Book 1

The proof of your ignorance, which by the very act of defending injustice convicts it, is plain enough: that all who once shared your ignorance and your hatred, the moment it falls to them to know, cease to hate as soon as they cease to be ignorant; indeed, they become the very thing they hated and begin to hate what they once were. Every day you groan over the growing number of Christians; you cry out that the city is under siege; you complain that in the fields, in the forts, on the islands there are Christians, that every sex, every age, every rank is going over to us, as though it were a loss to you. And yet not even by this do you raise your minds to suspect some hidden good. You are not permitted to suspect more rightly, you have no wish to test the matter more closely; here alone human curiosity grows numb. You love to be ignorant of what others rejoice to have found; you would rather not know, because you already hate, as though you were quite certain you would not hate once you knew. But if no hatred is owed, surely the best course will be to withdraw from your earlier injustice; while if a real cause stands firm, nothing will be taken from your hatred, which will rather be heaped higher by the awareness of its justice. Unless it is shame that keeps you from amending, or distaste that keeps you from being excused. I know well the answer with which you usually meet the testimony of our growth. The good of a thing, you say, is not to be inferred from the mere fact that it converts many and sweeps them to itself. I am familiar with the mind's change for the worse. How many deserters from the good life? How many turncoats to perversity? Many in good faith, indeed by now more of them on account of the extremities of the times. But the comparison you draw breaks down in its equivalence. For evil is so established in the judgment of all that not even the guilty themselves, who go over to evil and turn aside from good things into perverse ones, dare to defend evil as if it were good. They count base things matter for fear, impious things matter for shame. In short, they long to lie hidden, they shun appearing, they tremble when caught, they deny when accused; not even under torture do they confess easily or always, and once condemned they certainly grieve. They reproach themselves with what they were, they attribute the mind's evil passage from innocence to fate. So unwilling are they to own it as theirs, because they cannot deny it is evil. But the Christian, what such thing does he undergo? No one is ashamed, no one repents, except only of his former life. If he is denounced, he glories; if he is dragged to court, he does not resist; if he is accused, he makes no defense; questioned, he confesses; condemned, he gives thanks. What sort of evil is this, in which the very nature of evil is absent?

In this matter you yourselves pass judgment against the very form by which the wicked are judged. For when the guilty are brought before you, if they deny the charge, you press them with tortures to confession; but Christians, when they have confessed of their own accord, you crush with tortures to make them deny. What perversity is this, that you resist confession, that you reverse the office of torture, forcing the prisoner to escape acquitted, to deny against his will? Magistrates appointed to wring out the truth, from us alone you demand a lie, that we should say we are not what we are. I suppose you do not want us to be evil men, and so you are eager to shut us out from this name. Certainly you torture all the rest to make them deny that they are what they are charged with being. Yet when those others deny, you do not believe them; us, if we deny, you believe at once. If you are certain that we are utterly criminal, why even in this are we treated by you otherwise than the criminal? I do not say that you allow no room either for accusation or for defense — though you are accustomed not rashly to condemn the unaccused and undefended. But for instance: when a case is brought against a murderer, the cause is not settled, nor inquiry satisfied, the moment he has confessed to the name of murderer. Indeed, even when men confess you find it hard to believe them; you go further and require the attendant circumstances: how often he committed the killing, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, accomplices, harborers, so that nothing at all of the bad man's deed may lie hidden, nor anything be lacking to the truth that must be built up toward the sentence. But concerning us, whom you charge with more atrocious and more numerous crimes, you draw up briefer and lighter indictments. I suppose you do not want them burdened whom you want ruined by every means, or you think there is no need to inquire into what you already know. This then is the more perverse, if you compel men to deny things of which you are most certainly informed. Indeed, the more it suited your hatred — setting aside the proper form of judging, by your own zeal — not to strive for denial, lest you should free those you hate, but for the confession of each crime, so that your enmity might be the more gorged by the heaping up of penalties: while it was being established how many of those banquets each had already celebrated, how often in the dark he had rushed upon incest. What of this? That, in order to root out the breed, the investigation ought to have been spread wide, the inquiry extended to accomplices and the privy. Let the child-purveyors and the cooks be produced, the very dogs that draw the lights — the case would have been completed. Then would entertainment be added for the spectacle. With how much zeal would men crowd into the arena when some man was about to fight to the death who had devoured a hundred infants! For if such horrible and monstrous things are reported of us, surely they ought to have been brought to light, lest they seem incredible and the public hatred of us cool. For most people temper their belief in such things, shuddering to seek as a beast's food the kind which it has barred itself from by intercourse with the human race.

You then, on other occasions most diligent and persistent investigators of crimes far smaller, when faced with such horrors as these, surpassing every impiety, abandon that diligence — neither accepting the confession, which judges should always labor over, nor sorting out the examination, which prosecutors should always attend to. From this it is now plain that the whole charge against us is directed not at any crime, but at a name. For if it rested on the truth of crimes, the very names of the crimes would be enough to condemn us, if they were applied; so that the pronouncement against us would run thus: "It is decreed that that man, a murderer, or guilty of incest, or whatever we are charged with, be led off, be crucified, be thrown to the beasts." But your sentences brand nothing except the confession of being a Christian. No name of a crime exists, unless the name itself is the crime. This is in truth the whole basis of the hatred against us. The name is at issue, against which a certain hidden power makes war through your ignorance, so that you are unwilling to know for certain what you are certain you do not know for certain; and therefore you neither believe what is not proved, and, lest it be readily disproved, you are unwilling to inquire, so that the hated name may be punished on the presumption of crimes. Indeed, so that we may be released from the hated name, we are forced to deny it; and then, denying it, we are set free, with full impunity for all that is past — no longer murderers nor guilty of incest, because we have lost that name. But while this reasoning is shown in its place, declare what it is you pursue to the destruction of the name: what is the crime of the name, what the offense, what the fault? For it is laid down against you that you cannot bring charges which no established law assigns, no formal indictment fixes, no sentence enumerates. What is laid before the magistrate, what is inquired into concerning the accused, what is answered or denied, what is read out from the council's record — that I acknowledge as belonging to a defendant. And so, as to the merit of a name, if there is any guilt in names, any accusation in words, I think there is no quarrel with a word or a name unless it either sounds barbarous, or smacks of ill omen, or is obscene, or is otherwise than befits the speaker or pleases the hearer. Such are the faults of words or names, just as in expressions and discourse a barbarism is a defect, and a solecism, and a clumsy figure. But the Christian name, so far as its meaning goes, is interpreted from "anointing." Even when you mispronounce it as "Chrestiani" — for you are not even clearly certain of the name itself — it is still shaped from sweetness or goodness. You hold fast then, in harmless men, even our harmless name, which is no hardship to the tongue, not harsh to the ears, not evil to man, not hostile to the country, but both Greek, like others, and pleasant in sound and in interpretation. And surely names are not to be punished by sword or cross or beasts.

But you say the sect is punished by the name of its founder. First, that a sect should be marked by the appellation of its founder is, of course, an honest and customary right, since philosophers too are surnamed from their founders, as Pythagoreans and Platonists, as physicians the Erasistratians and grammarians the Aristarchians. Therefore, if on account of an evil founder a sect is evil, it is punished as the transmission of an evil name. But this would be presumed rashly. The founder ought first to be known, that the sect might be known, rather than to draw an inference about the founder from inspection of the sect. But as it is, necessarily being ignorant of the sect because you are ignorant of the founder, or not reviewing the founder because you do not review the sect either, you fasten on the name alone, as if in it you held fast the sect and the founder whom you do not know at all. And yet for philosophers there is open liberty to pass over, in your eyes, to a sect and to carry both the name of its founders and their own; nor does anyone stir up hatred against them, though against your manners, rites, worship, and way of life they openly and publicly bark out all the bitterness of their eloquence, with contempt of the laws, without respect of persons, so that some even hurl their freedom of speech against the emperors themselves with impunity. But the truth, which the age finds most laborious, the philosophers merely aspire to, while the Christians possess it; and therefore those who possess it give more offense, because he who aspires to it makes sport, but he who possesses it defends it. Socrates, in the end, was condemned on that side where he had come closer to the truth, by destroying your gods. Although the Christian name was not yet on earth at that time, still the truth was always condemned. And so you will not deny that he was a wise man, to whom your own Pythian god bore witness. "Of all men," he said, "Socrates is the wisest." The truth conquered Apollo, so that he pronounced sentence against himself; for he confessed that he was not a god, while affirming that the wisest man was the one who denied the gods. But with you he is the less wise for denying the gods, though wise on this very ground, that he denied the gods. In the same way you usually say of us: "A good man, Lucius Titius — only that he is a Christian." And another: "I am astonished that Gaius Seius, a serious man, has become a Christian." With the blindness of folly they praise what they know and condemn what they do not know, and they spoil the thing they know by the thing they do not know. It occurs to no one that perhaps a man is good and prudent for the very reason that he is a Christian, or a Christian for the very reason that he is prudent and good — though it would be more humane to judge the hidden by the manifest than to prejudge the manifest from the hidden. Some, whom before this name they knew as wandering, worthless, dishonest, marvel that they are suddenly reformed, and yet they know better how to marvel than how to follow. Others strive with such obstinacy that they fight even against their own interests, which they could otherwise gain from dealings with this name. I know a husband or two, once anxious about his wife's character — who could not endure even the mice creeping into his bedroom without a groan of suspicion — who, when he learned the cause of her new diligence and unaccustomed captivity, offered his wife all forbearance, declared he was no longer jealous, and would sooner have a harlot for a wife than a Christian. He was free to change his own nature for the worse, but would not permit the woman to be reformed for the better. A father disinherited the son with whom he had ceased to find fault. A master sent to the workhouse the slave he had otherwise found indispensable. As soon as anyone is recognized as a Christian, he is preferred guilty. For the discipline itself is exposed by its own quality, and we are betrayed by nothing other than our own good — just as the wicked shine forth by their own evil. Or are we alone, against the institutions of nature, branded the worst on account of good? For what do we hold out as our mark, except first wisdom, by which we do not adore the trifling works of the human hand; abstinence, by which we keep from what is another's; chastity, which we do not defile even with the eyes; mercy, by which we are bent toward the needy; truth itself, by which we give offense; freedom itself, for which we know how to die? Whoever wishes to understand who the Christians are must of necessity use these tokens.

As for what you say — that the worst and most disgraceful are stained with avarice, luxury, dishonesty — we shall not deny that some are. It is enough even for this to be a testimony to our name, if not all, if not the greater part. It is inevitable that in a body, however whole or pure you would have it, some mole should sprout, or a little wart rise up, or a freckle make a blemish. The very sky, no serenity strains and purifies so far that it is not unsealed by the wisp of some little cloud. A slight stain on the forehead, seen in some one part, while the whole is clean as a sample of it. The greater portion of good uses its slight evil as a testimony to itself. Yet when you prove some of ours to be wicked, by that very fact you prove them to be no Christians. Seek out a sect to which their wickedness may be charged. You yourselves, in conversation, when at any point against us, say, "Why is that man a cheat, if Christians are abstinent? Why is he cruel, if they are merciful?" By this very thing you bear witness that such men are not Christians, when you turn back upon us the question why those called Christians should be such. There is a great distance between the crime and the name, between opinion and truth. For names too have been so established that they have their boundaries between being called and being. How many, in short, are called philosophers, and yet do not fulfill the law of philosophy? All wear the name from their professions, but they bear the name without the excellence of the profession who, by the mere surface of the word, defame the truth. They are not at once what they are called, but because they are not so, they are called so in vain, and they deceive those who attach the reality to the name, when the standing of the name depends upon the reality. And yet such men neither gather nor share with us, having become yours once more through their offenses — since we do not mingle even with those whom your violence and savagery have driven to denial. For surely deserters of the discipline could more easily be kept among us against their will than of their own choice. But for the rest, without cause you call those Christians whom the Christians themselves deny — those who do not know how to deny themselves.

To these our propositions and answers, which the truth furnishes from its own resources, as often as your conscience is squeezed and confined — the silent witness of its own ignorance — you flee for refuge, in your distress, to a certain little altar, that is, the authority of the laws: that surely they would not punish this sect unless its demerits had been established before the framers of the laws. What then has prevented the same thing from being established before the executors of the laws as well, since in the case of other crimes, which are likewise barred and punished by the laws, the penalty is held back unless inquiry is first made? For instance, a murderer, an adulterer, are bound by the law: yet the manner of the deed is examined, and even so the kind of act is known to all. The laws punish the Christian. If there is any deed of a Christian, it ought to be brought to light. No law forbids inquiry; rather, inquiry serves the laws. For how will you observe a law by avoiding what the law forbids, when the diligence of avoidance is taken away through the failure to recognize what you should observe? No law owes the awareness of its own justice to itself, but to those from whom it claims obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect if it is unwilling to prove itself. Rightly, then, so long as it is not known what they persecute, the laws against the Christians are deemed just and to be revered and observed; rightly, after recognition, found most unjust, they are spat upon together with their swords and gibbets and lions. The honor of an unjust law is nothing. But, as I suppose, the injustice of certain laws is not even in doubt, since every day you temper their harshness and their wickedness by new decrees and ordinances.

Whence, then, you ask, has so much report against us been licensed — report whose testimony may perhaps have sufficed for the framers of the laws? Who, I pray, was the surety to them then, or thereafter to you, of its trustworthiness? Report it is. Is this not she: "Report, an evil than which nothing else is swifter"? Why an evil, if she were always true? Not by falsehood — and even then least of all, when she carries true things, does she cease from her lust for lying, so as not to weave the false into the true, adding, subtracting, confounding by variety. What of this? That such is her condition, that she persists only as long as she lies. For she lives just so long as she proves nothing; since once approved she falls, and as if discharged from the office of reporting she departs. Thereafter the matter is held as fact, the matter is named as fact, and no one says, for instance, "They say this was done at Rome," or "Report has it that he drew that province by lot," but "He drew the province," and "This was done at Rome." No one names Report except one who is unsure, since no one is made certain by report but by knowledge; no one believes Report except a fool, since the wise man does not believe the uncertain. Report, with however great ambition she has been spread abroad, must at some time have arisen from a single mouth; thence she creeps, as it were, through the relays of tongues and ears, and the slight flaw in her origins darkens the rumor, so that no one reflects whether that first mouth sowed lies — which often happens, either through the spirit of rivalry, or at the bidding of suspicion, or even from the fresh pleasure of lying. But it is well that time reveals all things, as your own maxims and proverbs bear witness, and nature itself, which is so ordered that nothing lies hidden, even what report has not betrayed. See, then, what a portent you have suborned against us, since what report once brought forth, and over so long a time has fortified into belief, it has been unable to prove even to this day. Under the emperor Augustus this name arose; under Tiberius its discipline shone out; under Nero its condemnation gained strength — so that from this very fact you may weigh the person of the persecutor. If that emperor was pious, then Christians are impious; if just, if chaste, then Christians are unjust and incestuous; if not a public enemy, then we are public enemies. What we are, the condemner himself made plain, punishing surely what was a rival to himself. And yet, when all his other measures were erased, this Neronian institution alone remained — just, in short, as being unlike its author. So our age numbers not yet two hundred and fifty years. So many wicked deeds in the meantime, so many crosses attaining divinity, so many infants slaughtered, so many loaves stained with blood, so many extinguishings of lamps, so many wanderings of unions — and still for the Christians report alone decides. It has indeed a grand foundation in the fault of the human character: more readily does it lie in bitter and atrocious matters. For the more prone you are to malice, the more apt to believe an evil; in short, a false evil is more readily believed than a true good. Yet if injustice had left any room among you for prudence, justice surely demanded, for testing the trustworthiness of report, that you look closely to see by whom report could have been given to the crowd, and so to the whole world. From the Christians themselves I do not suppose it, since by the very form and law of all mysteries silence is the trust that is owed. How much more in the case of such things as, even if betrayed, would not in the meantime escape the present punishment of the consequence? If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders are. I ask you, whence comes the knowledge to outsiders, when even lawful and licit mysteries guard against every outside witness, unless the unlawful ones spurn this less? Yet for outsiders, both to be ignorant and to invent is more in keeping. The curiosity of household members has stolen its way through crannies and caverns. What then? Will your household members betray these things to you? In every case we are betrayed by none more than by these — how much more so, if the atrocity be so great that the justice of indignation breaks every bond of household trust? The mind could not contain what it shuddered at, the eye what it dreaded. This too is a wonder, if both he who, by so great a right of impatience, leapt forward to inform did not also long to prove, and he who heard did not take care also to see — since the reward is equal both for the informer, if he proves what he has reported, and for the hearer, if he believes for himself what he hears. "Then," you say, "it was first reported and exhibited, heard and inspected, and thereafter committed to report." This indeed surpasses all wonder, if a thing was caught but once that is always being committed — unless we have by now ceased to do such things. Yet we are still called by the same name, and counted among the same charges, and we grow in number by the day; the more we are, the more we are hated by the many. The hatred grows the more as its subject-matter grows: with the multitude of the accused increasing, why does the multitude of informers not increase in like measure? So far as I know, our manner of life has become better known; you know the days of our assemblies, and so we are both besieged and crushed and detained in our very secret congregations. Yet who has ever come upon a half-eaten corpse? Who has detected the marks of teeth in a bloodstained loaf? Who, when the darkness was burst by a sudden light, has recognized any foul — not to say incestuous — tokens? If by a bribe we obtain not to be dragged out into public as such, why are we crushed at all? We could also escape being dragged out altogether. For who either sells or buys back the betrayal of any crime without the crime itself? But why should I shrink from outside spies and informers, since you bring forward such charges as are not published by us ourselves with the loudest outcry — either at once when heard, if they are shown beforehand, or later when discovered, if for a time they are concealed? For without doubt it is the custom for those wishing to be initiated to go first to the master of the rites or the father. Then he will say: "You need an infant, still a little child, to be slain, and a quantity of bread to be soaked in the blood; besides, lamp-stands, which dogs tied to them may overturn, and morsels to entice the same dogs; but a mother also or a sister is needful to you." What if there are none? I suppose you cannot be a lawful Christian. These things, I ask you, do they bear to be betrayed by others when proclaimed beforehand? It is a different matter for them to know. First the business of deception is carried through: to the unwitting both feast and union are presented; for they had never before heard anything of Christian mysteries. Yet afterwards they must of necessity come to know, since the rites must be ministered to others whom they themselves bring in. But for the rest, how empty it is that the uninitiated should know what the priest does not! They keep silence, then, and accept it, and break out in no Thyestean or Oedipal tragedy, and do not drag it forth before the people. Trust takes from its ministers and masters, and from those by now instructed, no more biting reproach. If nothing of the kind is proved, we must reckon it to be some great thing or other, the recompense of which consists in the endurance of such atrocities. O wretched and pitiable nations, behold, we set before you the pledge of our discipline. It promises eternal life to its followers and keepers; on the contrary, to the profane and the hostile it threatens eternal punishment by eternal fire; for both causes the resurrection of the dead is proclaimed. We shall see about the credit of these things, when they are set out in their place; meanwhile believe, as we do. For I wish to know, if you are ready to approach by such crimes, whether you do so as we do. Come, whoever you are, plunge the iron into the infant; or if it is another's office, then merely look on at the soul dying before it has lived; at least catch the fresh blood, in which you may soak your bread, and eat freely; meanwhile recline, count the places where mother or sister has pressed the couch; mark carefully, so that, when the darkness has rushed in — testing, of course, the diligence of each — you may not stray by attacking a stranger: you will have committed a sacrilege, unless it be incest. When you have accomplished these things, you will live forever. I would have you answer, if you value eternity so highly? No — for that very reason you do not believe; and even if you should believe, I deny that you would be willing; and even if you were willing, I deny that you would be able. But why should others be able, if you cannot? Why should you not be able, if others can? At what price do you wish impunity, eternity, to be bought? Or do these seem to us to be worth buying by any means at all? Are the rows of teeth different in Christians, and the caverns of their throats, and their sinews for the lust of incest? I do not think so. For it is enough for us to be distinguished from your position by truth alone.

Plainly, we are called a third race. Are we some dog-headed creatures, or Shadow-foots? Or some Antipodes from the underworld? If there is among you any reasoning at all in this, I would have you produce the first and second race, that the third may thereby be established. Psammetichus, indeed, thought he had explored the matter of the first-born by his own ingenuity. For he is said to have handed over infants fresh from birth, to be reared apart from human dealings, to a nurse whom for that very purpose he had deprived of her tongue, so that, being wholly exiled from the human voice, they might form their speech not from hearing, but uttering it from themselves, might mark out as the first nation that one whose sound nature had dictated. The first word reported was "bekkos"; its interpretation among the Phrygians is the name for bread; the Phrygians are thenceforth held to be the first race. But this will be the one item among the vanities of your fables not to be reviewed by us idly, since by it we aim to show that your trust is given to vanities rather than to truths. Or is it at all credible that, with such a member cut away, the very organ of the soul laid waste and cut, indeed, to the root, the throat castrated — which even from outside is dangerously wounded — and corruption thence flowing back into the vitals, and at the last food failing for some while, life endured in that nurse? Come now, suppose she did keep her life by the remedies of Philomela — whose silence the more prudent interpret not from any cutting of the tongue, but from the blush of shame. If, then, she lived, she could have stammered out something muffled. And a disjointed sound and ringing without the modulation of the lips, from an open mouth, with the tongue stupefied, can be forced from the throat alone. This perhaps the infants, since it was the only one, more easily contrived a little more melodiously — being themselves of nimble tongue — and hit upon as the discovery of some interpretation. Let the Phrygians be first now; still the Christians are not third. For how many other series of nations after the Phrygians? But reconsider, lest those whom you call a third race should hold the first place, since indeed there is no nation that is not Christian. And so whatever nation is first, it is none the less Christian. With ridiculous madness you call us latest and name us third. But it is by superstition that we are reckoned a third race, not by nation, so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians. But where then are the Greeks? Or if they are counted among the superstitions of the Romans, since indeed Rome solicited even the gods of Greece — where at least are the Egyptians, themselves, so far as I know, of a private and curious religion? Moreover, if those who hold the third place are so monstrous, what are we to think of those who go before in the first and second?

But why should I marvel at your vanities, when by a natural cast malice and folly have grown together, embodied as one, under the same proprietor of error? Truly, since I do not marvel, I must enumerate, so that you, recognizing yourselves, may marvel into what depth of folly you fall — you who would have us be the cause of every public disaster or injury. If the Tiber has overflowed, if the Nile has not overflowed, if the sky has stood still, if the earth has quaked, if famine has wasted, if pestilence has afflicted — at once the cry of all: "The Christians to the lion!" As if those who fear the true God had any small thing, or anything else, to fear. I suppose it is as despisers of your gods that we provoke these darts of theirs. As we have said above, our age numbers not yet three hundred years; how many disasters, before that span, fell upon the whole world, upon single cities and provinces? How many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, gapings and quakings of the earth, has the age recorded? Where then were the Christians, when the Roman state supplied so many histories of its labors? Where then were the Christians, when the islands of Hiera, Anaphe and Delos and Rhodos and Cea went to the bottom with many thousands of men — or that one, greater than Asia or Africa, which Plato records as sunk in the Atlantic sea? When fire poured from heaven upon Volsinii, and upon Pompeii from its own mountain? When by an earthquake the Corinthian sea was snatched away? When a cataclysm abolished the whole world? Where then were — I will not say the Christians, despisers of the gods — but your very gods, whom places, towns, prove to be later than that disaster, in which they were born, lived, were buried, even those they founded? For otherwise they would not have survived to the present, except as offspring later than that disaster. If you do not care to read again and unroll the testimonies of the ages, otherwise reported to you, then, above all, that you may not pronounce your gods most unjust, who on account of despisers harm even their own worshippers, do you not then prove that you yourselves are in error, if you hand down gods who do not distinguish you from the deserts of the profane? But if, as one or another most empty fellow says, they are angry with you also for this reason, that you are negligent about our extermination, then the matter is settled concerning their weakness and mediocrity: for they would not be angry with you for slackening in their vengeance, if they could do anything of themselves. Although you confess this on other occasions too, as often as you seem to avenge them by our punishment. If one thing is defended by another, it is defended by a greater. Let the gods then be ashamed to be defended by man.

Pour out now all your poisons, drive in all the darts of calumny against this name; I shall not cease henceforth to repel them, though afterwards they will be blunted by the exposition of our whole discipline. But now I shall turn these very same charges, plucked from our body, back upon you; I shall show the same wounds of crimes buried in you, so that you may fall by your own swords and arguments. First, then, as to what you direct against us in your general accusation — a divorce from the institutions of our forefathers — consider again and again whether you do not share this crime with us. For behold, throughout all the conduct of life and discipline, I recognize in you antiquity corrupted, indeed destroyed. Of the laws, indeed, it has already been said above, that you have buried them under new decrees and ordinances day by day. But as for the rest of the ordering of human conduct, it plainly lies open how much you have changed from your forefathers — in dress, in bearing, in equipment, in your very food, in your very speech; for you banish the old as rancid. Antiquity is everywhere shut out, in business, in offices; your authority has cast down all the authority of the forefathers. To be sure — and this is the more to your reproach — you always praise the old things, and none the less reject them. By what perverseness ought so many vanities of the forefathers to remain among you, to be approved, when you reject the very things you approve? But even the very thing you seem to keep and defend most faithfully as handed down from the forefathers — the very ground on which you most demand us guilty of transgression, on which the whole hatred of the Christian name is roused — I mean the worship of the gods — I shall show to be likewise destroyed and despised by you. Except that there is no reason why we should be held despisers of the gods either, since no one despises what he knows to be wholly nonexistent. That which exists at all can be despised; that which is nothing suffers nothing. Therefore, by those for whom they exist, they must of necessity suffer. By so much the more are you burdened, believing them to exist and despising them, worshipping and spitting upon them, honoring and provoking them. One may recognize this, above all, even from this: that since you worship some gods and others worship others, those whom you do not worship you of course despise. The preference of one cannot be without insult to another, nor is any choice made up without rejection. He who, out of many, takes up one, has scorned the one he does not take up. But so many and so great cannot be worshipped by all. Then already, at the first, you despised them, not fearing, of course, so to establish them that they could not all be worshipped. But indeed those most wise and most prudent forefathers, whose institutions you do not know how to renounce, especially in the person of your gods, are themselves caught out as impious. I lie, if they had not at some time decreed that no commander should dedicate a shrine he had vowed in war before the senate had approved it — as happened to Marcus Aemilius, who had vowed it to the god Alburnus. For surely it was a most impious — nay, most contemptuous — thing to commit, to place the honor of divinity in the arbitration and caprice of a human verdict, so that a god might not exist except for him whom the senate had permitted to exist. Often the censors, without consulting the people, leveled shrines to the ground. Liberty's Father himself, with his rites, the consuls, by the senate's authority, banished not only from the city but from all Italy. Moreover, Varro records that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were forbidden the Capitol, and that their altars, cast down by the senate, were restored only by the violence of the populace. Yet even Gabinius the consul, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely approve the victims because of the crowd of the populace, since he had decreed nothing concerning Serapis and Isis, held the senate's censure of more weight than the impulse of the crowd, and forbade altars to be set up. You have, then, in your forefathers — if not the name, yet the sect — a Christian sect, one that neglects the gods. Of these, if you at least were unimpaired in your honors, you would be guilty of injured religion; but I find that from you proceeded an advance both of superstition and of impiety alike. For how much the more irreligious are you found! Your private gods, whom you call Lares and Penates by household consecration, you trample by household license, selling and pawning them according to need and will. Indeed, the sacrileges of such contumacy would be more tolerable, except that they are by now the more contemptuous for being trifling. But the complaints of private and household gods are aided by some consolation, that you treat the public gods more basely and more contumeliously. First of all, those whom you have entered on the auction-list, you have made subject to the tax-farmers; every five years you assign them, proscribed among your revenues. Thus the Serapeum, thus the Capitol, is sought, knocked down, leased, like the forum, under the same voice of the auctioneer, the same levy of the quaestor. But fields laden with tribute are cheaper, men's heads taxed with a poll-tax are baser — for these are the marks and penalties of captivity — yet the gods, the more they are tributary, the more holy; nay, the more holy, the more tributary. Majesty is set up for profit, the dealing is proscribed by religion, holiness goes begging for a lease. You exact a fee for the temple's site, for entrance to the sacred place, for the offerings, for the victims. You sell the whole of divinity. It is not lawful for it to be worshipped free. In short, more is paid over to the tax-farmers than to the priests. Nor did the contumely of taxed gods suffice — a contumely to be reckoned, of course, from contempt — nor are you content not to have honored the gods, but you also cheapen whatever god you have by some indignity. For what do you do at all to honor them that you do not equally render to your dead? You build temples to the gods, and equally temples to the dead; you build altars to the gods, and equally altars to the dead; you write the same inscriptions upon them, you give the same forms to the statues, according to each one's art or trade or age: an old man is figured from Saturn, a beardless youth from Apollo, a maiden from Diana, and the soldier is consecrated in Mars, and the smith in Vulcan. Nothing then is to be wondered at, if you slay the same victims to the dead as to the gods, and burn the same incense. Who could excuse that contumely, which reckons the dead, however it may, together with the gods? To kings, indeed, even priesthoods and sacred apparatus are ascribed, and chariots and cars and couches spread for sun and feast, festivities and games. Plainly, since heaven lies open to them — this too not without contumely to the gods: first, because it was unbecoming that others should be numbered with them, if it be granted to become gods after death; secondly, because the witness of a man received into heaven would not so freely and openly perjure himself before the people, did he not despise those by whom he swears, both himself and those who allow him to perjure himself. For they themselves agree that what they swear by is nothing — nay, more, they even reward the man, because he has publicly despised the avengers of perjury. Although, among you, how few are pure of perjury? Indeed, by now the danger of swearing by the gods has vanished, the greater religion being held of swearing by Caesar — which itself too belongs to the obscuring of your gods; for those who perjure themselves by Caesar would more readily be punished than those who do so by any Jupiter. But contempt is more honorable, having a certain glory of pride; for it comes sometimes even from confidence, either of conscience's security or of the mind's natural loftiness. But derision, the more wanton it is, the more marked is its bite of contumely. Recognize then how you are found to be deriders of your own deities. I do not speak of what you are in sacrificing — that you slaughter whatever is sickly and wasting, but of the fat and whole offer up the superfluous bits not fit to eat, the heads and hooves, the pluckings of feathers and bristles, and whatever you would have thrown away at home anyway. I pass over what will seem matters of the common crowd or of sacrilegious gluttony, nearly suited to the religion of the forefathers. But the most learned, the gravest — so far as gravity and prudence are believed to profit from learning — are always also the most irreverent toward your gods; nor does their literature cease to bring forward what is the more shamefully vain or false about the gods. Let me begin from your own study, that of him from whom every more wicked one dreams, to whom you adjudge as much honor as you have detracted from your gods, magnifying the man who made sport of them. We still remember Homer. He, I suppose, is the one who treated the divine majesty after the human condition, steeping the gods in human chances and passions; who, of the gods set at variance by favoritism, composed, as it were, gladiatorial matches: he wounds Venus with a human arrow, holds Mars thirteen months in chains, perhaps to perish; the same poet shows Jupiter almost suffering the like from the commons of heaven, or wrings tears from him over Sarpedon, or brings him in luxuriating most foully with Juno, with the desire of his lust commended by the commemoration and enumeration of his mistresses. Thereafter, what poet, on the authority of his prince, was not insolent toward the gods, either by betraying the true or by feigning the false? And did the tragic or comic poets spare to prelude with the toils and penalties of a god? I say nothing of the philosophers, whom pride of severity and hardness of discipline, secure from all fear, and even some breath of truth, rouse up against the gods. In short, Socrates too, to their contumely, swears by an oak, a dog, and a goat. For although for this reason he was condemned, when the Athenians repented of the condemnation, so that they even punished his accusers, the testimony is restored to Socrates, and I can turn it back, that there was approved in him what is now reproved in us. But Diogenes too made some sport, I know not what, of Hercules; and the Roman Diogenes, Varro of the pen, brings in three hundred Joves — or "Jupiters," as we must say — without heads. The other geniuses of wantonness administer even your pleasures through the disgrace of the gods. Look among yourselves at the sacrilegious charms of the Lentuli and the Hostii, whether you laugh at mimes or at your gods in their tricks and jests; but you also receive with great pleasure the writings of actors, which mark out all the foulness of the gods. Majesties are debauched before you in an impure body. A defamed and degraded head puts on the image of any god you please. The Sun mourns his son struck by the thunderbolt, while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for the disdainful shepherd, while you do not blush; and you bear to have the praises of Jupiter set to music. Plainly you are more religious in the gladiators' arena, where, over human blood, over the filth of penalties, your gods likewise dance — plots and histories devised for paying out the guilty, or the guilty are punished in the very persons of the gods. We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated; and one who was burned alive had put on the dress of Hercules. We have laughed, too, at the noonday sport made of the gods, when Father Dis, Jupiter's brother, conducts the obsequies of the gladiators with a mallet; when Mercury, winged on his bald head, fiery in his caduceus, tests with a hot iron the bodies already lifeless, or feigning death. Each of these things, who could go on to investigate, whether they disturb the honor of divinity, whether they level the height of majesty? They are surely to be reckoned matters of contempt, both on the part of those who do such things and on the part of those who so receive them. Wherefore I do not know but that your gods may complain more of you than of us. Despised on the one hand, you flatter them on the other; you buy off whatever you transgress; and finally you are permitted to do as you will to those you have willed into being. But we wholly turn away from them.

Nor are we guilty in this name only of having deserted the common religion, but of having brought in over it a monstrous superstition. For, as some of you have dreamed, an ass's head is our god — a suspicion that Cornelius Tacitus raised. For he, in the fourth book of his Histories, where he treats of the Jewish war, beginning from the origin of the nation, and arguing as he pleased both of the origin itself and of the name of the religion, reports that the Jews, on their expedition, laboring in vast places from want of water, escaped by following wild asses, which, after pasture, were reckoned to be seeking water, as guides to a spring; and that thus, for that favor, the likeness of a similar beast came to be worshipped by the Jews. From this, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as near to the Jewish religion, are initiated to the same image. But indeed the same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars — forgetting his own assertion, reports in his later books that Pompey the Great, when the Jews were subdued and Jerusalem taken, entered the temple and, searching it thoroughly, found nothing of an image. Where then would that god have been? Surely nowhere more than in a temple so memorable, especially one closed to all except the priests, where they would not have feared a stranger. But why should I defend the point, having professed meanwhile a temporary confession of all things to be transferred equally to you? Let it be believed that our god is some ass-headed figure; will you at any rate deny that you have the same things along with us? Truly you worship whole asses, with their Epona too, and all draught-beasts and cattle and beasts, which you consecrate alike with their mangers. And perhaps this is what you reproach us with — that, among the worshippers of all creatures, we alone are ass-keepers.

But he too who affirms us to be priests of the cross will be our fellow-worshipper. The cross's quality is a sign made of wood: you too worship, among your own, wood with an image. Although, just as yours has a human figure, so ours too has its own proper one. Let the outlines now look to themselves, provided the quality is one; let the form look to itself, provided it be the very body of a god. But if a difference comes in here, how much is the Attic Pallas distinguished from the stake of a cross, and the Pharian Ceres, who is represented without form, by a rude stake and a mere shapeless prop of wood? A part of a cross — and indeed the greater part — is every beam fixed in upright position. But to us a whole cross is imputed, with its crossbeam, of course, and with that projection for a seat. In this you are the more inexcusable, who have dedicated a maimed and truncated wood, while others have consecrated it full and complete. For as to the rest, the religion of the whole cross is entire among you, as I shall show. But you do not know that this very origin came to your gods from that gibbet. For every image, whether it is carved from wood or stone, or cast from bronze, or produced from any other richer material, the modeler's hand must first precede it. Now the modeler first sets up a wooden cross, since to our very body too the position is a silent and secret line of a cross. The head juts up, the spine is set straight, the shoulders' slope projects: if you set up a man with hands outspread, you will have made the image of a cross. To this beginning, then, and as it were to this prop, clay woven over it bit by bit completes the limbs, and builds up the body, and packs into the cross the shape that pleases it within the clay; thence, by compass and leaden moulds, the preparation of the image is to be transferred into marble, into mud, or bronze, or whatever it has pleased to be made a god. From the cross, clay; from clay, a god: in a manner the cross passes into the god through the clay. You consecrate the cross, then, from which the consecrated thing takes its beginning. For the sake of example it will be said: from the kernel of an olive, the stone of a peach, and a grain of pepper steeped under the earth, a tree rises into branches, into foliage, into the appearance of its kind. If you transplant it, or use offspring from its branches in another, to what will be assigned what comes from the slip? Not to that grain or stone or kernel? For when the third grade is ascribed to the second, the second is equally ascribed to the first; thus the third will be carried back to the first, transmitted through the second. Nor need we argue longer on this point, since by a natural prescription every kind whatsoever traces its reckoning back to its origin, and the more the kind is reckoned from the origin, so much the more the origin is matched in the kind. If, then, in the kind of gods you worship the cross as origin, here will be the kernel and the primordial grain, from which among you the forests of images are propagated. But here is a thing now manifest. You venerate Victories as deities, and indeed the more august, the more joyous. The construction by which they raise them up — these will be crosses; the trophy is, in a manner, the cross's inner core. And so in the Victories the religion of the camp worships even crosses; it adores the standards, swears by the standards, prefers the standards to Jupiter himself. But that whole array of images, and all that worship of gold, are the necklaces of crosses. So too in the cantabra and the banners, which the soldiery guards with no less sanctity, those streamers are the robes of crosses. You blush, I suppose, to worship crosses unadorned and bare.

Others, plainly more humanely, suppose the Sun to be the Christian god, because it is known that we make our prayer toward the part of the east, or take our joy on the day of the sun. What of this? Do you do less? Do not most of you, in the affectation of adoring, sometimes even toward the heavenly bodies, move your lips at the rising of the sun? It is you, certainly, who have received the sun into the calendar of the seven days, and have chosen, of those days, the one before it, on which you withhold the bath or put it off till evening, or take your leisure and your dinner. And this indeed you do, straying yourselves, and that from your own to alien religions. For the Jews have their feasts of the sabbaths, and the pure supper, and the Jewish rites of lamps, and fasts with unleavened bread, and prayers on the shore — things which surely are alien from your gods. Wherefore, to return from my digression, you who reproach us with the sun and its day, acknowledge your nearness to us; we are not far from your Saturn and your sabbaths.

A new report has now been suggested about our god, and not so very recently a certain most abandoned fellow in this city — himself a deserter of his own religion, a Jew only by the loss of his skin, and indeed the more so after the bites of beasts, since he goes about daily to be shaken down over his whole body by those to whom he hires himself — set up a picture against us under this title: "Onocoetes." It had the ears of a pack-mule and was in a toga, with a book, one foot hoofed. And the crowd believed the infamous Jew. For what other kind is there of sowing our infamy? And so throughout the whole city Onocoetes is proclaimed. But this too, as a thing of yesterday, and destitute of the authority of time, and weak from the character of its author, I shall gladly take up in my zeal for turning it back. Let us see, then, whether here too you are caught with us. For it makes no difference under what form, provided we tend to deformed images. There are among you gods with a dog's head, and a lion's, horned with the ox and the ram and the goat, goat-born or serpent-formed, and winged in the foot, the front and the back. Why then do you single out our one? More Onocoetes are caught among you.

If we run together in equality as to the gods, it follows that there is no difference between us as to sacrifice or rite either, so that from another aspect the comparison may be satisfied. We offer or initiate with infanticide. You, if it has slipped your memory what you have done with the slaughter of man and with infanticides, will recognize it in its place; for now we defer many things, lest we seem to be everywhere reviewing the same matters. Meanwhile, as I said, from another quarter there is no lack of equivalence. For though we do it in one way, yet not otherwise are you too infanticides — you who slay your infants once born, forbidden indeed by laws, but no laws are eluded so much, so safely, with the connivance of all, by the tablets of a single age. But it makes no difference even in this, if you slay them not by the rite of sacrifice nor to a god. Indeed, this is the harsher, that you do away with them by cold and famine, or expose them to beasts, or by a longer death drown them in the waters. And if in any way it is done more unlike among you, in this add it: that you extinguish your own offspring, and there will be made up — nay, heaped over — in you whatever has fallen short from another reckoning. But of that sacrifice of impiety we are said to sup. While that too is recognized in you, where it is more conveniently placed, we are not far separated from your voracity. If yours is unchaste, but ours cruel, we are joined, if at all, by nature, in which cruelty always agrees with unchastity. And yet how do you do less — nay, what do you not do more? You gape, of course, too little at human flesh, when you devour the living and the grown? You lap up too little human blood, when you draw out the blood that is to be? You feed too little on the infant, when you drain off the whole infant before its time?

We have come to the hour of the lamps and the dogs' service and the contrivances of darkness. At this point I am afraid I may give ground. For what such thing shall I hold against you? But now praise the design of our modest incest, that we have devised an adulterous night, lest we should defile either the light or the true night; that we have thought even the earthly lamps should be spared; that we deceive even our own conscience — for whatever we do, if we wish, we suspect it. But your incests, in their own freedom, enjoy all the light and all the night and the whole consciousness of heaven; and the more happily they come off, since you mingle openly in incest with all heaven conscious of it, you alone are ignorant of it; while we can recognize our crimes even in darkness. Plainly the Persians, as Ctesias relates, live freely with their mothers, as knowing as they are unshuddering. But the Macedonians too — this is what they made plain — openly do it, since, when first the Oedipus of theirs came on the stage, slaughtered as to his eyes, they received him with laughter and derision. The actor, dismayed, drew back his mask: "Surely, masters," he said, "I have not displeased you?" The Macedonians answered: "Nay, you indeed acted beautifully — but either the writer was most foolish, if he made up this, or Oedipus most senseless, if he did it so"; and thereupon one to another said, "Drive on into your mother!" But what little stain is one nation or another upon the whole world? We, indeed, have infected the whole sun, polluted the whole ocean. Give us, then, some nation free of those things that draw the whole human race to incest. If any nation lacks, in intercourse itself and in the necessity of age and sex — not to say in lust and luxury — it will be the one that will lack incest. If any nature is set apart, withdrawn from the human condition, so as to be exposed neither to ignorance nor to error nor to chance, it will be the one that alone can answer more steadfastly to the Christians. Look, then, at lust, fluctuating among errors like the winds, and see whether there are wanting peoples whom the broad shoals and rough places of error drive on to this crime. Above all, when you expose your infants to the mercy of strangers, or for adoption to better parents, do you forget what great matter is supplied for incest, what great occasion is opened to chance? Plainly, the more severe, by some discipline, or with sure regard, restrain such an outcome from lust in whatever place, at home or abroad — so that the scattering of seed and the leaping of lust everywhere may not produce children unknown to you, whom afterwards either the parents themselves or other children may fall upon, since even the moderation of ages is excluded by lust. However many adulteries, however many ravishings, however many wanderings of public lust, whether under a fixed or a roving title — so many minglings of blood, so many compoundings of stock, so many transmissions thence to incest. From this source veins of plots flow to the mimes and comedians; from this source there burst out, like a tragedy, that affair too, judged when Fuscianus was prefect of the City. A boy of noble birth, by the chance carelessness of his attendants, having gone beyond the door, was drawn off by passers-by and lost from his home. A certain little Greek who had reared him — or had snatched him at the very threshold, after the Greek fashion, going in — thence, his age changed, he was brought back from Asia to Rome in the slave-market. The unwitting father bought him and used the Greek; then, as had been the way, the master sent off the youth, grown up, to the country and to chains. There already for a long time the tutor and the nurse were paying their penalty. The whole story is set before them; they tell their fortunes to one another: those, that their nursling had perished in boyhood; he, that he too had perished from boyhood; but with the same outcome, born at Rome of an honorable house; and perhaps he unrolled some marks too. So, then, by the will of God, that so great a stain might be cast in the age's teeth, his breath shook with the day, the times answered with the age, the eyes too recalled something of the features, certain properties in the body were reviewed. The masters — nay, now only the parents — are driven by the diligence of the inquiry brought forward. The slave-dealer is tracked down, unluckily found. The crime revealed, the parents heal themselves with a noose; the prefect assigns the goods to the son who ill survives — not to an inheritance, but to the wages of debauchery and incest. This one example of the public eruption of such crimes lying hidden among you was enough. Nothing happens but once in human affairs. Once, plainly, something can be brought to light from the sacraments of our religion, I suppose. You aim it, and there are matches to it among you, even in things not sacraments.

As for your charges of obstinacy or presumption, if you bring any forward, not even these withdraw from the fellowship of comparison. The first obstinacy is that which is set up as second to religion toward God — the obstinacy of Caesar's majesty: that we are called irreligious toward the Caesars, neither propitiating their images nor swearing by their genii. We are named enemies of the people. So be it, indeed — since out of you, nations, there are daily made Caesars Parthian and Median and German. On this point let the Roman race see in what manner the untamed and foreign nations stand. You, however, from among our own, conspire against our own. We acknowledge, to be sure, the Roman fidelity toward the Caesars. No conspiracy ever broke out, no blood of a Caesar in the senate or in the very palaces ever fixed a brand, no majesty was aimed at in the provinces. As yet the Syrias reek with the odors of corpses; as yet the Gauls do not wash in their own Rhone. But I pass over the crimes of madness, since even these the Roman name does not admit. The sacrileges of vanity I will deal with, and recognize the irreverence of your very home-bred race — both the festive lampoons that the statues know, and those words sometimes hurled aslant, with curses, by the assembly, that resound through the circus. If not in arms, at least in tongue you are always rebels. But it is one thing, I suppose, not to swear by the genius of Caesar — for one is in doubt about perjury's right, since not even by your gods do you swear in good faith. But we do not call the emperor a god; for upon this, when the crowd says so, we make a wry face. Nay, rather, you who call Caesar a god both mock him, by saying what he is not, and curse him, because he does not wish to be what you say. For he would rather live than become a god.

The remainder of obstinacy you place under this head: that we refuse with our minds neither your swords nor crosses nor beasts, not fire, not tortures, on account of our hardness and contempt of death. But indeed all these things, among your elders and forefathers, learned not only to be despised but even to be weighed with great praise from virtue. The sword — how many and how great men, of their own will! It is irksome to recount. The cross's novelty, frequent, abstruse, your own Regulus gladly dedicated; the queen of Egypt used her own beasts; the fires, after the Carthaginian woman more steadfast than her husband Hasdrubal in her country's last extremities, Dido herself had taught men to brave. But tortures too the Attic woman wearied, denying the tyrant, and at the last, lest her body and sex should give way, spat out her own tongue, having chewed it — the whole instrument of confession rooted out. But these things in your people you reckon to glory, in ours to hardness. Destroy now the glory of your forefathers, that you may destroy us too. Be content to detract even from the praise of your parents for the present, lest you give us a place from these examples. Perhaps the very quality of the times of a sturdier antiquity demanded harder spirits. But now, in the tranquility of peace, both spirits are softer and the minds of men are milder even toward strangers. "Be it so," you say; "compare yourselves with the ancients; for us it is needful to pursue with hatred, in you, what is not approved by us, because it is not even found in us." Answer, then, to each particular. I do not demand examples in the same voice. If, of course, contempt of death made tales of the sword among your forefathers, surely it is not from love of life that you hire yourselves out by the sword to the trainers, that from fear of death you give your names to military service. If for some woman there is a famous death from beasts, in the midst of peace, daily, of your own free will, you go to the beasts. If no Regulus among you has yet engaged with the cross, the machine for fixing the body, yet by now the contempt of fire has come about, since one of you recently hired himself out, to be clothed in the fiery tunic, up to a fixed place throughout. If a woman insulted the scourges, this too one of you recently, in the hunters' ranks, after running through his round, has measured out again — to say nothing of the Laconian glory.

Thus far, I suppose, the horrors of Christian obstinacies. If we share these with you, it remains to compare the persons to be derided. Although all our obstinacy is built up beforehand from persuasions; for we presume the resurrection of the dead. The hope of resurrection is a disdain of death. Laugh, then, as much as you please at the most stupid minds, which die that they may live; but, that you may laugh the more easily and break out in the more unrestrained guffaws, snatch up a sponge or, for the moment, your tongue, and blot out for the moment your own writings, which likewise assert that souls will return into bodies. Yet how much more acceptable is our presumption, which maintains that they will return into the same bodies! But to you how much more empty a thing has been handed down — that a man's spirit will return in a dog or a mule or a peacock? Likewise we announce a judgment appointed by God, according to each one's merits, after death. This you ascribe to Minos and Rhadamanthus, the juster Aristides being meanwhile rejected. By that judgment we say that the unjust will pass eternity in eternal fire, the pious and innocent in a place of delight. Among you too the condition of Pyriphlegethon and Elysium is disposed in no other way. Nor do the mythic and the poets alone sing such things, but the philosophers too affirm the reciprocation of souls and the distribution of judgment.

How long, then, most unjust nations, will you not acknowledge — nay, more, will you execrate your own kind — if there is no difference between us, if we are one and the same? Since you do not hate what you are, rather give us your right hands, join in kisses, mingle embraces, the bloody with the bloody, the incestuous with the incestuous, the conspirators with the conspirators, the obstinate and vain with your equals. We have injured the divine powers of the gods alike, we provoke their indignation alike. You too have a third race, though not of a third rite, yet of a third sex. That is more fitly joined of man and woman, with men and women. Or is it perhaps by our very fellowship that we offend you? Equality is wont to supply the matter of rivalry. Thus potter envies potter, smith smith. Nay, by now have done with your feigned confession! Conscience has returned to truth and to the steadfastness of truth. For all these things are present in us alone, and are refuted by us alone against whom they are brought — namely, by the recognition of the opposite party, whence, knowledge being equipped, it inspires counsel and governs judgment. Your own verdict, finally, is that no one should judge a case unless both sides are heard, which in our case alone you neglect. You satisfy nature's fault, condemning in others what you do not refute in yourselves, or casting upon others the guilt that you remember in yourselves. You will be occupied with diverse work: chaste toward strangers, incestuous toward yourselves; more vigorous abroad, subdued at home. This is the injustice — that we should be judged by the knowing from the ignorant, the acquitted from the guilty. Take the beam from your own eye, that you may draw the mote from another's. Amend yourselves first, that you may punish the Christians. Unless you amend, you will not punish; nay, you will be Christians; nay, if you become Christians, you will be amended. Learn what you accuse in us, and you will not accuse; recognize what you do not accuse in yourselves, and you will accuse. From this point it now lies open to you, so far as we have been able to open it in these few little books, both the inspection of error and the recognition of truth. Condemn the truth — but only when inspected, if you can; and approve error — but only when discovered, if you think so. But if it is prescribed for you to love error and to hate truth, why do you not come to know what you love and what you hate?