would wish. These things I
cannot ask from any but the God from whom I know I shall obtain them, both
because He alone bestows them and because I have claims upon Him for their
gift, as being a servant of His, rendering homage to Him alone, persecuted
for His doctrine, offering to Him, at His own requirement, that costly and
noble sacrifice of prayer(1) despatched from the chaste body, an unstained
soul, a sanctified spirit, not the few grains of incense a farthing
buys(2)--tears of an Arabian tree,--not a few drops of wine,--not the blood
of some worthless ox to which death is a relief, and, in addition to other
offensive things, a polluted conscience, so that one wonders, when your
victims are examined by these vile priests, why the examination is not
rather of the sacrificers than the sacrifices. With our hands thus
stretched out and up to God, rend us with your iron claws, hang us up on
crosses, wrap us in flames, take our heads from us with the sword, let
loose the wild beasts on us,--the very attitude of a Christian praying is
one of preparation for all punishment.(3) Let this, good rulers, be your
work: wring from us the soul, beseeching God on the emperor's behalf. Upon
the truth of God, and devotion to His name, put the brand of crime.

CHAP. XXXI.

   But we merely, you say, flatter the emperor, and feign these prayers of
ours to escape persecution. Thank you for your mistake, for you give us the
opportunity of proving our allegations. Do you, then, who think that we
care nothing for the welfare of Caesar, look into God's revelations,
examine our sacred books, which we do not keep in hiding, and which many
accidents put into the hands of those who are not of us. Learn from them
that a large benevolence is enjoined upon us, even so far as to supplicate
God for our enemies, and to beseech blessings on our persecutors.(4) Who,
then, are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians, than the very
parties with treason against whom we are charged? Nay, even in terms, and
most clearly, the Scripture says, "Pray for kings, and rulers, and powers,
that all may be peace with you."(5) For when there is disturbance in the
empire, if the commotion is felt by its other members, surely we too,
though we are not thought to be given to disorder, are to be found in some
place or other which the calamity affects.

CHAP. XXXII.

   There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer
in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of the empire,
and for Roman interests in general. For we know that a mighty shock
impending over the whole earth--in fact, the very end of all things
threatening dreadful woes---is only retarded by the continued existence of
the Roman empire.(1) We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire
events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our
aid to Rome's duration. More than this, though we decline to swear by the
genii of the Caesars, we swear by their safety, which is worth far more
than all your genii, Are you ignorant that these genii are called
"Daemones," and thence the diminutive name "Daemonia" is applied to them?
We respect in the emperors the ordinance of God, who has set them over the
nations. We know that there is that in them which God has willed; and to
what God has willed we desire all safety, and we count an oath by it a
great oath. But as for demons, that is, your genii, we have been in the
habit of exorcising them, not of swearing by them, and thereby conferring
on them divine honour.

CHAP. XXXIII.

   But why dwell longer on the reverence and sacred respect of Christians
to the emperor, whom we cannot but look up to as called by our Lord to his
office? So that on valid grounds I might say Caesar is more ours than
yours, for our God has appointed him. Therefore, as having this propriety
in him, I do more than you for his welfare, not merely because I ask it of
Him who can give it, or because I ask it as one who deserves to get it, but
also because, in keeping the majesty of Caesar within due limits, and
putting it under the Most High, and making it less than divine, I commend
him the more to the favour of Deity, to whom I make him alone inferior. But
I place him in subjection to one I regard as more glorious than himself.
Never will I call the emperor God, and that either because it is not in me
to be guilty of falsehood; or that I dare not turn him into ridicule; or
that not even himself will desire to have that high name applied to him. If
he is but a man, it is his interest as man to give God His higher place.
Let him think it enough to bear the name of emperor. That, too, is a great
name of God's giving. To call him God, is to rob him of his title. If he is
not a man, emperor he cannot be. Even when, amid the honours t of a
triumph, he sits on that lofty chariot, he a is reminded that he is only
human. A voice t at his back keeps whispering in his ear, n "Look behind
thee; remember thou art but u a man." And it only adds to his exultation,
that he shines with a glory so surpassing as to require an admonitory
reference to his condition.(2) It adds to his greatness that he needs such
a reminiscence, lest he should think himself divine.

CHAP. XXXIV.

   Augustus, the founder of the empire, would not even have the title
Lord; for that, too, is a name of Deity. For my part, I am willing to give
the emperor this designation, but in the common acceptation of the word,
and when I am not forced to call him Lord as in God's place. But my
relation to him is one of freedom; for I have but one true Lord, the God
omnipotent and eternal, who is Lord of the emperor as well. How can he, who
is truly father of his country, be its lord? The name of piety is more
grateful than the name of power; so the heads of families are called
fathers rather than lords. Far less should the emperor have the name of
God. We can only profess our belief that he is that by the most unworthy,
nay, a fatal flattery; it is just as if, having an emperor, you call
another by the name, in which case will you not give great and unappeasable
offence to him who actually reigns?--an offence he, too, needs to fear on
whom you have bestowed the title. Give all reverence to God, if you wish
Him to be propitious to the emperor. Give up all worship of, and belief in,
any other being as divine. Cease also to give the sacred name to him who
has need of God himself. If such adulation is not ashamed of its lie, in
addressing a man as divine, let it have some dread at least of the evil
omen which it bears. It is the invocation of a curse, to give Caesar the
name of god before his apotheosis.

CHAP. XXXV.

   This is the reason, then, why Christians are counted public enemies:
that they pay no vain, nor false, nor foolish honours to the emperor; that,
as men believing in the true religion, they prefer to celebrate their
festal days with a good conscience, instead of with the common wantonness.
It is, forsooth, a notable homage to bring fires and couches out before the
public, to have feasting from street to street, to turn the city into one
great tavern, to make mud with wine, to run in troops to acts of violence,
to deeds of shamelessness to lust allurements! What! is public joy
manifested by public disgrace? Do things unseemly at other times beseem the
festal days of princes? Do they who observe the rules of virtue out of
reverence for Caesar, for his sake turn aside from them? Shall piety be a
license to immoral deeds, and shall religion be regarded as affording the
occasion for all riotous extravagance? Poor we, worthy of all condemnation!
For why do we keep the votive days and high rejoicings in honour of the
Caesars with chastity, sobriety, and virtue? Why, on the day of gladness,
do we neither cover our door-posts with laurels, nor intrude upon the day
with lamps? It is a proper thing, at the call of a public festivity, to
dress your house up like some new brothel.(1) However, in the matter of
this homage to a lesser majesty, in reference to which we are accused of a
lower sacrilege, because we do not celebrate along with you the holidays of
the Caesars in a manner forbidden alike by modesty, decency, and purity,--
in truth they have been established rather as affording opportunities for
licentiousness than from any worthy motive;--in this matter I am anxious to
point out how faithful and true you are, lest perchance here also those who
will not have us counted Romans, but enemies of Rome's chief rulers, be
found themselves worse than we wicked Christians! I appeal to the
inhabitants of Rome themselves, to the native population of the seven
hills: does that Roman vernacular of theirs ever spare a Caesar? The Tiber
and the wild beasts' schools bear witness. Say now if nature had covered
our hearts with a transparent substance through which the light could pass,
whose hearts, all graven over, would not betray the scene of another and
another Caesar presiding at the distribution of a largess? And this at the
very time they are shouting, "May Jupiter take years from us, and with them
lengthen like to you,"--words as foreign to the lips of a Christian as it
is out of keeping with his character to desire a change of emperor. But
this is the rabble, you say; yet, as the rabble, they still are Romans, and
none more frequently than they demand the death of Christians.(2) Of
course, then, the other classes, as befits their higher rank, are
religiously faithful. No breath of treason is there ever in the senate, in
the equestrian order, in the camp, in the palace. Whence, then, came a
Cassius, a Niger, an Albinus? Whence they who beset the Caesar(3) between
the two laurel groves? Whence they who practised wrestling, that they might
acquire skill to strangle him? Whence they who in full armour broke into
the palace,(4) more audacious than all your Tigerii and Parthenii.(5) If I
mistake not, they were Romans; that is, they were not Christians. Yet all
of them, on the very eve of their traitorous outbreak, offered sacrifices
for the safety of the emperor, and swore by his genius, one thing in
profession, and another in the heart; and no doubt they were in the habit
of calling Christians enemies of the state. Yes, and persons who are now
daily brought to light as confederates or approvers of these crimes and
treasons, the still remnant gleanings after a vintage of traitors, with
what verdant and branching laurels they clad their door-posts, with what
lofty and brilliant lamps they smoked their porches, with what most
exquisite and gaudy couches they divided the Forum among themselves; not
that they might celebrate public rejoicings, but that they might get a
foretaste of their own votive seasons in partaking of the festivities of
another, and inaugurate the model and image of their hope, changing in
their minds the emperor's name. The same homage is paid, dutifully too, by
those who consult astrologers, and soothsayers, and augurs, and magicians,
about the life of the Caesars,--arts which, as made known by the angels who
sinned, and forbidden by God, Christians do not even make use of in their
own affairs. But who has any occasion to inquire about the life of the
emperor, if he have not some wish or thought against it, or some hopes and
expectations after it? For consultations of this sort have not the same
motive in the case of friends as in the case of sovereigns. The anxiety of
a kinsman is something very different from that of a subject.

CHAP. XXXVI.

   If it is the fact that men bearing the name of Romans are found to be
enemies of Rome, why are we, on the ground that we are regarded as enemies,
denied the name of Romans? We may be at once Romans and foes of Rome, when
men passing for Romans are discovered to be enemies of their country. So
the affection, and fealty, and reverence, due to the emperors do not
consist in such tokens of homage as these, which even hostility may be
zealous in performing, chiefly as a cloak to its purposes; but in those
ways which Deity as cerainly enjoins on us, as they are held to be
necessary in the case of all men as well as emperors. Deeds of true heart-
goodness are not due by us to emperors alone. We never do good with respect
of persons; for in our own interest we conduct ourselves as those who take
no payment either of praise or premium from man, but from God, who both
requires and remunerates an impartial benevolence.(1) We are the same to
emperors as to our ordinary neighbors. For we are equally forbidden to wish
ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of all men. The thing we must
not do to an emperor, we must not do to any one else: what we would not do
tO anybody, a fortiori, perhaps we should not do to him whom God has been
pleased so highly to exalt.

CHAP. XXXVII.

   If we are enjoined, then, to love our enemies, as I have remarked
above, whom have we to hate? If injured, we are forbidden to retaliate,
lest we become as bad ourselves: who can suffer injury at our hands? In
regard to this, recall your own experiences. How often you inflict gross
cruelties on Christians, partly because it is your own inclination, and
partly in obedience to the laws! How often, too, the hostile mob, paying no
regard to you, takes the law into its own hand, and assails us with stones
and flames! With the very frenzy of the Bacchanals, they do not even spare
the Christian dead, but tear them, now sadly changed, no longer entire,
from the rest of the tomb, from the asylum we might say of death, cutting
them in pieces, rending them asunder. Yet, banded together as we are, ever
so ready to sacrifice our lives, what single case of revenge for injury are
you able to point to, though, if it were held right among us to repay evil
by evil, a single night with a torch or two could achieve an ample
vengeance? But away with the idea of a sect divine avenging itself by human
fires, or shrinking from the sufferings in which it is tried. If we
desired, indeed, to act the part of open enemies, not merely of secret
avengers, would there be any lacking in strength, whether of numbers or
resources? The Moors, the Marcomanni, the Parthians themselves, or any
single people, however great, inhabiting a distinct territory, and confined
within its own boundaries, surpasses, forsooth, in numbers, one spread over
all the world! We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place
among you--cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market-places, the very
camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum,--we have left nothing to
you but the temples of your gods. For what wars should we not be fit, not
eager, even with unequal forces, we who so willingly yield ourselves to the
sword, if in our religion it were not counted better to be slain than to
slay? Without arms even, and raising no insurrectionary banner, but simply
in enmity to you, we could carry on the contest with you by an ill-willed
severance alone. For if such multitudes of men were to break away from you,
and betake themselves to some remote corner of the world, why, the very
loss of so many citizens, whatever sort they were, would cover the empire
with shame; nay, in the very forsaking, vengeance would be inflicted. Why,
you would be horror-struck at the solitude in which you would find
yourselves, at such an all-prevailing silence, and that stupor as of a dead
world. You would have to seek subjects to govern. You would have more
enemies than citizens remaining. For now it is the immense number of
Christians which makes your enemies so few,--almost all the inhabitants of
your various cities being followers of Christ.(2) Yet you choose to call us
enemies of the human race, rather than of human error. Nay, who would
deliver you from those secret foes, ever busy both destroying your souls
and ruining your health? Who would save you, I mean, from the attacks of
those spirits of evil, which without reward or hire we exorcise? This alone
would be revenge enough for us, that you were henceforth left free to the
possession of unclean spirits. But instead of taking into account what is
due to us for the important protection we afford you, and though we are not
merely no trouble to you, but in fact necessary to your well-being, you
prefer to hold us enemies, as indeed we are, yet not of man, but rather of
his error.

CHAP. XXXVIII.

   Ought not Christians, therefore, to receive not merely a somewhat
milder treatment, but to have a place among the law-tolerated societies,
seeing they are not chargeable with any such crimes as are commonly dreaded
from societies of the illicit class? For, unless I mistake the matter, the
prevention of such associations is based on a prudential regard to public
order, that the state may not be divided into parties, which would
naturally lead to disturbance in the electoral assemblies, the councils,
the curiae, the special conventions, even in the public shows by the
hostile collisions of rival parties; especially when now, in pursuit of
gain, men have begun to consider their violence an article to be bought and
sold. But as those in whom all ardour in the pursuit of glory and honour is
dead, we have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings;
nor is there aught more entirely foreign to us than affairs of state. We
acknowledge one all-embracing commonwealth--the world. We renounce all your
spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which
we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things
which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever
said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of
the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the
useless exercises of the wrestling-ground. Why do you take offence at us
because we differ from you in regard to your pleasures? If we will not
partake of your enjoyments, the loss is ours, if there be loss in the case,
not yours. We reject what pleases you. You, on the other hand, have no
taste for what is our delight. The Epicureans were allowed by you to decide
for themselves one true source of pleasure--I mean equanimity the
Christian, on his part, has many such enjoyments--what harm in that?

CHAP. XXXIX.

   I shall at once go on, then, to exhibit the peculiarities of the
Christian society, that, as I have refuted the evil charged against it, I
may point out its positive good.(1) We are a body knit together as such by
a common religious profession, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of a
common hope. We meet together as an assembly and congregation, that,
offering up prayer to God as with united force, we may wrestle with Him in
our supplications. This violence God delights in. We pray, too, for the
emperors, for their ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of
the world, for the prevalence of peace, for the delay of the final
consummation.(2) We assemble to read our sacred writings, if any
peculiarity of the times makes either forewarning or reminiscence
needful.(3) However it be in that respect, with the sacred words we nourish
our faith, we animate our hope, we make our confidence more stedfast; and
no less by inculcations of God's precepts we confirm good habits. In the
same place also exhortations are made, rebukes and sacred censures are
administered. For with a great gravity is the work of judging carried on
among us, as befits those who feel assured that they are in the sight of
God; and you have the most notable example of judgment to come when any one
has sinned so grievously as to require his severance from us in prayer, in
the congregation and in all sacred intercourse. The tried men of our elders
preside over us, obtaining that honour not by purchase, but by established
character. There is no buying and selling of any sort in the things of God.
Though we have our treasure-chest, it is not made up of purchase-money, as
of a religion that has its price. On the monthly day,(4) if he likes, each
puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be
able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary. These gifts are, as it
were, piety's deposit fund. For they are not taken thence and spent on
feasts, and drinking-bouts, and eating-houses, but to support and bury poor
people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and
parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have
suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished
to the islands, or shut up in the prisons, for nothing but their fidelity
to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of their
confession. But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to
put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one(5) another, for
themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die
for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death. And they are
wroth with us, too, because we call each other brethren; for no other
reason, as I think, than because among themselves names of consanguinity
are assumed in mere pretence of affection. But we are your brethren as
well, by the law of I our common mother nature, though you are hardly men,
because brothers so unkind. At the same time, how much more fittingly they
are called and counted brothers who have been led to the knowledge of God
as their common Father, who have drunk in one spirit of holiness, who from
the same womb of a common ignorance have agonized into the same light of
truth! But on this very account, perhaps, we are regarded as having less
claim to be held true brothers, that no tragedy makes a noise about our
brotherhood, or that the family possessions, which generally destroy
brotherhood among you, create fraternal bonds among us. One in mind and
soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All
things are common among us but our wives. We give up our community where it
is practised alone by others, who not only take possession of the wives of
their friends, but most tolerantly also accommodate their friends with
theirs, following the example, I believe, of those wise men of ancient
times, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends
the wives whom they had married, it seems for the sake of progeny both to
themselves and to others; whether in this acting against their partners'
wishes, I am not able to say. Why should they have any care over their
chastity, when their husbands so readily bestowed it away? O noble example
of Attic wisdom, of Roman gravity--the philosopher and the censor playing
pimps! What wonder if that great love of Christians towards one another is
desecrated by you! For you abuse also our humble feasts, on the ground that
they are extravagant as well as infamously wicked. To us, it seems, applies
the saying of Diogenes: "The people of Megara feast as though they were
going to die on the morrow; they build as though they were never to die!"
But one sees more readily the mote in another's eye than the beam in his
own. Why, the very air is soured with the eructations of so many tribes,
and curioe, and decurioe. The Salii cannot have their feast without going
into debt; you must get the accountants to tell you what the tenths of
Hercules and the sacrificial banquets cost; the choicest cook is appointed
for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries; the smoke from the
banquet of Serapis will call out the firemen. Yet about the modest supper-
room of the Christians alone a great ado is made. Our feast explains itself
by its name The Greeks call it agape, i.e., affection. Whatever it costs,
our outlay in the name of piety is gain, since with the good things of the
feast we benefit the needy; not as it is with you, do parasites aspire to
the glory of satisfying their licentious propensities, selling themselves
for a belly-feast to all disgraceful treatment,--but as it is with God
himself, a peculiar respect is shown to the lowly. If the object of our
feast be good, in the light of that consider its further regulations. As it
is an act of religious service, it permits no vileness or immodesty. The
participants, before reclining, taste first of prayer to God. As much is
eaten as satisfies the cravings of hunger; as much is drunk as befits the
chaste. They say it is enough, as those who remember that even during the
night they have to worship God; they talk as those who know that the Lord
is one of their auditors. After manual ablution, and the bringing in of
lights, each(1) is asked to stand forth and sing, as he can, a hymn to God,
either one from the holy Scriptures or one of his own composing,--a proof
of the measure of our drinking. As the feast commenced with prayer, so with
prayer it is closed. We go from it, not like troops of mischief-doers, nor
bands of vagabonds, nor to break out into licentious acts, but to have as
much care of our modesty and chastity as if we had been at a school of
virtue rather than a banquet. Give the congregation of the Christians its
due, and hold it unlawful, if it is like assemblies of the illicit sort: by
all means let it be condemned, if any complaint can be validly laid against
it, such as lies against secret factions. But who has ever suffered harm
from our assemblies? We are in our congregations just what we are when
separated from each other; we are as a community what we are individuals;
we injure nobody, we trouble nobody. When the upright, when the virtuous
meet together, when the pious, when the pure assemble in congregation, you
ought not to call that a faction, but a curia--[i.e., the court of God.]

CHAP. XL.

   On the contrary, they deserve the name of faction who conspire to bring
odium on good men and virtuous, who cry out against innocent blood,
offering as the justification of their enmity the baseless plea, that they
think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every
affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as
the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if
the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or
pestilence, straightway the cry(2) is, "Away with the Christians to the
lion!" What! shall you give such multitudes to a single beast? Pray, tell
me how many calamities befell the world and particular cities before
Tiberius reigned--before the coming, that is, of Christ? We read of the
islands of Hiera, and Anaphe, and Delos, and Rhodes, and Cos, with many
thousands of human beings, having been swallowed up. Plato informs us that
a region larger than Asia or Africa was seized by the Atlantic Ocean. An
earthquake, too, drank up the Corinthian sea; and the force of the waves
cut off a part of Lucania, whence it obtained the name of Sicily. These
things surely could not have taken place without the inhabitants suffering
by them. But where--I do not say were Christians, those despisers of your
gods--but where were your gods themselves in those days, when the flood
poured its destroying waters over all the world, or, as Plato thought,
merely the level portion of it? For that they are of later date than that
calamity, the very cities in which they were born and died, nay, which they
founed, bear ample testimony; for the cities could have no existence at
this day unless as belonging to postdiluvian times. Palestine had not yet
received from Egypt its Jewish swarm (of emigrants), nor had the race from
which Christians sprung yet settled down there, when its neighbors Sodom
and Gomorrah were consumed by fire from heaven. The country yet smells of
that conflagration; and if there are apples there upon the trees, it is
only a promise to the eye they give--you but touch them, and they turn to
ashes. Nor had Tuscia and Campania to complain of Christians in the days
when fire from heaven overwhelmed Vulsinii, and Pompeii was destroyed by
fire from its own mountain. No one yet worshipped the true God at Rome,
when Hannibal at Cannae counted the Roman slain by the pecks of Roman
rings. Your gods were all objects of adoration, universally acknowledged,
when the Senones closely besieged the very Capitol. And it is in keeping
with all this, that if adversity has at any time befallen cities, the
temples and the walls have equally shared in the disaster, so that it is
clear to demonstration the thing was not the doing of the gods, seeing it
also overtook themselves. The truth is, the human race has always deserved
ill at God's hand. First of all, as undutiful to Him, because when it knew
Him in part, it not only did not seek after Him, but even invented other
gods of its own to worship; and further, because, as the result of their
willing ignorance of the Teacher of righteousness, the Judge and Avenger of
sin, all vices and crimes grew and flourished. But had men sought, they
would have come to know the glorious object of their seeking; and knowledge
would have produced obedience, and obedience would have found a gracious
instead of an angry God. They ought then to see that the very same God is
angry with them now as in ancient times, before Christians were so much as
spoken of. It was His blessings they enjoyed--created before they made any
of their deities: and why can they not take it in, that their evils come
from the Being whose goodness they have failed to recognize? They suffer at
the hands of Him to whom they have been ungrateful. And, for all that is
said, if we compare the calamities of former times, they fall on us more
lightly now, since God gave Christians to the world; for from that time
virtue put some restraint on the world's wickedness, and men began to pray
for the averting of God's wrath. In a word, when the summer clouds give no
rain, and the season is matter of anxiety, you indeed--full of feasting day
by day, and ever eager for the banquet, baths and taverns and brothels
always busy--offer up to Jupiter your rain-sacrifices; you enjoin on the
people barefoot processions; you seek heaven at the Capitol; you look up to
the temple-ceilings for the longed-for clouds--God and heaven not in all
your thoughts. We, dried up with fastings, and our passions bound tightly
up, holding back as long as possible from all the ordinary enjoyments of
life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, assail heaven with our importunities-
-touch God's heart--and when we have extorted divine compassion, why,
Jupiter gets all the honour!

CHAP. XLI.

   You, therefore, are the sources of trouble in human affairs; on you
lies the blame of public adversities, since you are ever attracting them--
you by whom God is despised and images are worshipped. It should surely
seem the more natural thing to believe that it is the neglected One who is
angry, and not they to whom all homage is paid; or most unjustly they act,
if, on account of the Christians, they send trouble on their own devotees,
whom they are bound to keep clear of the punishments of Christians. But
this, you say, hits your God as well, since He permits His worshippers to
suffer on account of those who dishonour Him. But admit first of all His
providential arrangings, and you will not make this retort. For He who once
for all appointed an eternal judgment at the world's close, does not
precipitate the separation, which is essential to judgment, before the end.
Meanwhile He deals with all sorts of men alike, so that all together share
His favours and reproofs. His will is, that outcasts and elect should have
adversities and prosperities in common, that we should have all the same
experience of His goodness and severity. Having learned these things from
His own lips, we love His goodness, we fear His wrath, while both by you
are treated with contempt; and hence the sufferings of life, so far as it
is our lot to be overtaken by them, are in our case gracious admonitions,
while in yours they are divine punishments. We indeed are not the least put
about: for, first, only one thing in this life greatly concerns us, and
that is, to get quickly out of it; and next, if any adversity befalls us,
it is laid to the door of your transgressions. Nay, though we are likewise
involved in troubles because of our close connection with you, we are
rather glad of it, because we recognize in it divine foretellings, which,
in fact, go to confirm the confidence and faith of our hope. But if all the
evils you endure are inflicted on you by the gods you worship out of spite
to us, why do you continue to pay homage to beings so ungrateful, and
unjust; who, instead of being angry with you, should rather have been
aiding and abetting you by persecuting Christians--keeping you clear of
their sufferings?

CHAP. XLII.

   But we are called to account as harm-doers on another(1) ground, and
are accused of being useless in the affairs of life. How in all the world
can that be the case with people who are living among you, eating the same
food wearing the same attire, having the same habits, under the same
necessities of existence? We are not Indian Brahmins or Gymnosophists, who
dwell in woods and exile themselves from ordinary human life. We do not
forget the debt of gratitude we owe to God, our Lord and Creator; we reject
no creature of His hands, though certainly we exercise restraint upon
ourselves, lest of any gift of His we make an immoderate or sinful use. So
we sojourn with you in the world, abjuring neither forum, nor shambles, nor
bath, nor booth, nor workshop, nor inn, nor weekly market, nor any other
places of commerce. We sail with you, and fight with you,(2) and till the
ground with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings-
-even in the various arts we make public property of our works for your
benefit. How it is we seem useless in your ordinary business, living with
you and by you as we do, I am not able to understand. But if I do not
frequent your religious ceremonies, I am still on the sacred day a man. I
do not at the Saturnalia bathe myself at dawn, that I may not lose both day
and night; yet I bathe at a decent and healthful hour, which preserves me
both in heat and blood. I can be rigid and pallid like you after ablution
when I am dead. I do not recline in public at the feast of Bacchus, after
the manner of the beast-fighters at their final banquet. Yet of your
resources I partake, wherever I may chance to eat. I do not buy a crown for
my head. What matters it to you how I use them, if nevertheless the flowers
are purchased? I think it more agreeable to have them free and loose,
waving all about. Even if they are woven into a crown, we smell the crown
with our nostrils: let those look to it who scent the perfume with their
hair. We do not go to your spectacles; yet the articles that are sold
there, if I need them, I will obtain more readily at their proper places.
We certainly buy no frankincense. If the Arabias complain of this, let the
Sabaeans be well assured that their more precious and costly merchandise is
expended as largely in the burying of Christians(3) as in the fumigating of
the gods. At any rate, you say, the temple revenues are every day falling
off:(4) how few now throw in a contribution! In truth, we are not able to
give alms both to your human and your heavenly mendicants; nor do we think
that we are required to give any but to those who ask for it. Let Jupiter
then hold out his hand and get, for our compassion spends more in the
streets than yours does in the temples. But your other taxes will
acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Christians; for in the faithfulness
which keeps us from fraud upon a brother, we make conscience of paying all
their dues: so that, by ascertaining how much is lost by fraud and
falsehood in the census declarations--the calculation may easily be made--
it would be seen that the ground of complaint in one department of revenue
is compensated by the advantage which others derive.

CHAP. XLIII.

   I will confess, however, without hesitation, that there are some who in
a sense may complain of Christians that they are a sterile race: as, for
instance, pimps, and panders, and bath-suppliers; assassins, and poisoners,
and sorcerers; soothsayers, too, diviners, and astrologers. But it is a
noble fruit of Christians, that they have no fruits for such as these. And
yet, whatever loss your interests suffer from the religion we profess, the
protection you have from us makes amply up for it. What value do you set on
persons, I do not here urge who deliver you from demons, I do not urge who
for your sakes present prayers before the throne of the true God, for
perhaps you have no belief in that--but from whom you can have nothing to
fear?

CHAP. XLIV.

   Yes, and no one considers what the loss is to the common weal,--a loss
as great as it is real, no one estimates the injury entailed upon the
state, when, men of virtue as we are, we are put to death in such numbers;
when so many of the truly good suffer the last penalty. And here we call
your own acts to witness, you who are daily presiding at the trials of
prisoners, and passing sentence upon crimes. Well, in your long lists of
those accased of many and various atrocities, has any assassin, any
cutpurse, any man guilty of sacrilege, or seduction, or stealing bathers'
clothes, his name entered as being a Christian too? Or when Christians are
brought before you on the mere ground of their name, is there ever found
among them an ill-doer of the sort? It is always with your folk the prison
is steaming, the mines are sighing, the wild beasts are fed: it is from you
the exhibitors of gladiatorial shows always get their herds of criminals to
feed up for the occasion. You find no Christian there, except simply as
being such; or if one is there as something else, a Christian he is no
longer.(1)

CHAP. XLV.

   We, then, alone are without crime. Is there ought wonderful in that, if
it be a very necessity with us? For a necessity indeed it is. Taught of God
himself what goodness is, we have both a perfect knowledge of it as
revealed to us by a perfect Master; and faithfully we do His will, as
enjoined on us by a Judge we dare not despise. But your ideas of virtue you
have got from mere human opinion; on human authority, too, its obligation
rests: hence your system of practical morality is deficient, both in the
fulness and authority requisite to produce a life of real virtue. Man's
wisdom to point out what is good, is no greater than his authority to exact
the keeping of it; the one is as easily deceived as the other is despised.
And so, which is the ampler rule, to say, "Thou shalt not kill," or to
teach, "Be not even angry?" Which is more perfect, to forbid adultery, or
to restrain from even a single lustful look? Which indicates the higher
intelligence, interdicting evil-doing, or evil-speaking? Which is more
thorough, not allowing an injury, or not even suffering an injury done to
you to be repaid? Though withal you know that these very laws also of
yours, which seem to lead to virtue, have been borrowed from the law of God
as the ancient model. Of the age of Moses we have already spoken. But what
is the real authority of human laws, when it is in man's power both to
evade them, by generally managing to hide himself out of sight in his
crimes, and to despise them sometimes, if inclination or necessity leads
him to offend? Think of these things, too, in the light of the brevity of
any punishment you can inflict--never to last longer than till death. On
this ground Epicurus makes light of all suffering and pain, maintaining
that if it is small, it is contemptible; and if it is great, it is not
long-continued. No doubt about it, we, who receive our awards under the
judgment of an all-seeing God, and who look forward to eternal punishment
from Him for sin,--we alone make real effort to attain a blameless life,
under the influence of our ampler knowledge, the impossibility of
concealment, and the greatness of the threatened torment, not merely long-
enduring but everlasting, fearing Him, whom he too should fear who the
fearing judges,--even God, I mean, and not the proconsul.

CHAP. XLVI.

   We have sufficiently met, as I think, the accusation of the various
crimes on the ground of which these fierce demands are made for Christian
blood. We have made a full exhibition of our case; and we have shown you
how we are able to prove that our statement is correct, from the
trustworthiness, I mean, and antiquity of our sacred writings, and from the
confession likewise of the powers of spiritual wickedness themselves. Who
will venture to undertake our refutation; not with skill of words, but, as
we have managed our demonstration, on the basis of reality? But while the
truth we hold is made clear to all, unbelief meanwhile, at the very time it
is convinced of the worth of Christianity, which has now become well known
for its benefits as well as from the intercourse of life, takes up the
notion that it is not really a thing divine, but rather a kind of
philosophy. These are the very things, it says, the philosophers counsel
and profess--innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity. Why, then,
are we not permitted an equal liberty and impunity for our doctrines as
they have, with whom, in respect of what we teach, we are compared? or why
are not they, as so like us, not pressed to the same offices, for declining
which our lives are imperilled? For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice
or take an oath, or put out useless lamps at midday? Nay, they openly
overthrow your gods, and in their writings they attack your superstitions;
and you applaud them for it. Many of them even, with your countenance, bark
out against your rulers, and are rewarded with statues and salaries,
instead of being given to the wild beasts. And very right it should be so.
For they are called philosophers, not Christians. This name of philosopher
has no power to put demons to the rout. Why are they not able to do that
too? since philosophers count demons inferior to gods. Socrates used to
say, "If the demon grant permission." Yet he, too, though in denying the
existence of your divinities he had a glimpse of the truth, at his dying
ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius, I believe in honour of his
father,(1) for Apollo pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Thoughtless
Apollo! testifying to the wisdom of the man who denied the existence of his
race. In proportion to the enmity the truth awakens, you give offence by
faithfully standing by it; but the man who corrupts and makes a mere
pretence of it precisely on this ground gains favour with its persecutors.
The truth which philosophers, these mockers and corrupters of it, with
hostile ends merely affect to hold, and in doing so deprave, caring for
nought but glory, Christians both intensely and intimately long for and
maintain in its integrity, as those who have a real concern about their
salvation. So that we are like each other neither in our knowledge nor our
ways, as you imagine. For what certain information did Thales, the first of
natural philosophers, give in reply to the inquiry of Croesus regarding
Deity, the delay for further thought so often proving in vain? There is not
a Christian workman but finds out God, and manifests Him, and hence assigns
to Him all those attributes which go to constitute a divine being, though
Plato affirms that it is far from easy to discover the Maker of the
universe; and when He is found, it is difficult to make Him known to all.
But if we challenge you to comparison in the virtue of chastity, I turn to
a part of the sentence passed by the Athenians against Socrates, who was
pronounced a corrupter of youth. The Christian confines himself to the
female sex. I have read also how the harlot Phryne kindled in Diogenes the
fires of lust, and how a certain Speusippus, of Plato's school, perished in
the adulterous act. The Christian husband has nothing to do with any but
his own wife. Democritus, in putting out his eyes, because he could not
look on women without lusting after them, and was pained if his passion was
not satisfied, owns plainly, by the punishment he inflicts, his
incontinence. But a Christian with grace-healed eyes is sightless in this
matter; he is mentally blind against the assaults of passion. If I maintain
our superior modesty of behaviour, there at once occurs to me Diogenes with
filth-covered feet trampling on the proud couches of Plato, under the
influence of another pride: the Christian does not even play the proud man
to the pauper. If sobriety of spirit be the virtue in debate, why, there
are Pythagoras at Thurii, and Zeno at Priene, ambitious of the supreme
power: the Christian does not aspire to the aedileship. If equanimity be
the contention, you have Lycurgus choosing death by self-starvation,
because the Lacons had made some emendation of his laws: the Christian,
even when he is condemned, gives thanks.(2) If the comparison be made in
regard to trustworthiness, Anaxagoras denied the deposit of his enemies:
the Christian is noted for his fidelity even among those who are not of his
religion. If the matter of sincerity is to be brought to trial, Aristotle
basely thrust his friend Hermias from his place: the Christian does no harm
even to his foe. With equal baseness does Aristotle play the sycophant to
Alexander, instead of exercising to keep him in the right way, and Plato
allows himself to be bought by Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aristippus
in the purple, with all his great show of gravity, gives way to
extravagance; and Hippias is put to death laying plots against the state:
no Christian ever attempted such a thing in behalf of his brethren, even
when persecution was scattering them abroad with every atrocity. But it
will be said that some of us, too, depart from the rules of our discipline.
In that case, however, we count them no longer Christians; but the
philosophers who do such things retain still the name and the honour of
wisdom. So, then, where is there any likeness between the Christian and the
philosopher? between the disciple of Greece and of heaven? between the man
whose object is fame, and whose object is life? between the talker and he
doer? between the man who builds up and the man who pulls down? between the
friend and the foe of error? between one who corrupts the truth, and one
who restores and teaches it? between its chief and its custodier?

CHAP. XLVII.

   Unless I am utterly mistaken, there is nothing so old as the truth; and
the already proved antiquity of the divine writings is so far of use to me,
that it leads men more easily to take it in that they are the treasure-
source whence all later wisdom has been taken. And were it not necessary to
keep my work to a moderate size, I might launch forth also into the proof
of this. What poet or sophist has not drunk at the fountain of the
prophets? Thence, accordingly, the philosophers watered their arid minds,
so that it is the things they have from us which bring us into comparison
with them. For this reason, I imagine, philosophy was banished by certain
states--I mean by the Thebans, by the Spartans also, and the Argives--its
disciples sought to imitate our doctrines; and ambitious, as I have said,
of glory and eloquence alone, if they fell upon anything in the collection
of sacred Scriptures which displeased them, in their own peculiar style of
research, they perverted it to serve their purpose: for they had no
adequate faith in their divinity to keep them from changing them, nor had
they any sufficient understanding of them, either, as being still at the
time under veil--even obscure to the Jews themselves, whose peculiar
possession they seemed to be. For so, too, if the truth was distinguished
by its simplicity, the more on that account the fastidiousness of man, too
proud to believe, set to altering it; so that even what they found certain
they made uncertain by their admixtures. Finding a simple revelation of
God, they proceeded to dispute about Him, not as He had revealed to them,
but turned aside to debate about His properties, His nature, His abode.
Some assert Him to be incorporeal; others maintain He has a body,--the
Platonists teaching the one doctrine, and the Stoics the other. Some think
that He is composed of atoms, others of numbers: such are the different
views of Epicurus and Pythagoras. One thinks He is made of fire; so it
appeared to Heraclitus. The Platonists, again, hold that He administers the
affairs of the world; the Epicureans, on the contrary, that He is idle and
inactive, and, so to speak, a nobody in human things. Then the Stoics
represent Him as placed outside the world, and whirling round this huge
mass from without like a potter; while the Platonists place Him within the
world, as a pilot is in the ship he steers. So, in like manner, they differ
in their views about the world itself, whether it is created or uncreated,
whether it is destined to pass away or to remain for ever. So again it is
debated concerning the nature of the soul, which some contend is divine and
eternal, while others hold that it is dissoluble. According to each one's
fancy, He has introduced either something new, or refashioned the old. Nor
need we wonder if the speculations of philosophers have perverted the older
Scriptures. Some of their brood, with their opinions, have even adulterated
our new-given Christian revelation, and corrupted it into a system of
philosophic doctrines, and from the one path have struck off many and
inexplicable by-roads.(1) And I have alluded to this, lest any one becoming
acquainted with the variety of parties among us, this might seem to him to
put us on a level with the philosophers, and he might condemn the truth
from the different ways in which it is defended. But we at once put in a
plea in bar against these tainters of our purity, asserting that this is
the rule of truth which comes down from Christ by transmission through His
companions, to whom we shall prove that those devisers of different
doctrines are all posterior. Everything opposed to the truth has been got
up from the truth itself, the spirits of error carrying on this system of
opposition. By them all corruptions of wholesome discipline have been
secretly instigated; by them, too, certain fables have been introduced,
that, by their resemblance to the truth, they might impair its credibility,
or vindicate their own higher claims to faith; so that people might think
Christians unworthy of credit because the poets or philosophers are so, or
might regard the poets and philosophers as worthier of confidence from
their not being followers of Christ. Accordingly, we get ourselves laughed
at for proclaiming that God will one day judge the world. For, like us, the
poets and philosophers set up a judgment-seat in the realms below. And if
we threaten Gehenna, which is a reservoir of secret fire under the earth
for purposes of punishment, we have in the same way derision heaped on us.
For so, too, they have their Pyriphlegethon, a river of flame in the
regions of the dead. And if we speak of Paradise,(2) the place of heavenly
bliss appointed to receive the spirits of the saints, severed from the
knowledge of this world by that fiery zone as by a sort of enclosure, the
Elysian plains have taken possession of their faith. Whence is it, I pray
you have all this, so like us, in the poets and philosophers? The reason
simply is, that they have been taken from our religion. But if they are
taken from our sacred things, as being of earlier date, then ours are the
truer, and have higher claims upon belief, since even their imitations find
faith among you. If they maintain their sacred mysteries to have sprung
from their own minds, in that case ours will be reflections of what are
later than themselves, which by the nature of things is impossible, for
never does the shadow precede the body which casts it, or the image the
reality.(3)

CHAP. XLVIII.

   Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius holds, following an
opinion of Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from a mule, a
serpent from a woman, and with skill of speech twists every argument to
prove his view, will he not gain acceptance for and work in some the
conviction that, on account of this, they should even abstain from eating
animal food? May any one have the persuasion that he should so abstain,
lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his? But if a
Christian promises the return of a man from a man, and the very actual
Gaius from Gaius,(1) the cry of the people will be to have him stoned; they
will not even so much as grant him a hearing. If there is any ground for
the moving to and fro of human souls into different bodies, why may they
not return into the very substance they have left, seeing this is to be
restored, to be that which had been? They are no longer the very things
they had been; for they could not be what they were not, without first
ceasing to be what they had been. If we were inclined to give all rein upon
this point, discussing into what various beasts one and another might
probably be changed, we would need at our leisure to take up many points.
But this we would do chiefly in our own defence, as setting forth what is
greatly worthier of belief, that a man will come back from a man--any given
person from any given person, still retaining his humanity; so that the
soul, with its qualities unchanged, may be restored to the same condition,
thought not to the same outward framework. Assuredly, as the reason why
restoration takes place at all is the appointed judgment, every man must
needs come forth the very same who had once existed, that he may receive at
God's hands a judgment, whether of good desert or the opposite. And
therefore the body too will appear; for the soul is not capable of
suffering without the solid substance (that is, the flesh; and for this
reason, also) that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of
God to bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done
by them. But how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be made
to reappear again? Consider thyself, O man, and thou wilt believe in it!
Reflect on what you were before you came into existence. Nothing. For if
you had been anything, you would have remembered it. You, then, who were
nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also when you cease to be,
why may you not come into being again out of nothing, at the will of the
same Creator whose will created you out of nothing at the first? Will it be
anything new in your case? You who were not, were made; when you cease to
be again, you shall be made. Explain, if you can, your original creation,
and then demand to know how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be
still easier surley to make you what you were once, when the very same
creative power made you without difficulty what you never were before.
There will be doubts, perhaps, as to the power of God, of Him who hung in
its place this huge body of our world, made out of what had never existed,
as from a death of emptiness and inanity, animated by the Spirit who
quickens all living things, its very self the unmistakable type of the
resurrection, that it might be to you a witness--nay, the exact image of
the resurrection. Light, every day extinguished, shines out again; and,
with like alternation, darkness succeeds light's outgoing. The defunct
stars re-live; the seasons, as soon as they are finished, renew their
course; the fruits are brought to maturity, and then are reproduced. The
seeds do not spring up with abundant produce, save as they rot and dissolve
away;--all things are preserved by perishing, all things are refashioned
out of death. Thou, man of nature so exalted, if thou understandest
thyself, taught even by the Pythian(2) words, lord of all these things that
die and rise,--shalt thou die to perish evermore? Wherever your dissolution
shall have taken place, whatever material agent has destroyed you, or
swallowed you up, or swept you away, or reduced you to nothingness, it
shall again restore you. Even nothingness is His who is Lord of all. You
ask, Shall we then be always dying, and rising up from death? If so the
Lord of all things had appointed, you would have to submit, though
unwillingly, to the law of your creation. But, in fact, He has no other
purpose than that of which He has informed us. The Reason which made the
universe out of diverse elements, so that all things might be composed of
opposite substances in unity--of void and solid, of animate and inanimate,
of comprehensible and incomprehensible, of light and darkness, of life
itself and death--has also disposed time into order, by fixing and
distinguishing its mode, according to which this first portion of it, which
we inhabit from the beginning of the world, flows down by a temporal course
to a close; but the portion which succeeds, and to which we look forward
continues forever. When, therefore, the boundary and limit, that millennial
interspace, has been passed, when even the outward fashion of the world
itself--which has been spread like a veil over the eternal economy, equally
a thing of time--passes away, then the whole human race shall be raised
again, to have its dues meted out according as it has merited in the period
of good or evil, and thereafter to have these paid out through the
immeasurable ages of eternity. Therefore after this there is neither death
nor repeated resurrections, but we shall be the same that we are now, and
still unchanged--the servants of God, ever with God, clothed upon with the
proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and all who are not true
worshippers of God, in like manner shall be consigned to the punishment of
everlasting fire--that fire which, from its very nature indeed, directly
ministers to their incorruptibility. The philosophers are familiar as well
as we with the distinction between a common and a secret fire. Thus that
which is in common use is far different from that which we see in divine
judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven, or bursting up out
of the earth through mountain-tops; for it does not consume what it
scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the mountains continue ever
burning; and a person struck by lighting is even now kept safe from any
destroying flame. A notable proof this of the fire eternal! a notable
example of the endless judgment which still supplies punishment with fuel!
The mountains burn, and last. How will it be with the wicked and the
enemies of God?(1)

CHAP. XLIX.

   These are what are called presumptuous speculations in our case alone;
in the philosophers and poets they are regarded as sublime speculations and
illustrious discoveries. They are men of wisdom, we are fools. They are
worthy of all honour, we are folk to have the finger pointed at; nay,
besides that, we are even to have punishments inflicted on us. But let
things which are the defence of virtue, if you will, have no foundation,
and give them duly the name of fancies, yet still they are necessary; let
them be absurd if you will, yet they are of use: they make all who believe
them better men and women, under the fear of never-ending punishment and
the hope of never-ending bliss. It is not, then, wise to brand as false,
nor to regard as absurd, things the truth of which it is expedient to
presume. On no ground is it right positively to condemn as bad what beyond
all doubt is profitable. Thus, in fact, you are guilty of the very
presumption of which you accuse us, in condemning what is useful. It is
equally out of the question to regard them as nonsensical; at any rate, if
they are false and foolish, they hurt nobody. For they are just (in that
case) like many other things on which you inflict no penalties--foolish and
fabulous things, I mean, which, as quite innocuous, are never charged as
crimes or punished. But in a thing of the kind, if this be so indeed, we
should be adjudged to ridicule, not to swords, and flames, and crosses, and
wild beasts, in which iniquitous cruelty not only the blinded populace
exults and insults over us, but in which some of you too glory, not
scrupling to gain the popular favour by your injustice. As though all you
can do to us did not depend upon our pleasure. It is assuredly a matter of
my own inclination, being a Christian. Your condemnation, then, will only
reach me in that case, if I wish to be condemned; but when all you can do
to me, you can do only at my will, all you can do is dependent on my will,
and is not in your power. The joy of the people in our trouble is therefore
utterly reasonless. For it is our joy they appropriate to themselves, since
we would far rather be condemned than apostatize from God; on the contrary,
our haters should be sorry rather than rejoice, as we have obtained the
very thing of our own choice.

CHAP. L.

   In that case, you say, why do you complain of our persecutions? You
ought rather to be grateful to us for giving you the sufferings you want.
Well, it is quite true that it is our desire to suffer, but it is in the
way that the soldier longs for war. No one indeed suffers willingly, since
suffering necessarily implies fear and danger. Yet the man who objected to
the conflict, both fights with all his strength, and when victorious, he
rejoices in the battle, because he reaps from it glory and spoil. It is our
battle to be summoned to your tribunals that there, under fear of
execution, we may battle for the truth. But the day is won when the object
of the struggle is gained. This victory of ours gives us the glory of
pleasing God, and the spoil of life eternal. But we are overcome. Yes, when
we have obtained our wishes. Therefore we conquer in dying;(2) we go forth
victorious at the very time we are subdued. Call us, if you like,
Sarmenticii and Semaxii, because, bound to a half-axle stake, we are burned
in a circle-heap of fagots. This is the attitude in which we conquer, it is
our victory-robe, it is for us a sort of triumphal, car. Naturally enough,
therefore, we do not please the vanquished; on account of this, indeed, we
are counted a desperate, reckless race. But the very desperation and
recklessness you object to in us, among yourselves lift high the standard
of virtue in the cause of glory and of fame. Mucius of his own will left
his right hand on the altar: what sublimity of mind! Empedocles gave his
whole body at Catana to the fires of AEtna: what mental resolution! A
certain foundress of Carthage gave herself away in second marriage to the
funeral pile: what a noble witness of her chastity! Regulus, not wishing
that his one life should count for the lives of many enemies, endured these
crosses over all his frame: how brave a man--even in captivity a conqueror!
Anaxarchus, when he was being beaten to death by a barley-pounder, cried
out, "Beat on, beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; no stroke falls on
Anaxarchus himself." O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even in such an
end had jokes upon his lips! I omit all reference to those who with their
own sword, or with any other milder form of death, have bargained for
glory. Nay, see how even torture contests are crowned by you. The Athenian
courtezan, having wearied out the executioner, at last bit off her tongue
and spat it in the face of the raging tyrant, that she might at the same
time spit away her power of speech, nor be longer able to confess her
fellow-conspirators, if even overcome, that might be her inclination. Zeno
the Eleatic, when he was asked by Dionysius what good philosophy did, on
answering that it gave contempt of death, was all unquailing, given over to
the tyrant's scourge, and sealed his opinion even to the death. We all know
how the Spartan lash, applied with the utmost cruelty under the very eyes
of friends encouraging, confers on those who bear it honor proportionate to
the blood which the young men shed. O glory legitimate, because it is
human, for whose sake it is counted neither reckless foolhardiness, nor
desperate obstinacy, to despise death itself and all sorts of savage
treatment; for whose sake you may for your native place, for the empire,
for friendship, endure all you are forbidden to do for God! And you cast
statues in honour of persons such as these, and you put inscriptions upon
images, and cut out epitaphs on tombs, that their names may never perish.
In so far you can by your monuments, you yourselves afford a son of
resurrection to the dead. Yet he who expects the true resurrection from
God, is insane, if for God he suffers! But go zealously on, good
presidents, you will stand higher with the people if you sacrifice the
Christians at their wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to
dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. Therefore God
suffers that we thus suffer; for but very lately, in condemning a Christian
woman to the law rather than to the leo you made confession that a taint on
our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any
punishment and any death.(1) Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite,
avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by
you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.(2) Many
of your writers exhort to the courageous bearing of pain and death, as
Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Chances, as Diogenes, Pyrrhus,
Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many disciples as Christians
do, teachers not by words, but by their deeds. That very obstinacy you rail
against is the preceptress. For who that contemplates it, is not excited to
inquire what is at the bottom of it? who, after inquiry, does not embrace
our doctrines? and when he has embraced them, desires not to suffer that he
may become partaker of the fulness of God's grace, that he may obtain from
God complete forgiveness, by giving in exchange his blood? For that secures
the remission of all offences. On this account it is that we return thanks
on the very spot for your sentences. As the divine and human are ever
opposed to each other, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by
the Highest.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland beginning in
1867. (ANF 3, Roberts and Donaldson). The digital version is by The
Electronic Bible Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

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