Apologeticum

If you who preside over the Roman Empire are not permitted, in some open and lofty place, at the very summit of the state where you sit in judgment, to examine plainly and to weigh openly what truth there really is in the cause of the Christians; if in this single instance your authority is afraid or ashamed to inquire publicly with the diligence of justice; if, finally — as has lately happened — the persecution of this sect, too zealously pursued by the courts of private households, blocks its defence: then let truth be permitted to reach your ears, if only by the hidden path of a silent document.

Truth makes no appeal on its own behalf, for it does not wonder at its own condition. It knows that it lives as a stranger upon the earth, that among aliens it easily finds enemies, but that its lineage, its home, its hope, its favour, its dignity are in heaven. One thing for now it longs for: that it should not be condemned unheard.

What does the law lose here, ruling as it does in its own realm, if it grants a hearing? Will its power glory the more in this, that it condemns truth even after hearing it? But if it condemns truth unheard, then besides the odium of injustice it will earn the suspicion of some guilty conscience, in refusing to hear what, once heard, it could not condemn.

This, then, is the first charge we lay against you: the injustice of the hatred directed at the name of Christian. That injustice is at once aggravated and convicted by the very thing that seems to excuse it — namely, ignorance. For what is more unjust than that men should hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves to be hated? A thing deserves hatred only when it is known whether it deserves it.

But when the knowledge of its desert is absent, how is the justice of the hatred to be defended — a hatred that must be proved not by its outcome but by conscience? When, therefore, men hate for this reason, because they do not know what the thing they hate is like, why may it not be of such a kind that they ought not to hate it? So we convict them of both faults out of either one: of ignorance, while they hate; and of unjust hatred, while they remain ignorant.

The witness to their ignorance — an ignorance which, while it excuses the injustice, also condemns it — is this: that all who once hated, because they did not know what it was they hated, the moment they cease to be ignorant also cease to hate. Out of these men Christians are made, plainly upon discovery; and they begin to hate what they had been, and to profess what they had hated; and they are as numerous as we are reported to be.

They cry out that the city is besieged; that there are Christians in the fields, in the strongholds, on the islands; they mourn, as over a loss, that every sex, every age, every condition, even men of rank, are crossing over to this name.

And yet not even in this way do they bring their minds to suspect that some hidden good is at work. They will not allow themselves a juster suspicion; they have no wish to investigate more closely. Here alone human curiosity grows numb. They love to be ignorant, while others rejoice to have learned. How much more would Anacharsis have branded these men — the unwise judging the wise — than he branded the unmusical judging the musical!

They prefer not to know, because they already hate. Thus they prejudge the thing they do not know to be such that, if they knew it, they could not hate it: since, if no debt of hatred be found in it, surely the best course is to cease from hating unjustly; but if its desert be established, then nothing of the hatred is diminished, but more is acquired toward perseverance, with even the sanction of justice itself.

"But it is not good," someone says, "merely because it converts many; for how many are trained up to evil? how many desert to the worse?" Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil not even those whom it sweeps along dare to defend as good. Nature has poured over every evil either fear or shame.

In a word, evildoers long to lie hidden, shun being seen, tremble when caught, deny when accused; even under torture they do not easily or always confess; certainly when condemned they grieve. They reckon up against themselves the impulses of an evil mind, and lay them to the charge of fate or the stars; for they will not own as their own what they recognize to be evil.

But the Christian — what like this is there in him? None of them is ashamed, none repents, except only that he was not a Christian before. If he is branded, he glories; if he is accused, he makes no defence; when questioned, he confesses even of his own accord; when condemned, he gives thanks.

What kind of evil is this, which has none of the natural marks of evil — fear, shame, evasion, repentance, lamentation? What — is this an evil in which the accused rejoices, in which the accusation is what he prayed for, and the penalty is his happiness? You cannot call it madness, you who are convicted of ignorance.

If, in the end, it is certain that we are the most criminal of men, why are we treated by you otherwise than our equals — that is, the rest of the criminal — when the same treatment ought to attend the same offence?

Whatever others are charged with, when they are charged they use both their own voice and a hired advocate to commend their innocence. The opportunity to answer, to dispute, lies open, since it is not even lawful to condemn men wholly undefended and unheard.

But to Christians alone nothing is permitted to be said that might clear the case, that might defend the truth, that might keep the judge from being unjust. One thing only is awaited, the thing that public hatred requires: the confession of the name, not the examination of a crime.

Whereas, if you are trying any other criminal, you are not, upon his mere confession that he is a murderer or a temple-robber or guilty of incest or a public enemy — to speak in the language of the charges laid against us — content to pronounce sentence, unless you also demand the attendant particulars: the nature of the deed, its number, its place, its manner, its time, the accomplices, the partners.

In our case there is nothing of the kind, though it ought to be wrung from us with equal force whatever is falsely alleged: how many murders of infants each man had already tasted, how many incests he had wrapped in darkness, what cooks, what dogs had been at hand. Oh, how great would be the glory of that governor who had unearthed a man who had already devoured a hundred infants!

And yet we find that even investigation into us has been forbidden. For Pliny the Younger, when he was governing his province and had condemned certain Christians and degraded others from their rank, was so disturbed by their very numbers that he consulted the emperor Trajan as to what he should do thereafter, alleging that, apart from their obstinacy in not sacrificing, he had discovered nothing else about their rites than that they held meetings before dawn to sing to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by a common discipline forbidding murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the rest of crimes.

Then Trajan wrote back that men of this kind were not indeed to be sought out, but that, if brought before the court, they ought to be punished.

O sentence, confounded by its own necessity! He forbids them to be sought out, as though innocent, and orders them to be punished, as though guilty. He spares and he rages, he winks and he chastises. Why do you trip yourself up with your own censure? If you condemn, why do you not also investigate? If you do not investigate, why do you not also acquit? Throughout all the provinces a military post is assigned for tracking down robbers. Against traitors and public enemies every man is a soldier; the inquiry extends even to associates and accomplices.

The Christian alone may not be sought out, though he may be brought before the court — as if the inquiry had any other aim than the bringing forward. So you condemn a man brought before you whom no one wished sought out; one who, I suppose, has now deserved punishment not because he is guilty, but because, though he was not to be sought, he was found.

And so even in this you do not deal with us according to the form by which evildoers are tried: that whereas with all others, when they deny, you apply torture to make them confess, with Christians alone you apply it to make them deny. For if it were an evil, we for our part would deny it, and you would compel us by torture to confess. Nor would you think that crimes need not be sought out by interrogation merely because you were sure they were admitted by the confession of the name; for to this very day, in the case of a confessed murderer, knowing well what murder is, you nonetheless wring out the full account of what was committed.

By so much the more perverse is it, that when you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, you compel us by tortures to fall back from that confession, so that, by denying the name, we should at the same time deny also the crimes which from the confession of the name you had presumed.

But, I suppose, you do not wish us to perish, though you believe us the worst of men. For thus you are accustomed to say to a murderer, "Deny!" and to order a temple-robber to be torn if he persists in confessing. If you do not act so toward us, who are guilty, then you judge us most innocent — since, as if we were most innocent, you do not wish us to persist in that confession which you know must be condemned by you out of necessity, not out of justice.

A man cries out, "I am a Christian." He says what he is; you wish to hear what he is not. You who preside over the wringing-out of truth, in our case alone you labour to hear a lie. "This I am," he says, "which you ask whether I am. Why do you torture me to make me lie? I confess, and you torture me: what would you do if I denied?" Plainly, when others deny, you do not readily give them credence; but if we deny, you believe us at once.

Let this perversity of yours be suspect to you, lest some hidden power lie concealed in it, employing you against the form, against the very nature of judging, and against the laws themselves. For unless I am mistaken, the laws command that evildoers be unearthed, not hidden; they prescribe that the confessed be condemned, not acquitted. This the decrees of the senate define, this the mandates of the emperors. The empire whose ministers you are is a civil, not a tyrannical, dominion.

For among tyrants torture was applied even as a penalty; with you it is reserved for inquiry alone. Keep your own law for it, up to the point where confession becomes necessary; and if confession forestalls the torture, the torture is idle: sentence is what is needed. The guilty man must be discharged by the penalty he owes, not delivered from it.

In short, no one is eager to acquit him. To wish this is not lawful; and therefore no one is compelled to deny. You judge the Christian guilty of every crime — an enemy of the gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, of all nature — and you compel him to deny, that you may acquit a man whom you could not acquit unless he denied.

You play false with the laws. You want him, then, to deny that he is guilty, that you may make him innocent — and that against his will, no longer guilty even of the past. Whence this perversity, that you do not even consider this, that the man who confesses of his own accord is more to be believed than the man who denies under compulsion? Or that one forced to deny may not have denied in good faith, and, acquitted there, after leaving the tribunal, may laugh at your rivalry, a Christian once again?

Since, then, you arrange everything for us otherwise than for the rest of the guilty, bending all your effort to this single end, that we may be cut off from that name — for we are cut off if we do what non-Christians do — you can understand that it is not any crime that is at issue, but a name, which is pursued by a certain method of rival operation, whose first aim is this: that men should be unwilling to know for certain what they know for certain that they do not know.

Therefore they both believe of us things that are not proved, and refuse to have them investigated, lest it be proved that the things are not what they would rather have believed; so that the name of that rival method, on the strength of crimes presumed and not proved, may be condemned upon its own confession alone. This is why we are tortured when we confess, and punished when we persevere, and acquitted when we deny: because the contest is over a name.

In short, why do you read from the tablet, "This man is a Christian"? Why not also "a murderer"? If a Christian is a murderer, why not also incestuous, or whatever else you believe us to be? In our case alone are you ashamed or loath to pronounce the very names of crimes? If a Christian is guilty of no crime that has a name, then "Christian" is a very monstrous thing, if the crime lies in the name alone.

What of this — that most men so blindly strike at the hatred of this name that, even while bearing good witness to someone, they mix in a reproach of the name? "A good man is Gaius Seius, only that he is a Christian." Likewise another: "I am astonished that Lucius Titius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian." No one reflects whether Gaius is not good and Lucius prudent because they are Christians, or Christians because they are prudent and good.

They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and what they know they spoil with what they do not — though it were juster to prejudge the hidden by the manifest than to condemn beforehand the manifest by the hidden.

Others, men whom before this name they had known as vagabonds, worthless, depraved, brand them by the very thing they praise. In the blindness of their hatred they stumble into approval: "What a woman! how wanton, how gay!" "What a youth! how dissolute, how amorous! They have become Christians!" So the name is set down to the account of reform.

Some even strike a bargain with this hatred to their own loss, content with the injury, so long as they do not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, casts out a wife now chaste; a father, once patient, disowns a son now obedient; a master, once gentle, banishes from his sight a slave now faithful. As each is reformed by this name, he gives offence. The good is not worth so much as the hatred of Christians.

Now then, if it is the hatred of a name, what guilt lies in names? What accusation can there be of mere words, unless some sound of a name rings barbarous, or unlucky, or abusive, or indecent? But "Christian," so far as the meaning goes, is derived from "anointing." And even when it is wrongly pronounced "Chrestian" by you — for you have not even a sure knowledge of the name — it is formed from "sweetness" or "kindness." So in harmless men even a harmless name is hated.

"But the sect is hated in the name of its founder." What is new in this, if some school confers upon its followers a surname taken from its master? Are not philosophers named from their founders — Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? And from the places of their meetings and stations — Stoics, Academics? Likewise physicians from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, even cooks from Apicius?

And yet the profession of a name handed down, together with the instruction, by an instructor, gives offence to no one. Plainly, if anyone has proved the sect to be evil, and so its founder also to be evil, he will prove the name to be evil too, deserving of hatred for the guilt of the sect and its founder. Therefore, before hating the name, it was fitting first to examine the sect through its founder, or the founder through the sect.

But as it is, with the investigation and knowledge of both neglected, the name is fastened upon, the name is assailed; and a sect unknown, a founder unknown, are condemned beforehand by a mere word — because they are named, not because they are convicted.

And so, having as it were spoken this preface to brand the injustice of the public hatred against us, I will now take my stand upon the cause of our innocence; nor will I merely refute the charges brought against us, but I will turn them back upon the very men who bring them, so that from this too men may know that there are not in Christians the things which they do not know to be in themselves; and at the same time that they may blush, accusing — I do not say the best as the worst, but now, as they would have it, their own equals.

We will answer to each of the things we are said to commit in secret, the very things we find them committing openly; the things in respect of which we are reckoned wicked, vain, deserving of condemnation, deserving of mockery.

But since, when our truth meets every charge, the authority of the laws is at last set up against it — so that either it is said that nothing can be reconsidered once the laws have spoken, or the necessity of obedience is, however reluctantly, preferred to truth — I will first join issue with you about the laws, as with the guardians of the laws.

Now first, when you harshly lay it down, saying, "It is not lawful for you to exist!" — and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration — you profess violence and an unjust dominion from your citadel, if you deny that the thing is lawful for this reason only, because you wish it, not because it ought not to be lawful.

But if, because it ought not to be, you therefore do not wish it to be lawful, then without doubt what is wrongly done ought not to be lawful; and by this very fact it is prejudged that what is rightly done is lawful. If I find that to be good which your law has forbidden, surely it cannot, by that prejudgment, forbid me what, if it were evil, it would rightly forbid? If your law has erred, I suppose it was conceived by a man; for it did not fall from heaven.

Do you marvel that a man could either err in framing a law, or come to his senses in repealing one? Were not the very laws of Lycurgus, amended by the Lacedaemonians, the cause of so much grief to their author that he passed sentence on himself, in seclusion, by starvation?

Do you not yourselves daily, as experience sheds light on the darkness of antiquity, hew down and cut away that whole old and squalid forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?

Did not Severus, the most steadfast of emperors, but yesterday, after so venerable an old age, abolish those most empty Papian laws, which compel a man to take up children before the marriage of Juba could be contracted?

There were laws too by which men adjudged debtors might be cut in pieces by their creditors; yet by common consent that cruelty was afterward erased, and the capital penalty was changed into a mark of disgrace. The introduction of confiscation of goods chose rather to make a man's blood mantle with shame than to shed it.

How many laws yet remain hidden from you, in need of cleansing — laws which neither their years nor the dignity of their framers commends, but equity alone? And therefore, when they are recognized as unjust, they are deservedly condemned, even though they condemn.

How do we call them unjust? Nay rather, if they punish a name, then they are foolish too; but if they punish deeds, why do they punish deeds on the strength of a name alone, when in others they require these deeds to be proved by the act committed, not by the name? I am incestuous: why do they not investigate? I commit infanticide: why do they not wring it from me? I commit some offence against the gods, against the Caesars: why am I not heard, who have wherewithal to clear myself?

No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to be done, since neither does a judge justly punish, unless he learns that what is not lawful has been committed; nor does a citizen faithfully obey a law, while ignorant of the nature of that which the law punishes.

No law owes the assurance of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect that refuses to be examined, and is wicked if, unexamined, it lords it over men.

To go back a little to the origin of laws of this kind: there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by an emperor unless approved by the senate. Marcus Aemilius knows this, in the matter of his god Alburnus. This too tells for our cause, that with you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god has pleased a man, he shall not be a god; the god, it now appears, will have to be propitious to the man.

Tiberius, then, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, when tidings were brought to him from Syria Palestine of the things which there had revealed the truth of this divinity, laid the matter before the senate with the prerogative of his own vote in its favour. The senate, because it had not itself approved, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion, threatening danger to the accusers of the Christians.

Consult your records: there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the imperial sword against this sect, just as it was rising at Rome. But in such a man as the consecrator of our condemnation we even glory. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but some great good could have been condemned by Nero.

Domitian too had attempted it, being a portion of Nero in cruelty; but, being also somewhat a man, he soon checked what he had begun, even restoring those whom he had banished. Such men are ever our persecutors — unjust, impious, base — men whom you yourselves are wont to condemn, and whose condemned victims you are accustomed to restore.

But of all the emperors since, down to this very day, who have been wise in things divine and human, name me one persecutor of the Christians!

We, on the contrary, can produce a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most weighty emperor, be sought out, in which he testifies that the Germanic drought was broken by a rain obtained, as it chanced, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. Just as he did not openly remove the penalty from men of that sort, so in another way he openly dispersed it, by adding even a condemnation — and a harsher one — for their accusers.

What kind of laws, then, are these which only the impious, the unjust, the base, the savage, the vain, the mad enforce against us? Laws which Trajan in part frustrated, by forbidding Christians to be sought out; which no Hadrian, though he explored every curiosity, no Vespasian, though he conquered the Jews, no Pius, no truly good emperor ever pressed upon us.

Surely the worst men would more easily be judged fit to be rooted out by the best, as by rivals, than by their own associates.

Now let those most religious guardians and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions answer me, I beg, concerning their own faith and honour and obedience toward the decrees of their forefathers: whether they have fallen away from none, whether they have swerved in nothing, whether they have not blotted out all that was most needful and most fitting to discipline.

Whither have those laws gone that curbed extravagance and ambition — which ordered that no more than a hundred asses be spent upon a dinner, that no more than one hen be served, and that not a fattened one; which removed from the senate a patrician for possessing ten pounds of silver, as for a great mark of ambition; which straightway pulled down theatres springing up to the corruption of morals; which suffered the insignia of rank and noble birth to be assumed neither rashly nor with impunity?

For I see dinners now to be reckoned at a hundred thousand sesterces; and silver mines wrought into dishes — too little to say of senators, when it is even of freedmen, or of men whose backs still feel the lash. I see theatres, and not single ones nor uncovered ones either; for, lest impure pleasure should grow cold even in winter, the Lacedaemonians were the first to devise the cloak for the games. I see no distinction of dress left between matrons and harlots.

As regards women indeed, those ancestral institutions too have fallen which were the patrons of modesty and sobriety, when a woman knew no gold save on the single finger which her betrothed had pledged with the marriage-ring; when women were kept so far from wine that a matron was starved to death by her own family for having unsealed the locks of the wine-cellar; while under Romulus a woman who had touched wine was slain with impunity by her husband Metennius.

For this reason too there was even a necessity of offering kisses to one's kinsmen, that they might be judged by the breath.

Where is that happiness of marriages, prospered surely by good morals, by which for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the city no household wrote a divorce? But now in women no limb is light for the weight of gold, no kiss is free for wine; and divorce is now even a thing prayed for, as if it were the fruit of marriage.

Even concerning your own gods, what your fathers had providently decreed, you, their most obedient sons, have annulled. Father Liber with his mysteries the consuls, by the senate's authority, drove out not only from the city but from all Italy.

Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates, with their dog-headed companion, when they were forbidden to be brought into the Capitol — that is, were expelled from the assembly of the gods — Piso and Gabinius the consuls, not surely Christians, did away with, even overthrowing their altars, thereby restraining the vices of base and idle superstitions. These you have restored, and have conferred on them the highest majesty.

Where is the religion, where the veneration owed by you to your forefathers? In dress, in diet, in furniture, in feeling, in your very speech, you have renounced your ancestors. You are forever praising antiquity, and yet you live afresh from day to day. By which it is shown that, while you depart from the good institutions of your forefathers, you keep and guard those that you ought not, whereas you have not guarded those that you ought.

The very thing which you seem most faithfully to maintain as handed down from your fathers — the thing in which you have chiefly marked out Christians as transgressors, I mean the zeal for worshipping the gods, wherein antiquity most of all went astray — even though you have now rebuilt altars to a Serapis become Roman, even though you now offer your frenzies to a Bacchus become Italian, I will show in its place to be likewise despised and neglected and destroyed by you, against the authority of your forefathers.

For now I will answer that infamy of secret crimes, that I may clear my way to things more manifest.

We are called the most criminal of men, on the score of the sacrament of infant-murder, and the feeding upon it, and the incest that follows the banquet, where the dogs — the pimps of darkness, forsooth — overturn the lamps and procure a shamelessness for our impious lusts. We are always being called this; nor do you take pains to unearth what we have so long been called. Therefore either unearth it, if you believe it, or do not believe it, since you have not unearthed it.

From your own dissembling it is to be inferred that the thing is not what you do not dare even yourselves to unearth. A far different task you impose upon the executioner against the Christians — not that they should tell what they do, but that they should deny what they are.

The origin of this discipline, as we have already declared, is from Tiberius. With hatred of itself truth began. As soon as it appeared, it was an enemy. It has as many enemies as it has strangers — and properly, out of rivalry, the Jews; out of extortion, the soldiers; by very nature, even our own households.

Daily we are besieged, daily we are betrayed; in our very meetings and gatherings, most of all, we are surprised.

Who ever came upon an infant wailing in such fashion? Who kept for the judge, bloody as he found them, the Cyclops-and-Siren mouths? Who detected on the very wives any traces of uncleanness? Who, having found such crimes, concealed them, or sold his silence, dragging off the men themselves? If we always lie hidden, when was what we commit ever betrayed?

Nay, by whom could it be betrayed? Not by the guilty parties themselves, surely, since by the very rule of all mysteries the duty of silence is owed; the Samothracian and Eleusinian rites are kept secret — how much more such crimes as these, which, if betrayed, would meanwhile provoke even human punishment, while the divine is held in reserve? If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that strangers must be. And whence have strangers their knowledge, when even pious initiations always keep off the profane and beware of witnesses? Unless it be that the impious fear less.

The nature of rumour is known to all. It is your own poet who says: "Rumour, than which no other evil is more swift." Why is rumour an evil? Because swift? Because an informer? Or because for the most part a liar? — rumour, which not even then, when it brings some truth, is without the taint of falsehood, taking away, adding, altering the truth.

What of this — that its condition is such that it persists only while it lies, and lives only so long as it offers no proof; since, when it has proved its tale, it ceases to be, and, as if its office of announcing were discharged, hands over the matter, and thenceforth the thing is held as fact, the thing is named as fact?

Nor does anyone say, for example, "This is said to have happened at Rome," or "Rumour has it that he was allotted a province"; but "He was allotted a province," and "This happened at Rome."

Rumour, the name of the uncertain, has no place where the matter is certain. Or would anyone believe rumour but a thoughtless man? For the wise man does not believe the uncertain. It is open to all to reckon, however far that rumour has been spread by ambition, however firmly built up by assertion, that it must at some time have sprung from a single author.

Thence it creeps along through the propagation of tongues and ears, and so the flaw of its small seed obscures all the rest of the report, so that no one reflects whether that first mouth sowed a lie — which often happens, whether through a temper of rivalry, or the caprice of suspicion, or a pleasure in lying, not new but inborn in some men.

But it is well that time reveals all things — even your own proverbs and maxims being witnesses — by the disposition of nature, which has so ordered things that nothing lies hidden long, not even what rumour has not spread abroad. Rightly, then, is rumour for so long the sole accomplice of the crimes of the Christians. This is the informer you bring against us — rumour, which, though it once bruited the tale, and through so long a space confirmed it into opinion, has even until now been unable to prove it: so that I may appeal to the very faith of nature against those who presume that such things are to be believed.

Behold, we set before you the reward of these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it, for the moment. For of this I ask: whether you, even granting that you believed it, would think it worth so much to attain to that life with such a conscience.

Come, plunge the steel into an infant that is no one's enemy, guilty of nothing, the son of all; or, if that is another's office, do you only stand by a man that is dying before he has lived; await the fresh soul as it flees, catch the new-shed blood, glut your bread with it, eat freely.

Meanwhile, as you recline, reckon up the places — where the mother is, where the sister; mark them diligently, so that, when the darkness falls at the dogs' overturning of the lamps, you may not go astray. For you will have committed a sin, unless you have committed incest.

Thus initiated and sealed, you live forever. I desire you to answer whether eternity is worth so much. Or if it is not, then neither is it to be believed. Even if you believed it, I say you would not be willing; even if you were willing, I say you could not. Why then should others be able, if you cannot? Why should you not be able, if others can?

We are, I suppose, of another nature — Cynopaeans or Sciapods? Have we other ranks of teeth, other sinews for incestuous lust? You who believe such things of a man are able also to do them. You yourself are a man, even as the Christian is. You who cannot do them ought not to believe them. For the Christian is a man, even what you are too.

"But it is foisted and imposed upon the ignorant." For they did not know that any such thing was alleged of Christians, to be watched against by them, surely, and tracked down with all vigilance.

And yet for those who wish to be initiated it is the custom, I suppose, first to approach the father of those rites, to set down what is to be prepared. Then he says: "You will need an infant, still tender, that knows not death, that smiles under your knife; bread, too, with which to gather up the gravy of the blood; besides, candelabra and lamps, and some dogs, and morsels to make them stretch to the overturning of the lamps. Above all, you must come with your mother and your sister."

But what if they should be unwilling, or there should be none? what, in short, of solitary Christians? There will be, I suppose, no lawful Christian unless he be a brother or a son. And what now — even if all these things are prepared without the man's knowledge? Surely afterward he learns of them, and endures them, and forgives them.

They fear to be punished, if they cry out — they who would deserve to be defended; who would rather even perish than live under such a conscience. Come now, suppose they do fear: why then do they persevere? For it follows that you would no longer wish to be what, had you known it beforehand, you would never have been.

That I may the more refute these charges, I will show that they are committed by you, partly openly, partly in secret — which is perhaps the reason why you believed them of us too.

Infants were sacrificed to Saturn in Africa, openly, down to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed the very priests upon the trees of his temple — those trees that overshadowed their crimes — on votive crosses, the soldiery of our own country being witness, which performed that very office for that proconsul.

But even now this holy crime is carried on in secret. It is not Christians alone whom your gods despise; nor is any crime forever rooted out, nor does any god change his ways.

Since Saturn did not spare his own sons, he persisted, of course, in not sparing the children of strangers — children whom their own parents offered, and gladly answered the summons, and caressed the infants lest they should be sacrificed weeping. And yet there is a great difference between murder and parricide.

Among the Gauls a fuller age is slaughtered to Mercury. I leave the Tauric fables to their own theatres. Behold, in that most religious city of the pious sons of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom at his games they wash with human blood. "But it is the blood of a beast-fighter," you say. This, I suppose, is less than the blood of a man? Or is it not more shameful, because it is the blood of an evil man? At all events it is poured out of murder. O Jupiter, Christian and the sole son of his father — in cruelty!

But since, as regards infant-murder, it makes no difference whether it is committed for a religious rite or by private choice — though parricide differs from murder — I will turn to the populace. How many of these who stand around, gaping for the blood of the Christians — even of you yourselves, our most just and most severe governors — how many shall I knock at in their consciences, who slay the very children born to them?

For there is a difference also in the manner of death: surely you snuff out the breath more cruelly in water, or expose them to cold and hunger and dogs. For an older age too would have chosen to die by the sword.

But for us, murder being once for all forbidden, it is not lawful even to destroy what is conceived in the womb, while the blood is still being drawn into a human being. To hinder birth is a hastening of murder; nor does it matter whether one snatches away a soul already born, or destroys one in the act of being born. He is a man, too, who is to be one; the whole fruit is already in the seed.

As to the feeding upon blood and dishes of that tragic kind, read — somewhere it is recorded (in Herodotus, I think) — that certain nations made a covenant by drawing blood from their arms and tasting it from one another. Something too was tasted in Catiline's day. They say also that among certain Scythian tribes each dead man is eaten by his own people.

But I range too far. To this day, here among us, the blood drawn from a gashed thigh and caught in the palm, and given to be eaten, seals a man as initiate of Bellona.

Likewise those who at the games in the arena carry off with greedy thirst the fresh blood of slaughtered criminals, running down from the throat, as a cure for the falling sickness — where are they? Likewise those who feast on the wild beasts' provender from the arena, who hunger after the boar, after the stag? That boar wiped off, in the struggle, the blood with which he had been stained. That stag lay in a gladiator's blood. The very bellies of the bears are sought after, still loaded with the crudities of human flesh. So flesh fed on man is belched up by man.

You who eat such things, how far are you from the banquets of the Christians? And do those do less who, with savage lust, gape after human limbs — because they devour the living? Are they less consecrated to filth with human blood — because they lick up blood that is to be? They do not, indeed, eat infants, but rather grown men.

Let your error blush before the Christians, who do not have even the blood of animals in our edible feasts; who for this very reason abstain even from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be in any way contaminated with blood, even with blood buried within the entrails.

In short, among the means by which you tempt Christians, you offer sausages stuffed full of blood, being surely most certain that the thing by which you would make them swerve is unlawful among them. But how is it that you, who are confident that they shrink in horror from the blood of cattle, should believe that they gape after human blood — unless, perhaps, you have found it sweeter?

Indeed this very blood ought to have been employed as a test of Christians, like the brazier and the censer. For so they would be proved by craving human blood, just as by refusing the sacrifice — otherwise to be reckoned as having denied if they had not tasted, just as if they had not offered incense. And surely you would not lack human blood, in the hearing of cases and the condemnation of prisoners.

Again, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias relates that the Persians have intercourse with their own mothers. And the Macedonians too were suspected, because, when first they heard the tragedy of Oedipus, mocking the incestuous man's grief, they would say, "Drive on against the mother."

Now then, consider how much licence for the mingling of incest is given to errors, with the wantonness of luxury supplying the materials. In the first place, you expose your children, to be taken up by some passing stranger's pity, or to be adopted away into better families by men freed of their offspring. Of an alienated stock the memory must at some time be scattered; and the moment error has stumbled in, thenceforth the strain of incest goes forward, the race creeping on together with the crime.

Then again, in whatever place — at home, abroad, across the seas — lust is your companion, whose roving leaps can easily, somewhere or other, beget children unknown to you, or, by some portion of seed, scatter a race so that it meets again, through the commerce of mankind, with its own kindred, and does not recognize them in the blindness of its incestuous blood.

From this hazard a most diligent and most faithful chastity has fenced us off; and so far as we are safe from fornication and from every excess after marriage, so far are we safe also from the chance of incest. Some, much more secure, ward off the whole force of this error by a virgin continence — old men and yet boys.

If you would consider that these things are in you, you would perceive likewise that they are not in Christians. The same eyes would have reported both. But the two kinds of blindness easily run together, so that those who do not see what is, seem to see what is not. So I will show throughout. Now I will speak of things more manifest.

"You do not worship the gods," you say, "and you do not pay sacrifices for the emperors." It follows that we do not sacrifice for others, by the same reasoning that we do not for ourselves either, once we do not worship the gods at all. And so we are arraigned as guilty of sacrilege and of treason. This is the chief charge — nay, the whole of it — and surely worthy to be examined, if it be not presumption or injustice that judges: the one despairing of, the other refusing, the truth.

We have ceased to worship your gods from the time that we have recognized that they are not gods. This, then, you ought to require: that we prove that they are not gods, and therefore not to be worshipped, because they would deserve to be worshipped only if they were gods. And then Christians would deserve to be punished, if it were established that those whom they did not worship, because they thought them not to be gods, were in fact gods.

"But to us," you say, "they are gods." We appeal, and we make our appeal from you to your own conscience. Let that conscience judge us, let that condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were men.

And if it should deny it even of this, it will be convicted out of its own records of antiquity, from which it learned of them — records to which both the cities in which they were born, and the regions in which they wrought something and left traces, bear witness to this day; in which their very tombs are shown.

Shall I now run through them one by one, so many and so great — new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adoptive, private, common, male, female, rustic, urban, nautical, military? It would be idle even to recite their titles, so as to gather them into a summary; and this, not that you may learn of them, but that you may recall them.

For surely you go about as men who have forgotten. Before Saturn there is no god among you; from him is the reckoning of all your divinity, or at least of the chief and better-known. So that what is established concerning the origin will hold also of the posterity.

Saturn, then — so far as letters teach, neither Diodorus the Greek nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any chronicler of antiquities of this kind, has set forth as anything but a man; and so far as the evidence of facts goes, I nowhere find more trustworthy testimony than in Italy itself, in which Saturn settled after many wanderings, and after his Attic sojourn, received by Janus — or Janes, as the Salii would have it.

The mountain which he inhabited was called Saturnian; the city which he marked out is Saturnia even now; in short, all Italy, after the name Oenotria, was surnamed Saturnia. By him first the tablet was devised, and the coin stamped with an image; and therefore he presides over the treasury.

Yet if Saturn was a man, surely he was born of a man; and because of a man, surely not of heaven and earth. But since his parents were unknown, it was easy for him to be called the son of those of whom we all may seem to be the sons. For who would not call heaven and earth his mother and father, for honour's sake and reverence's? Or by the common human custom, by which men unknown, or appearing unexpectedly, are said to have come down from heaven.

Thus it befell Saturn, suddenly appearing everywhere, to be called heaven-born; for the crowd calls "sons of earth" those whose lineage is uncertain. I pass over the fact that men, still so rude, behaved in such a way that at the sight of any new man they were stirred as at something divine — whereas today, polished as they are, they consecrate among the gods men whom, a few days before, they have confessed dead with public mourning.

Enough now of Saturn, brief though it be. We will also show Jupiter to be as much a man, and sprung of a man, and thereafter the whole muster of the race to be as mortal as the seed from which it sprang.

And since, as you do not dare to deny that they were men, so you have established the practice of asserting that they were made gods after death, let us examine the causes that demanded this.

First of all, you must grant that there is some more sublime god, a certain master and dispenser of divinity, who made gods out of men. For neither could they have assumed to themselves a divinity which they did not possess, nor could any other bestow it upon those who lacked it, save one who properly possessed it.

But if there were no one to make gods, you presume in vain that gods were made, taking away the maker. Certainly, if they could have made themselves, they would never have been men, possessing, as they would, the power of a better condition.

If, then, there is one who makes gods, I return to examine the causes for making gods out of men; and I find none, unless that great god lacked ministers and helpers for his divine offices. But, first, it is unworthy that he should need anyone's service — and that of a dead man — when it would have been worthier from the beginning to have made some god, if he was going to need the service of a dead one.

But neither do I see any room for service. For this whole body of the world — whether unborn and unmade, as Pythagoras holds, or born and made, as Plato holds — once for all, in its construction, was found ordered and equipped and arranged with every governance of reason. What perfected all things could not have been imperfect.

Nothing waited for Saturn and the Saturnian race. Men will be foolish, unless they are sure that from the very beginning the rains poured from heaven, and the stars shone, and the lights flourished, and the thunders roared, and Jupiter himself feared the thunderbolts which you place in his hand; likewise that every fruit teemed forth from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva — nay, before that first man — since nothing that was provided for the sustenance and preservation of man could be brought in after man.

In fact, they are said to have discovered these necessaries of life, not to have instituted them. But what is discovered already was; and what already was will be reckoned not to him who discovered it, but to him who instituted it; for it existed before it was discovered.

Otherwise, if Liber is a god because he showed the vine, then Lucullus, who first introduced cherries from Pontus into Italy, was ill-treated, in that he was not therefore consecrated as the author of a new fruit, when he was its discoverer.

Wherefore, if from the beginning the universe stood equipped and disposed by fixed laws for the discharge of its functions, the ground for alleging the deification of humanity into divinity is on this side void; for the stations and powers which you have distributed to them existed from the beginning, just as they would have existed even if you had not created these gods.

But you turn to another cause, answering that the conferring of divinity was the reward of merits. And here you grant, I suppose, that that god-making god excels in justice, who did not dispense so great a reward rashly, nor unworthily, nor prodigally.

I wish, then, to review their merits, to see whether they are such as to have lifted them up to heaven and not rather to have plunged them into the lowest Tartarus — which you, when you please, affirm to be the prison of infernal punishments.

For thither are wont to be thrust the impious — those who sin against their parents, and the incestuous against their sisters, and the adulterers of married women, and the ravishers of virgins, and the corrupters of boys, and those who rage and those who kill and those who steal and those who deceive, and whoever is like any of your gods, not one of whom you will be able to prove free of crime or vice, unless you deny that he was a man.

But, just as you cannot deny that they were men, so these further marks accrue, which do not allow it to be believed that they were afterward made gods. For if you preside over the punishment of such men, if every honest man rejects the commerce, the converse, the company of the wicked and the base, while that god of majesty has admitted their equals to the fellowship of his own — why then do you condemn those whose colleagues you adore?

Your justice is an affront in heaven. Make gods of the most criminal of men, that you may please your gods. The consecration of their equals is their honour.

But — to omit the examination of this indignity — grant that they were upright and whole and good. How many better men, nevertheless, have you left in the lower world! Some Socrates for wisdom, an Aristides for justice, a Themistocles for warfare, an Alexander for grandeur, a Polycrates for fortune, a Croesus for wealth, a Demosthenes for eloquence.

Which of those gods of yours is graver and wiser than Cato, juster and more warlike than Scipio? Who is loftier than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Tully? How much more worthily would that god have waited to take up these as gods, foreknowing surely the better men! He made haste, I suppose, and shut heaven once for all; and now, no doubt, he blushes while the better men murmur in the lower world.

I cease now from this, as one who knows that I shall demonstrate from truth itself what they are not, when I have shown what they are. As regards your gods, then, I see only the names of certain men long dead, and I hear fables, and from the fables I recognize the rites.

As regards the images themselves, I find fault with nothing else than that their materials are sisters of common pots and vessels, or that, from those very pots and vessels, they change as it were their fate by consecration, the licence of art transfiguring them — and that most insultingly, and in the very making sacrilegiously; so that in truth it may be to us, above all, who are punished on account of these very gods, a consolation in our punishments that they themselves suffer the like in being made.

You set Christians upon crosses and stakes. What image is there that the clay does not first shape upon a cross and a stake? It is on a gibbet that the body of your god is first dedicated.

With claws you tear the sides of Christians. But over all the limbs of your gods the axes and planes and rasps press more violently. We bow our necks. Before the lead and the glue and the bolts, your gods are headless. We are driven to the beasts — the very beasts, surely, that you attach to Liber and Cybele and the Heavenly Goddess. We are burned with fire. This too befalls them from the very first lump. We are condemned to the mines. From there your gods are quarried. We are banished to islands. On some island, too, one of your gods is wont to be born or to die. If by such things any divinity is established, then those who are punished are consecrated, and tortures must be called divinities.

But plainly your gods do not feel these injuries and insults of their fashioning, just as they do not feel its honours. O impious voices! O sacrilegious revilings! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the same men who applauded a certain Seneca when he held forth at greater length and more bitterly upon your superstition.

If, then, we do not adore statues and frozen images, most like the dead men they represent — which kites and mice and spiders understand — did not the rejection of an acknowledged error deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we seem to injure those whom we are certain are nothing at all? What does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, because it does not exist.

"But to us they are gods," you say. And how is it that you, on the contrary, are caught being impious and sacrilegious and irreligious toward your own gods, you who neglect those whom you presume to exist, who destroy those whom you fear, who even mock those whom you also avenge?

Consider whether I lie. First indeed, since you, some of you, worship some gods, others others, of course you offend those whom you do not worship. The preference of one cannot proceed without insult to another, since neither can choice be made without rejection.

You therefore already despise those whom you reject, whom in rejecting you do not fear to offend. For, as we touched on above, the standing of each god hung upon the estimation of the senate. He was no god whom a man, being consulted, refused, and in refusing condemned.

The household gods, whom you call Lares, you handle with a household power, pawning them, selling them, sometimes turning a Saturn into a stewpot, sometimes a Minerva into a ladle, as each grows worn and battered by long worship, as each master has felt the more sanctifying necessity of his household.

The public gods likewise you defile by public right, having them as taxable wares in the auction-room. So one resorts to the Capitol, so to the vegetable-market; under the same voice of the crier, under the same spear, under the same registration of the quaestor, divinity is knocked down and let out. But fields burdened with tribute are cheaper, men's heads taxed with a poll-tax are baser (for these are the marks of captivity); whereas gods, the more they are taxed, the more they are holy — nay rather, the more holy, the more taxed. Majesty is made a thing of profit. Religion goes begging round the taverns. You exact a fee for the ground of a temple, for entrance to a shrine. It is not lawful to know the gods for nothing; they are for sale.

What, in short, do you do to honour them which you do not also bestow upon your dead? Temples likewise, altars likewise. The same garb and insignia on the statues. As was the age, the craft, the calling of the dead man, so is the god. Wherein does the funeral feast of Jupiter differ from the funeral banquet of the dead? the sacred bowl from the funeral cup? the soothsayer from the corpse-dresser? For the soothsayer too attends upon the dead.

But fitly do you assign the honour of divinity to deceased emperors, since you assign it to them while living too. Your gods will take it kindly — nay, will rejoice — that their masters are made their equals.

But when you adore Larentina, a public harlot — would it were at least Lais or Phryne — among the Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you inaugurate Simon Magus with a statue and the inscription "To the Holy God"; when you make some one or other of the boy-favourites of the court a god of the synod — though the older gods are not nobler, yet they will reckon it an insult from you that this was permitted to others which antiquity conferred upon them alone.

I do not wish to review your rites either: I do not say what you are like in sacrificing, when you slaughter every worn-out and diseased and scabby beast, when from the fat and sound victims you lop off all the superfluous parts, the little heads and the hooves, which at home too you would have set aside for your boys or your dogs, when of Hercules' tithe you place not a third part upon his altar. I will rather praise your wisdom, that you save something from what is wasted.

But, turning to your literature, by which you are trained to prudence and the liberal duties, how many mockeries do I find! that the gods clashed in battle among themselves for the Trojans and the Achaeans, like matched pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a human arrow, because she wished to rescue her son Aeneas, all but slain by that same Diomedes;

that Mars was nearly worn out by thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, lest he should suffer the same violence from the other heaven-dwellers, was set free by the work of a certain monster; and now weeping the fall of Sarpedon, now foully lusting after his sister, with mention of mistresses formerly not so dearly loved.

From that time on, what poet is not found, on the authority of his prince, a defamer of the gods? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus for the feeding of his flocks; another lets out the building services of Neptune to Laomedon.

There is too that lyric poet — Pindar I mean — who sings that Aesculapius, for the desert of his avarice, because he practised medicine to men's hurt, was condemned by the thunderbolt. An evil Jupiter, if the bolt is his — impious toward his grandson, envious of the craftsman. These things ought neither to be revealed as true nor invented as false among men so very religious.

Nor do the tragic or comic poets spare the gods, but make the calamities or errors of some god's house the preface to their plays.

I say nothing of the philosophers; I am content with Socrates, who, to insult the gods, used to swear by an oak and a goat and a dog. But for this very reason Socrates was condemned, because he was destroying the gods. Plainly, once — that is, always — truth is hated.

Yet when the Athenians afterward, repenting of their sentence, both punished the accusers of Socrates and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the rescinding of the condemnation rendered testimony to Socrates. But Diogenes too makes some sport with Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings in three hundred Joves — or Jupiters, as they should be called — without heads.

The rest of the inventions of wantonness work even for your pleasures by the dishonour of the gods. Look upon the elegant pieces of the Lentuli and the Hostilii: is it mimes or your gods that you laugh at in the jests and tricks — the adulterer Anubis, and the masculine Moon, and Diana flogged, and the reading of dead Jupiter's will, and the three famished Herculeses mocked?

The very scripts of the players portray all their foulness. The Sun mourns his son hurled from heaven, while you make merry; Cybele sighs for the disdainful shepherd, while you do not blush; you endure to have the records of Jupiter sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva judged by a shepherd.

The very fact that the likeness of your god clothes an ignominious and infamous head, that an impure body, bred for that art by effeminacy, represents some Minerva or Hercules — is not majesty violated and divinity outraged, while you applaud?

Plainly you are more religious in the amphitheatre, where over human blood, over the filth of the punishments, your gods likewise dance, supplying plots and stories to the condemned — except that the condemned often impersonate your very gods.

We have sometimes seen Attis castrated, that god of Pessinus; and a man who was burning alive had taken the part of Hercules. We have laughed too, amid the cruelties of the noonday sports, at Mercury examining the dead with his hot iron; we have seen the brother of Jupiter dragging away the bodies of gladiators with his mallet.

But who could investigate all these things one by one? If they disturb the honour of divinity, if they obliterate the traces of majesty, surely they are to be reckoned as contempt — both of those who do such things and of those for whom they do them.

But let these be sports. If, however, I add what no man's conscience will fail to recognize — that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that among the altars pandering is carried on, that often in the very lodges of the keepers and priests, under the same fillets and caps and purple, lust is satisfied amid the burning of incense — I do not know but that your gods complain of you more than of the Christians. At any rate, the temple-robbers are always caught from among your own. For Christians do not know the temples even by day; perhaps they would even plunder them, if they too adored them.

What then do they worship who do not worship such things? It is already easy to understand that they are worshippers of truth who are not worshippers of falsehood, and that they no longer err in that wherein, by acknowledging that they had erred, they have ceased to err. Grasp this first, and from it draw the whole order of our religion, when first, however, the false opinions have been beaten back.

For some of you have dreamed that the head of an ass is our god. This suspicion of such a god Cornelius Tacitus has set going.

For in the fifth book of his Histories, beginning the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, after arguing what he pleased both about that origin and about the name and religion of the nation, he relates that the Jews, when delivered out of Egypt — or, as he thought, driven out — in the vast and waterless wilds of Arabia, perishing with thirst, used as guides to a spring some wild asses which, after feeding, were thought to be seeking water; and that for this kindness they consecrated the figure of a like beast.

And from this, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as near akin to the Jewish religion, are initiated to the same image. But that same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars, to be sure — in the same history relates that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and therefore entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, found there no image at all.

And surely, if what was worshipped were represented by some effigy, nowhere would it be displayed more than in its own sanctuary — the more so because it did not even fear strangers as witnesses, vain though the worship be. For to the priests alone was access permitted; even the sight of it was forbidden to all others by a hung veil.

You, however, will not deny that you worship all beasts of burden, whole asses and all, together with their Epona. Perhaps this is why we are condemned — that among the worshippers of all cattle and beasts we alone are ass-keepers.

But he too who thinks us devotees of the cross will be our fellow-worshipper. When a piece of wood is worshipped, the shape matters little, so long as the quality of the material is the same; the form matters little, so long as it is the very body of a god. And yet how much is the Attic Pallas distinguished from the post of a cross, or the Pharian Ceres, which stand without effigy, a rude stake and a shapeless block of wood?

Every beam set up in an upright position is part of a cross. We, if anything, worship a whole and entire god. We have said that the origin of your gods is fetched by the makers from the cross. But you also adore Victories, when in the trophies the crosses are the inward frame of the trophies.

The whole religion of the Roman camp venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those tiers of images on the standards are the necklaces of crosses; those banners and ensigns of the vexilla and the cantabra are the robes of crosses. I praise your diligence: you would not consecrate crosses unadorned and bare.

Others, more plausibly and with more likelihood, believe the sun to be our god. We shall be reckoned among the Persians, if anything — though we do not adore the sun painted on linen, having him everywhere in his own disk.

The suspicion arose, in fact, because it became known that we pray toward the region of the east. But most of you too, in an affectation of sometimes worshipping the heavenly bodies, move your lips toward the rising of the sun.

Likewise, if we devote the day of the sun to gladness, it is for a far different reason than from any worship of the sun; we come, in this, second only to those who set apart the day of Saturn for idleness and feasting, themselves swerving from the Jewish custom of which they are ignorant.

But a new representation of our god has lately been published in this city, ever since a certain hireling criminal, who fights wild beasts to cheat them of their prey, set forth a picture with this inscription: "The god of the Christians, ass-begotten." It had ass's ears, was hoofed on one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga.

We laughed both at the name and the form. But they ought at once to have adored a two-formed deity, who have received gods mixed of dog's and lion's head, horned from a goat and a ram, goats from the loins, serpents from the legs, and winged on foot or back. This I have set down out of fulness, that I might leave no rumour unanswered, as though it had passed unchallenged out of any guilty conscience. All which things, having now turned to the demonstration of our religion, we have cleared away.

What we worship is one God, who out of nothing brought forth this whole mass, with all its furniture of elements, of bodies, of spirits, by the word with which he commanded, by the reason with which he ordered, by the power with which he was able — for the adornment of his majesty; whence the Greeks too gave the world the name cosmos.

He is invisible, though he be seen; incomprehensible, though by grace he be represented; inestimable, though he be estimated by human senses. Therefore is he true and so great. For what can commonly be seen, comprehended, estimated, is less than the eyes by which it is grasped, and the hands by which it is contaminated, and the senses by which it is detected; but what is immeasurable is known only to itself.

This it is which makes God to be estimated, while he cannot be estimated. Thus the force of his greatness sets him before men both as known and as unknown. And this is the height of the offence of those unwilling to recognize him whom they cannot but know.

Will you have us prove him from his own works, so many and such as they are, by which we are contained, by which we are sustained, by which we are delighted, even by which we are terrified? Will you have us prove him from the testimony of the soul itself?

Though it is pressed by the prison of the body, though circumscribed by depraved teachings, though enervated by lusts and concupiscences, though enslaved to false gods — yet, when it comes to itself, as from a surfeit, as from sleep, as from some sickness, and recovers its health, it names God, by this name alone, because it is properly the true God, this one alone. "God is good and great," and "What God shall give," is the cry of all. It bears witness to him also as judge: "God sees," and "I commend it to God," and "God will repay me." O testimony of a soul by nature Christian! In short, while pronouncing these things, it looks not to the Capitol but to heaven. For it knows the dwelling of the living God; from him, and from thence, it came down.

But that we might approach him more fully and more deeply, both himself and his dispositions and his will, he added the instrument of literature, for any who might wish to inquire about God, and, having inquired, to find him, and, having found him, to believe, and, having believed, to serve him.

For men worthy of him through the innocence of their righteousness, who knew God and could make him known, he sent forth from the beginning into the world, flooded with the divine Spirit, to proclaim that there is one only God, who founded the universe, who fashioned man from the clay (for this is the true Prometheus), who ordered the world by fixed dispositions and ends of time;

and thereafter what signs of his majesty in judgment he has put forth through rains, through fires; what disciplines he has determined for winning his favour; what rewards he has appointed for those who ignore, desert, and observe them; how, when this present age is brought to a close, he is to judge his worshippers unto the reward of eternal life, and the profane unto a fire likewise perpetual and unceasing — all who were dead from the beginning being raised and reshaped and reviewed, for the rendering of either desert.

We too laughed at these things once. We are of your number. Christians are made, not born.

Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets, from the office of foretelling. Their voices and likewise the powers which they put forth to prove the divinity remain in the treasuries of literature, nor do these lie hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, whom they surname Philadelphus, and most sagacious in all literature, when in zeal for libraries he rivalled, I think, Pisistratus, among other records to which either antiquity or some curiosity lent fame, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, then the most approved of grammarians, to whom he had entrusted the charge, requested books also from the Jews, their own native writings, which they alone possessed.

For from themselves and to themselves the prophets had always discoursed — namely, to God's domestic people, by reason of the favour shown to the fathers. They were once Hebrews, who are now Jews. Therefore both the writing and the language are Hebrew.

But that the knowledge might not be wanting, this too was granted by the Jews to Ptolemy: seventy-two interpreters were furnished, whom even the philosopher Menedemus, that champion of providence, looked up to for their agreement of judgment.

This Aristeas too has affirmed to you. So he left the records laid open, rendered into Greek. To this day the libraries of Ptolemy are exhibited at the Serapeum, together with the very Hebrew writings. But the Jews too read them openly. It is a freedom paid for by tribute; commonly they are resorted to every sabbath. Whoever shall hear will find God; whoever shall also study to understand will be compelled to believe.

The first claim to authority for these instruments is asserted by their extreme antiquity. Among you too it is a kind of religion to vouch for credit by appeal to dates. [Authority to writings is given by the highest antiquity. For the first prophet, Moses, who set forth, beginning from the past, the founding of the world and the sprouting of the human race, and presently the avenging force of the flood upon the iniquity of that age, by his prophesying down to his own time, and thereafter through his own affairs, gave forth images of things to come; and in him the order of the times, digested from the beginning, furnished a reckoning of the age of the world. He is found earlier by about three hundred years than that most ancient Danaus among you, who crossed over into Argos; he is before the Trojan war by nearly a thousand years, and therefore before Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is related that Belus king of the Assyrians and Saturn king of the Titans warred with Jupiter, it is shown that the war preceded the fall of Troy by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this Moses too was sent from God that law proper to the Jews. Thereafter many others, prophets more ancient than your writings. For even he who sang last either ran a little before, or at least kept pace in age with, your authors of wisdom and your lawgivers. For in the reign of Cyrus and Darius was Zechariah, at which time Thales, prince of natural philosophers, gave Croesus, when he questioned him, no certain answer about divinity, being troubled, no doubt, by the voices of the prophets. Solon foretold to that same king that he must look to the end of a long life, not otherwise than the prophets. So it may be seen that both your laws and your studies took their conception from the law and from divine doctrine. What is earlier must of necessity be the seed. Hence you have certain things in common with us, or near us. From wisdom, the love of it was called philosophy; from prophecy, the affectation of it claimed poetic divination. Men greedy of glory, if they had found anything, adulterated it, to make it their own. It has befallen even fruits to degenerate from their seed. By many further means I might establish the antiquity of the divine writings, were not greater authority furnished them for credit by the strength of their own truth than by the annals of their age. For what shall plead more powerfully for the testimony of these writings than the daily fulfilment throughout the whole world, when the orderings of kingdoms, the fall of cities, the destruction of nations, the conditions of the times, answer to all things just as they were foretold thousands of years before? Hence our hope too, which you deride, is animated, and our confidence, which you call presumption, is strengthened. For the recognition of past things is fit material for establishing confidence in things to come. The same voices proclaimed both parts, the same writings recorded them. With them there is one time which with us seems to be divided. Thus all that remains as yet unproved is, to us, proved, because it was foretold together with those things which then were future and have now been proved. You have, so far as I know, your Sibyl too, in so far as that title of a true prophetess of the true God has everywhere been usurped over the rest who seemed to prophesy. Your Sibyls have falsified the name of truth, just as your gods also have.]

All substances therefore and all materials, the origins, the orders, the sources of every venerable writing of yours, most nations too and famous cities, and the hoary memorials of histories, and finally the very forms of letters, those marks and guardians of things — and (I think we are still saying too little) your very gods, I say, the very temples and oracles and rites — the casket of a single prophet outdoes by ages, in which is seen laid up the treasure of the whole Jewish covenant, and thence already of ours.

If you have heard meanwhile of one Moses, he is of equal age with the Argive Inachus. By nearly four hundred years — for it is seven less — he comes before Danaus, himself the most ancient among you; he precedes the fall of Priam by about a thousand years; I might even say by five hundred more, that he precedes Homer too, having those whom I may follow.

The other prophets too, though they come after Moses, yet the very latest of them are not found later than your foremost sages and lawgivers and historians.

By what orders of proof these things can be established it is not so difficult for us to set forth as it is vast — not arduous, but for the present long. Many instruments must be sat down to, with the gesturings of fingers reckoning. The archives even of the most ancient nations must be unlocked — of the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians.

Their fellow-countrymen, through whom the knowledge was supplied, must be summoned: a Manetho the Egyptian, and a Berosus the Chaldean, but also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; their followers too, Ptolemy of Mendes and Menander of Ephesus and Demetrius of Phalerum and King Juba and Apion and Thallus, and whoever either approves or convicts these; Josephus the Jew, native champion of Jewish antiquities;

the registers of the Greeks too must be compared, that it may be made clear what was done when, and that the chains of the times be laid open, through which the numbers of the annals may shine; we must travel through the histories and writings of the world. And yet we have already, as it were, introduced part of the proof, since we have sprinkled in the means by which it can be proved.

But it is better to defer it, lest by haste we pursue it too little, or, in pursuing it, we wander too long.

We now offer more, in place of this delay, the majesty of the Scriptures, if we prove them divine not by their antiquity, supposing their antiquity be doubted. Nor is this to be learned more slowly or from elsewhere. Present before you are the things that will teach you: the world and the age and the issue of events.

Whatever is now done was foretold; whatever is now seen was once heard. That the earth swallows cities, that the seas defraud men of islands, that wars without and within tear nations asunder, that kingdoms clash with kingdoms, that famine and pestilence and local calamities and frequent mortalities lay waste, that the lowly are exchanged for the lofty and the lofty for the lowly,

that justice grows rare and iniquity grows rife, that care for all good disciplines grows numb, that even the offices of the seasons and the services of the elements swerve from their course, that the order of nature is disturbed by monsters and portents — all this was providently written. While we suffer it, it is read; while we recognize it, it is proved. A fit testimony to divinity, I think, is the truth of divination.

Hence, therefore, among us the faith of things to come also is secure, those things being now, so to speak, already proved, because they were foretold together with the things that are daily proved. The same voices sound, the same writings record, the same Spirit impels; there is one time for the divination that foretells the future.

Among men, if you will, it is distinguished, while it is being fulfilled, while out of the future it is reckoned present, and then out of the present, past. Wherein do we offend, I ask you, in believing things to come also, who have already learned to believe in them through two degrees?

But since we have declared that this sect is propped upon the most ancient instruments of the Jews — a sect somewhat new, as of Tiberius' time, as most know, we ourselves professing it too — perhaps on this score there may be some question about its standing, as though, under the shadow of a most notable religion, certainly a lawful one, it concealed something of a presumption of its own;

or because, apart from the matter of age, we have nothing to do with the Jews — neither as regards the restrictions of diet, nor the solemnities of days, nor the very seal upon the body, nor the fellowship of the name — which surely ought to be the case if we were bound to the same God.

But the common people too now know Christ as some man, such as the Jews judged him, so that one may the more readily think us worshippers of a man. Yet we are not ashamed of Christ, since it is a joy to be reckoned and condemned under his name; nor do we hold any other opinion of God. It is necessary, therefore, to say a few things about Christ as God.

The Jews of old had favour with God, where there was both notable righteousness and the faith of the original founders; whence both the greatness of their race and the height of their kingdom flourished, and such great prosperity, that out of the voices of God by which they were taught, they were forewarned concerning deserving God and not offending him.

But how greatly they sinned — puffed up by their fathers' standing to swerve aside, turning aside from discipline in a profane manner — even if they did not themselves confess it, their present issue would prove. Scattered, wandering, exiles of their own soil and sky, they roam through the world without a man, without a God for king, to whom it is not granted, even by the right of strangers, so much as to salute their native land with a footstep.

While the holy voices threatened them these things, the same voices always urged that, under the latest courses of the age, God would choose for himself worshippers far more faithful, out of every nation and people and place, to whom he would transfer his favour — a fuller favour indeed, by reason of their capacity for a larger discipline.

There came, therefore, he who was foretold by God as about to come to reform and enlighten it: Christ, that Son of God. Of this favour and discipline, then, the arbiter and master, the enlightener and guide of the human race, was announced as the Son of God: not indeed so begotten as to be ashamed of the name of Son, or of his Father's seed.

He did not, of an incest with a sister, or of the violation of a daughter or another's wife, suffer a god to be his father, scaled or horned or feathered, or a lover transformed into gold for some daughter of Danaus. These are the deities of your Jupiter.

But the Son of God has no mother of any unchastity; even she whom he seems to have had had not married.

But first I will set forth his substance, and so the nature of his nativity will be understood. We have already said that God framed this whole universe by his word and reason and power. Among your own sages too it is agreed that the Logos — that is, the Word and Reason — is seen to be the artificer of the universe. For Zeno defines this as the maker, who formed all things in their disposition; and the same is called both fate and god and the mind of Jupiter and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes gathers all these into spirit, which he affirms to be the permeator of the universe.

And we too ascribe as the proper substance of the Word and Reason, and likewise of the Power through which we have declared God to have framed all things, the Spirit, in which the Word is present as it speaks, and Reason attends as it disposes, and Power presides as it perfects. This we have learned to have been put forth from God, and by that putting-forth to have been begotten, and therefore to be called Son of God and God, from unity of substance. For God too is Spirit.

And when a ray is put forth from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; but the sun will be in the ray, because it is the sun's ray, nor is the substance separated, but extended. So is spirit from spirit, and God from God, as light kindled from light. The parent matter remains whole and undiminished, though you borrow from it many derivations of its quality; so too what proceeded from God is God and the Son of God, and both are one.

So too, spirit from spirit, and God from God, has made a second in measure, by degree not by condition; and from the parent he has not departed, but gone forth.

This ray of God, then, as was always foretold of old, gliding down into a certain virgin, and in her womb fashioned into flesh, is born man mingled with God. The flesh, furnished with the Spirit, is nourished, grows up, speaks, teaches, works — and is Christ. Receive for the moment this story; it is like your own — while we show how Christ is proved, and who among you have supplied beforehand such rival fables for the destruction of the truth.

The Jews too knew that Christ was to come — those, of course, to whom the prophets spoke. For even now they await his coming, nor is there any other contest greater between us and them than that they do not believe he has already come. For two comings of his being signified — the first, which has already been fulfilled in the lowliness of the human condition; the second, which threatens at the close of the age in the loftiness of divinity laid bare — by not understanding the first, they thought the second, which they hope to be more plainly foretold, to be the only one.

For their sin earned it that they should not understand the first — since they would have believed if they had understood, and would have obtained salvation if they had believed. They themselves read that it is so written, that they were stripped of wisdom and understanding, and of the fruit of their eyes and ears.

Him, therefore, whom they had presumed to be merely a man, by reason of his lowliness, it followed that they should reckon a magician, by reason of his power, when he cast out demons from men by a word, gave sight again to the blind, cleansed lepers, braced up paralytics, at last by a word restored the dead to life, made the very elements his servants, stilling storms and walking upon the seas, showing himself to be the Word of God — that is, the Logos, that primordial, firstborn Word, attended by power and reason and upheld by the Spirit, the same who by his word both made and had made all things.

But at his teaching, by which the masters and chief men of the Jews were confuted, they were so exasperated, chiefly because a vast multitude turned aside to him, that at last, having brought him before Pontius Pilate, then governing Syria on Rome's behalf, by the violence of their votes they wrung from him that Jesus should be given up to them for the cross. He had himself foretold that they would do so; too little, were it not that the prophets before him had done so as well.

And yet, hanging on the cross, he displayed many marks proper to that death. For of his own accord he dismissed his spirit with a word, forestalling the office of the executioner. At the same moment the day was withdrawn, though the sun stood marking the mid-circle of the sky. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold of Christ thought it, of course, an eclipse.

And yet you have that cosmic event recorded in your archives. Then the Jews, having taken him down and laid him in a tomb, beset it, with a great guard of soldiers besides, with the utmost diligence, lest — because he had foretold that on the third day he would rise from death — his disciples should steal the body away and so deceive the suspicious.

But behold, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, and the mass that had blocked the tomb was rolled away, and the guard scattered in terror; and, with no disciples appearing, nothing was found in the tomb but the grave-clothes of the buried.

None the less the chief men, whose interest it was both to spread abroad the crime and to recall the people, tributary and servile to them, from the faith, gave out that he had been stolen away by the disciples. For he did not bring himself forth before the common people, lest the impious should be freed from their error, and that faith, destined to no mean reward, should stand fast through difficulty.

With certain disciples in Galilee, a region of Judea, he passed about forty days, teaching them what they were to teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, he was taken up into heaven, wrapped round in a cloud — far more truly than your own Proculus is wont to affirm of Romulus.

All these things concerning Christ, Pilate — himself now in his conscience a Christian — reported to the Caesar of that time, Tiberius. But even the Caesars would have believed concerning Christ, if either Caesars had not been necessary to the world, or if Christians too could have been Caesars.

The disciples too, spread abroad through the world by the command of their Master, God, gave obedience; and they themselves, having suffered much from the persecuting Jews, surely for their confidence in the truth, gladly at last at Rome sowed the Christian blood through the savagery of Nero.

But we will show you fit witnesses of Christ — those very beings whom you adore. It is much, if I bring them forward, that you should believe Christians on account of those for whose sake you do not believe Christians. Meanwhile this is the order of our teaching; this we have set forth — the lineage both of the sect and of the name, with its founder.

Let no one now fasten infamy upon us, let no one think otherwise, since it is not lawful for anyone to lie about his own religion. For in saying that he worships something other than what he worships, he denies what he worships, and transfers worship and honour to another, and by transferring it no longer worships what he denied.

We say, and we say it openly, and, torn and bleeding under your tortures, we cry aloud: We worship God through Christ. Count him a man, if you will; through him and in him God wills to be known and worshipped.

To answer the Jews — they too learned to worship the Lord through a man, Moses. To meet the Greeks — Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia bound men by their initiations. To look to you also, lords of the nations — Pompilius Numa was a man, who burdened the Romans with the most laborious superstitions.

It may have been permitted to Christ too to invent a divinity — a thing properly his — not such a one as, by making rude and still savage men astonished at a multitude of so many gods to be propitiated, might temper them to humanity, which was Numa's work, but one which might open the eyes of men already polished, and deceived by their very refinement, to the recognition of truth. Inquire, therefore, whether this divinity of Christ be true.

If it is that by which, when it is known, a man is reformed to good, it follows that the false is to be renounced — that false, especially, being detected by every reasoning, which, lurking under the names and images of dead men, by certain signs and miracles and oracles works a faith in its divinity.

And indeed we say that there are certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new. The philosophers know of demons, Socrates himself awaiting the judgment of his demon. Why not? since the demon is said to have clung to him from boyhood, plainly dissuading him from good.

All the poets know them; even the unlearned crowd uses them often as a curse. For they pronounce Satan too, the prince of this evil race, with the same voice of execration, out of the soul's own consciousness. Angels too even Plato did not deny.

Witnesses to either name even the magicians are at hand. But how, out of certain angels corrupted of their own will, a yet more corrupt race of demons came forth, condemned by God along with the authors of the race and with him whom we have called their prince — the order of it is learned in the holy writings.

Now it will be enough to set forth their operation. Their operation is the ruin of man. So spiritual malice, from the beginning, took its first step toward the destruction of man. And so upon bodies they inflict both diseases and certain bitter accidents, and upon the soul sudden and extraordinary outbreaks of violence. Their subtlety and fineness gives them access to either substance of man.

Much is permitted to spiritual powers, so that, invisible and imperceptible, they appear rather in their effect than in their act, as when some hidden blight of the air casts down apples and crops in the blossom, kills them in the bud, wounds them in their growth; or as when the air, tainted by some unknown cause, sheds abroad its pestilential breaths.

By the same obscure contagion, then, the breath of demons and angels works corruptions of the mind also, by frenzies and foul madnesses or savage lusts, with errors of every kind; of which the chief is that by which it commends these gods of yours to men's captured and circumscribed minds, so that it may procure for itself its proper food of the steam and blood offered to statues and images.

And what choicer pasture is there for it than to turn man away from the thought of the true divinity by false illusions? How it works even these illusions I will explain.

Every spirit is winged. This is true of angels and of demons. Therefore in a moment they are everywhere; the whole world is to them one place; what is being done anywhere they know as easily as they announce it. Their swiftness is believed to be divinity, because their substance is unknown. So at times they wish even to be thought the authors of the things they announce. And plainly they are authors sometimes of evil things, but never of good.

The dispositions of God too they caught up of old when the prophets discoursed, and now they cull them from the readings as they resound. Thus too, gathering hence certain hints of the times, they ape divinity, while they steal divination.

But with what cunning they shape the ambiguities of their oracles to fit the events, the cases of Croesus, the cases of Pyrrhus, know. For the rest, that a tortoise was being boiled with the flesh of a sheep, the Pythian announced in the manner we have said above; in a moment he had been in Lydia. They have, from their dwelling in the air and their nearness to the stars and their commerce with the clouds, the means of knowing the heavenly preparations, so that they promise rains too, which they already feel.

They are plainly beneficent too in their care of health. For they first injure, then prescribe remedies new to a marvel or contrary to expectation; after which they cease to injure, and are believed to have cured.

Why then should I discourse of the rest of the devices, or even the powers, of spiritual deceit? — the phantoms of the Castors, and water carried in a sieve, and a ship moved by a girdle, and a beard reddened at a touch — so that stones might be believed deities, and the true God might not be sought?

Further, if even magicians produce phantoms, and defame the souls of the already dead, if they strike children into the utterance of an oracle, if they sport with many marvels by the tricks of jugglers, if they even send dreams, having, once they have invited them, the present power of angels and demons, through whom even goats and tables have grown wont to divine — how much more would that power, of its own will and for its own business, strive with all its might to work what it furnishes for another's business!

Or if angels and demons work the same things that your gods do, where then is the pre-eminence of divinity, which surely must be believed superior to every power? Will it not then be more worthily presumed that these are the very ones who make themselves gods, since they do the same things that make gods to be believed, than that gods are the equals of angels and demons?

The difference of place distinguishes them, I suppose, so that you reckon those gods from their temples whom elsewhere you do not call gods; so that he who flies over sacred towers seems to rave in one way, he who leaps across his neighbours' roofs in another; and one power is pronounced in the man who gashes his genitals or his arms, another in him who cuts his own throat. The outcome of the frenzy is the same, and the reason of the instigation is one.

But thus far words; now from this point the demonstration of the thing itself, by which we shall show that the quality of both names is one. Let there be produced here, before your tribunals, someone whom it is agreed is driven by a demon. Bidden to speak by any Christian, that spirit will as truly confess himself a demon, as elsewhere, falsely, a god.

Likewise let one be brought forward of those who are thought to suffer under a god — who, breathing over the altars, conceive the deity from the steam, who are cured by belching, who deliver their oracles by panting.

That very virgin Heavenly Goddess, promiser of rains, that very Aesculapius, revealer of medicines, supplier of life on another day to Socordius and Tenatius and Asclepiodotus who were dying — unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, then shed there the blood of that most insolent Christian!

What more manifest than this work? What more faithful than this proof? The simplicity of truth is in the midst; its own power attends it; nothing can be suspected. Do you say it is done by magic, or some deceit of that kind? You will not say so, if your eyes and ears permit you.

For what can be alleged against that which is shown in naked sincerity? If on the one hand they are truly gods, why do they lie that they are demons? Is it that they may be subject to us? Then already your divinity is subjected to Christians; nor is that to be reckoned divinity which is made subject to a man, and, if it does anything to its disgrace, to its rivals.

If on the other hand they are demons or angels, why do they answer that they elsewhere act as gods? For just as those who are held to be gods would not have said they were demons, if they were truly gods — namely, that they might not depose themselves from majesty — so these, whom you know plainly to be demons, would not dare elsewhere to act as gods, if there were any gods at all whose names they use; for they would fear to abuse a majesty undoubtedly superior, and to be feared.

So utterly is that divinity which you hold nothing, since, if it were, it would neither be claimed by demons in confession nor denied by gods. Since therefore both parties concur in the confession, denying that they are gods, acknowledge that there is one kind, that is, demons — true on both sides.

Now seek gods. For those whom you had presumed to be gods, you find to be demons. And by the same work of ours, the same gods of yours not only disclosing this — that neither they themselves are gods, nor any others — you learn at once also who is truly God, and whether it be he, and whether it be that only one whom we Christians profess, and whether he is so to be believed and worshipped, as the faith, as the discipline of the Christians is ordered.

They will say there: "And who is that Christ, with his fable? Whether a man of common condition, whether a magician, whether after death stolen from the tomb by his disciples, whether now indeed among the dead and not rather in heaven, and thence to come with the shaking of the whole world, with the shuddering of the globe, with the wailing of all men, but not of Christians, as the Power of God and the Spirit of God and the Word and the Wisdom and the Reason and the Son of God."

Whatever you mock, let them mock together with you; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from the beginning of time, the body being restored; let them say before the tribunal, if they will, that Minos and Rhadamanthus, by the consent of Plato and the poets, have this lot;

let them refute at least the brand of their own ignominy and condemnation. They renounce that they are unclean spirits — which ought to have been understood even from their food, blood and smoke and the foul pyres of cattle, and from the most impure tongues of their very prophets; let them deny that for their wickedness they were condemned beforehand to the same day of judgment, with all their worshippers and works.

But indeed all this our dominion and power over them avails by the naming of Christ, and by the reminder of those things which they expect to threaten them from God through Christ as arbiter. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they are made subject to the servants of God and of Christ.

So, at our touch and breath, seized by the contemplation and representation of that fire, they go out from our bodies too at our command, unwilling and grieving, and, in your presence, blushing for shame. Believe them, when they speak truth of themselves, you who believe them when they lie. No one lies to his own disgrace, but rather to his honour.

Credit is more readily to be given to men confessing against themselves than to men denying for themselves.

These testimonies of your gods, in short, are wont to make Christians; for in trusting them as much as may be, we believe in Christ the Lord. They themselves kindle the faith of our writings; they themselves build up the confidence of our hope.

You worship them, so far as I know, even with the blood of Christians. They would be unwilling, therefore, to lose you, so profitable and so dutiful to them; or unwilling that you, becoming Christians one day, should put them to flight — if it were permitted them to lie under a Christian who would have you prove the truth.

All this confession of theirs, by which they deny that they are gods, and by which they answer that there is no other God but the one to whom we are bound, is sufficient to drive off the charge of treason against the Roman religion especially. For if they are not gods for certain, neither is the religion for certain; if there is no religion, because there are no gods for certain, neither are we for certain guilty of treason against religion.

But, on the contrary, the reproach has rebounded upon you, who, worshipping falsehood, not only by neglecting but by openly assailing the true religion of the true God, commit against the truth the real crime of true irreligion.

Now, even granting that they are gods, do you not admit, by the common estimation, that there is someone more sublime and more powerful, as it were the prince of the world, of perfect power and majesty? For most men so dispose divinity, that they will have the sovereignty of supreme dominion to be in the hands of one, his offices in the hands of many; as Plato describes the great Jupiter in heaven, attended by an army of gods and demons alike.

And therefore (they say) those who manage affairs and the prefects and presidents must alike be revered. And yet what crime does he commit who transfers his service and his hope rather to the winning of Caesar's favour, and does not, as he confesses the title of emperor in some prince, confess that of god in him — when it is reckoned a capital offence both to say and to hear that there is another besides Caesar?

Let one worship God, another Jupiter; let one stretch out suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Faith; let one, if you so think, count the clouds as he prays, another the panels of the ceiling; let one vow his own soul to his god, another the soul of a goat.

For see whether this too does not contribute to the indictment of irreligion — to take away freedom of religion and to forbid the choice of a divinity, so that it is not lawful for me to worship whom I will, but I am compelled to worship whom I will not. No one, not even a man, will wish to be worshipped by an unwilling worshipper.

And to that end, even to the Egyptians was permitted the power of so vain a superstition, of consecrating birds and beasts and condemning to death any who killed a god of that kind. To every province too and city its own god: to Syria, Astarte; to Arabia, Dusares; to the Noricans, Belenus; to Africa, the Heavenly Goddess; to Mauretania, its own princelings.

I have named, I think, Roman provinces; and yet their gods are not Roman, since at Rome they are no more worshipped than those which throughout Italy itself are reckoned gods by municipal consecration: Delventinus of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Ancharia of Asculum, Nortia of Volsinii, Valentia of Ocriculum, Hostia of Sutrium; among the Faliscans, in honour of their Father, Curis even received the surname of Juno.

But we alone are barred from a religion of our own. We injure the Romans, and are not held to be Romans, because we do not worship the god of the Romans.

It is well that he is the God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or no. But with you it is a right to worship anything you please except the true God, as though he were not rather the God of all, whose we all are.

I seem to myself to have sufficiently proved the matter of false and true divinity, since I have shown how the proof stands — not merely by disputations and arguments, but by the very testimonies of those whom you believe to be gods, so that there is now nothing left to be reconsidered in this cause.

Yet, since the mention of the Roman name in particular has come up, I will not omit the encounter to which that presumption invites — of those who say that the Romans, for the desert of their most diligent religiosity, have been raised to such a height of greatness as to have seized the world, and that the gods are so truly gods that those flourish beyond the rest who do their service beyond the rest.

This reward, no doubt, has been paid out by the Roman gods in gratitude. Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina advanced the empire! For I would not think that foreign gods would have wished to favour an alien nation more than their own, and to give to men beyond the sea their native soil, in which they were born, grew up, ennobled, and buried.

Let Cybele look to it, if she loved the city of Rome as the memorial of Trojan stock — her own people, of course, shielded against the arms of the Achaeans — if she foresaw her crossing over to the avengers, whom she knew would subdue the Greece that had conquered Phrygia.

And so, in our own age too, she has set forth a great proof of the majesty conferred by her upon the city, when, Marcus Aurelius having been taken from the commonwealth at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy archigallus, on the ninth day before those same Kalends, on which he was offering his impure blood by gashing his arms too, gave the wonted commands likewise for the welfare of the emperor Marcus — already cut off.

O tardy messengers! O sleepy dispatches! through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death before — that the Christians might not laugh at such a goddess.

But Jupiter, surely, would not at once have suffered his own Crete to be shaken by the Roman fasces, forgetting that Idaean cave and the Corybantian bronze and the most delightful fragrance of his nurse there. Would he not have set that tomb of his above all the Capitol, that that land might rather excel the world which covered the ashes of Jupiter?

Would Juno wish the Punic city, beloved of her with Samos set aside, to be destroyed by the race of the sons of Aeneas? So far as I know, "here were her arms, here was her chariot; that this should be the realm of nations the goddess even then strove and cherished, if in any way the fates allowed." That wretched wife and sister of Jupiter availed nothing against the fates! Plainly Jupiter himself stands by fate.

And yet the Romans dedicated not so much honour to the fates that delivered Carthage to them, against the destiny and the vow of Juno, as to that most prostituted she-wolf Larentina.

It is certain that several of your gods reigned. Therefore, if they hold the power of conferring empire, when they themselves reigned, from whom had they received that favour? Whom had Saturn and Jupiter worshipped? Some Sterculus, I suppose. But afterward the Romans, with their indigitamenta.

Even if some did not reign, yet they were reigned over by others, not yet their worshippers, since they were not yet held to be gods. Therefore it belongs to others to give a kingdom, since there was a reign long before these gods were graven.

But how vain it is to set down the height of the Roman name to the deserts of religiosity, when religion advanced after the empire — or rather while it was still a kingdom! For although a superstitious curiosity was conceived by Numa, yet not as yet did divine worship among the Romans consist of images or temples.

Religion was frugal, and the rites poor, and there were no Capitols vying with the sky, but altars hastily made of turf, and vessels still of Samian ware, and the steam rising from them, and the god himself nowhere. For not yet then had the genius of the Greeks and Etruscans flooded the city with the making of images. Therefore the Romans were not religious before they were great; and therefore not great because religious.

Nay, how could they be great because of religion, who derive their greatness from irreligion? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is acquired by wars and extended by victories. Moreover, wars and victories consist for the most part in the taking and overthrow of cities. That business is not without injury to the gods. The same overthrow of walls and of temples, the like slaughter of citizens and of priests, the like plunder of sacred and of profane riches.

As many, then, are the sacrileges of the Romans as their trophies; as many their triumphs over gods as over nations; as many their spoils as there yet remain images of captured gods.

And so they endure to be adored by their very enemies, and they decree empire without end to those whose injuries rather than whose flatteries they ought to have requited. But beings who feel nothing are injured with as much impunity as they are worshipped in vain.

Certainly it cannot agree with faith that those should seem to have grown great by the deserts of religion who, as we have suggested, either grew by injuring religion, or injured it by growing. Even those whose kingdoms were melted into the sum of the Roman empire, when they lost them, were not without religions.

See, then, whether it be not he who dispenses kingdoms, whose is both the world that is ruled and the very man that rules; whether it be not he who ordains the changes of dominions, in the very seasons of the age, who was before all time and made the age the body of times; whether it be not he who exalts and abases cities, under whom the human race once existed without cities.

Why do you go astray? Earlier than some of its own gods is the woodland Rome; she reigned before she built so great a circuit of the Capitol. The Babylonians had reigned before the Pontiffs, and the Medes before the Quindecimviri, and the Egyptians before the Salii, and the Assyrians before the Luperci, and the Amazons before the Vestal virgins.

Finally, if Roman religions bestow kingdoms, never in time past would Judea have reigned — Judea, despiser of these common divinities, whose God you Romans honoured for a time with victims, and his temple with gifts, and his nation with treaties — never to have mastered it, had she not at the last sinned against Christ.

Enough of this, in answer to the charge of treason against divinity — that we may not seem to injure that which we have shown not to exist. Being therefore challenged to sacrifice, we plant our foot in resistance, for the faith of our conscience, by which we are certain to what beings these offices come, under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names.

But some think it madness, that, when we might both sacrifice for the moment and depart unharmed, keeping our purpose in our mind, we prefer obstinacy to safety.

You give us advice, of course, by which we should cheat you; but we know whence such things are suggested, who sets all this in motion, and how, now by the cunning of persuasion, now by the harshness of cruelty, it works to cast down our steadfastness.

That spirit, namely, of demonic and angelic furnishing, which, our rival because of our separation and envious because of God's favour, fights against us out of your minds, secretly inspired and suborned to all that perversity of judgment and iniquity of cruelty with which we began at the outset.

For although the whole force of demons and of spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet, like worthless slaves, they sometimes mingle defiance with their fear, and long to injure those whom otherwise they dread.

For fear too breathes hatred. Besides, their desperate condition, out of their foredoomed sentence, reckons it a solace to enjoy meanwhile their malignity, during the respite of their punishment. And yet, when they are seized, they are subdued, and they sink down to their own condition; and those whom from afar they assail, from near at hand they entreat.

Therefore, when, as in the rebellion of prisons or chain-gangs or mines or any servitude of that penal kind, they break out against us, in whose power they are, sure that they are no match for us, and that for this very reason they are the more lost — against our will we resist them as equals, and we fight back, persevering in that which they assail; and we never triumph over them more than when we are condemned for our faithful obstinacy.

But since it would readily seem unjust that free men should be forced against their will to sacrifice (for even otherwise a willing mind is required for the performing of a divine rite), it would certainly be reckoned absurd if one were compelled by another to the honour of the gods, whom of his own accord, for his own sake, he ought to propitiate — lest it should be at hand, by the right of liberty, to say: "I do not want Jupiter propitious to me; who are you? Let Janus meet me angry, with whichever face he pleases; what have you to do with me?" You have been trained by these same spirits, of course, to compel us to sacrifice for the welfare of the emperor; and the necessity of compelling is laid upon you, just as the obligation of incurring danger is laid upon us.

We have come, then, to the second charge, of treason against a more august majesty, since with greater dread and a more crafty timidity you watch over Caesar than over Olympian Jupiter himself. And rightly, if you knew it. For who of the living, whoever he be, is not more powerful than any dead man?

But you do not do this by reason rather than by regard for present power: so that in this too you will be caught being irreligious toward your own gods, since you assign more fear to human dominion. In short, among you men more readily swear falsely by all the gods than by the single genius of Caesar.

Let it first be established, then, whether those to whom sacrifice is offered can impart welfare to emperors or to any man whatever; and then arraign us for treason, if angels or demons, beings of the worst spiritual substance, work any benefit; if the lost preserve, if the condemned set free, if, in short — as is in your own conscience — the dead protect the living.

For surely they would first protect their own statues and images and temples, which, as I suppose, the soldiers of the Caesars keep safe by their watches. Nay, I think these very materials come from the metals of the Caesars, and whole temples stand by the nod of Caesar.

In short, many gods have had Caesar for an enemy. It tells for our case, if also for a friend, when he confers on them some bounty or privilege. How then shall those who are in Caesar's power, and wholly his, have Caesar's welfare in their power, so that they may seem able to bestow that which they themselves more easily obtain from Caesar?

For this reason, then, we are said to commit treason against the majesty of the emperor, because we do not subject him to his own things, because we do not make a mockery of the office of guarding his welfare — we who do not think it lies in hands of lead.

But you are the religious ones, who seek it where it is not, who ask it of those who cannot give it, passing over him in whose power it is; and, what is more, you make war upon those who know how to ask it, who can even obtain it, since they know how to ask.

For we, on behalf of the welfare of the emperors, invoke the eternal God, the true God, the living God, whom even the emperors themselves prefer to have propitious to them above all others. They know who gave them the empire; they know, as they are men, who gave them their life too; they feel that he is the only God, in whose power alone they are, after whom they are second, before whom and above all gods they are first. Why not? since they are above all men, who at least live, and are above the dead.

They reflect how far the powers of their empire avail, and so they understand God; against whom they cannot prevail, by him they recognize that they prevail. Let the emperor make war on heaven; let him lead heaven captive in his triumph; let him set watches over heaven, lay tributes on heaven. He cannot.

He is great for this reason, that he is less than heaven. For he himself is his whose is both heaven and every creature. He is emperor from him from whom he was a man before he was emperor; from him is his power, from whom is also his breath.

Looking up thither, we Christians, with hands outspread, because they are harmless; with head bare, because we are not ashamed; in fine, without a prompter, because we pray from the heart — are ever making supplication for all emperors. We ask for them long life, a secure empire, a safe house, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world — whatever a man and a Caesar can wish for.

These things I cannot ask of any other than him from whom I know I shall obtain them, since he it is who alone bestows them, and I am he to whom the obtaining is due — his servant, who alone observe him, who for his discipline am put to death, who offer to him a rich and a greater victim than he himself commanded, prayer sent up from a chaste body, from an innocent soul, from a holy spirit;

not grains of incense worth a single as, the tears of an Arabian tree, nor two drops of wine, nor the blood of a worthless ox longing to die, and, after all this filth, a foul conscience too: so that I marvel, when victims are tested among you by the most vicious of priests, why it is the entrails of the victims rather than of the sacrificers themselves that are examined.

So then, while we are stretched out toward God, let the claws dig us, the crosses hang us, the fires lap us, the swords cut off our throats, the beasts leap upon us: the very posture of a praying Christian is ready for every torment. Do this, good governors; wring out the soul that is making supplication to God for the emperor. Here will be the crime — where there is the truth of God and devotion.

We have now, you say, been flattering the emperor, and have lied about the prayers we spoke, to escape, of course, your violence. Plainly that deceit profits us: for you allow us to prove whatever we maintain. You, therefore, who thought that we care nothing for the welfare of the Caesars, look into the words of God, our writings, which we ourselves neither suppress, and which many accidents pass on to outsiders.

Know from them that it is enjoined upon us, to the overflowing of kindness, to pray to God even for our enemies, and to invoke good upon our persecutors. Who are more the enemies and persecutors of Christians than those on whose majesty we are arraigned for treason?

But even by name and expressly: "Pray," he says, "for kings and for princes and powers, that all may be peaceful for you." For when the empire is shaken, and its other members too are shaken, surely we also, though we be reckoned strangers to the crowds, are found in some place of the calamity.

There is also another and a greater necessity for us of praying for the emperors, and indeed for the whole state of the empire and the affairs of Rome: in that we know that the mighty force which threatens the whole world, and the very close of the age menacing dreadful disasters, is delayed by the respite the Roman empire affords. And so we are unwilling to experience it; and, while we pray that it be deferred, we favour the long continuance of Rome.

But we swear too — not, indeed, by the genii of the Caesars, but by their welfare, which is more august than all genii. Do you not know that genii are called demons, and thence, by a diminutive word, demonia? We look up to the judgment of God in the emperors, who has set them over the nations.

We know to be in them that which God has willed; and therefore we wish that to be safe which God has willed, and we hold this for a great oath. But demons — that is, genii — we are accustomed to adjure, in order to drive them out of men, not to swear by them, so as to confer on them the honour of divinity.

But why should I say more of the religion and piety of the Christian toward the emperor, whom we are bound to look up to as one whom our Lord has chosen — so that I might rightly say, "Caesar is more ours, appointed by our God"?

And therefore, as more my own, I do more for his welfare; since I not only ask it of him who can grant it, or ask it as one who deserves to obtain it, but also, in that I keep the majesty of Caesar below God, I the more commend him to God, to whom alone I subject him. But I subject him to one to whom I do not make him equal.

For I will not call the emperor God — either because I do not know how to lie, or because I do not dare to mock him, or because not even he himself will wish to be called God. If he is a man, it is the interest of a man to yield to God. Let him be content to be called emperor. That too is a great name, which is handed down by God. He who calls him God denies that he is emperor; unless he be a man, he is not emperor.

That he is a man he is reminded even while he is triumphing in that most exalted chariot. For it is suggested to him from behind: "Look back behind you! Remember that you are a man!" And surely he rejoices the more that he flashes with such great glory, that the reminder of his condition is necessary to him. He would be less, if he were then called God, because he would not be truly called so. He is greater who is called back, lest he think himself a god.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, did not even wish to be called Lord; for this too is a name of God. I will indeed call the emperor Lord, but in the common manner, but when I am not forced to call him Lord in God's stead. For the rest, I am free toward him. For my Lord is one, the almighty and eternal God, the same who is his Lord too.

He who is father of his country — how is he its lord? But the name of affection is also more welcome than that of power. Even in a household men are called fathers rather than lords. So far is it from being right that the emperor should be called God, a thing that cannot be believed without not only the most shameful but even a pernicious flattery.

As if, having one emperor, you should call another by that name — would you not contract the greatest and most implacable offence of the one whom you have, an offence to be feared even by the very man whom you so called? Be religious toward God, you who would have him propitious to the emperor. Cease to believe another to be God, and so to call him God who has need of God.

If such flattery does not blush at its lie, calling a man God, let it at least fear the ill omen. It is a curse to call Caesar God before his apotheosis.

For this reason, then, the Christians are public enemies — because they do not pay the emperors honours that are vain or false or rash; because, as men of a true religion, they celebrate their festivals with the conscience rather than with the wantonness of the soul.

A great service, no doubt, to bring out braziers and couches into the public street, to feast from street to street, to make the city wear the look of a tavern, to work mud out of wine, to run in troops to insults, to indecencies, to the enticements of lust! Is public joy thus expressed by public disgrace? Do those things befit the festal days of princes which befit no other days?

Shall those who keep observance out of regard for Caesar, desert it for Caesar's sake; and shall licence in evil morals be piety, and the occasion of luxury be reckoned religion?

O how deservedly are we to be condemned! For why do we keep the vows and joys of the Caesars chaste and sober and upright? Why on a glad day do we not shade our doorposts with laurels, nor break the daylight with lamps? It is an honourable thing, when a public festival requires it, to clothe your house with the garb of some new brothel!

Yet in this matter too, of the second majesty — on which we Christians are arraigned for a second sacrilege, in that we do not celebrate the festivals of the Caesars together with you, in a fashion which neither modesty nor decency nor chastity permits to be celebrated, but to which the occasion of pleasure rather than any worthy reason has persuaded — I would willingly show forth your good faith and truth, lest perhaps even here those should be found worse than Christians who refuse to have us reckoned Romans, but would have us reckoned enemies of the Roman princes.

I call the very Quirites to witness, the very native rabble of the seven hills: does that Roman tongue spare any Caesar of theirs? Witness is the Tiber, and the schools of the beasts.

Now if nature had spread over our breasts some translucent substance, like glass, to let them be seen through, whose heart would not be found graven with the spectacle of one new Caesar after another presiding over the dividing-out of the largess? Even at that very hour when they cry out: "From our years may Jupiter add to your years!" — these things a Christian no more knows how to utter than to wish for a new Caesar.

"But it is the rabble," you say. Rabble though they be, yet they are Romans; and there are none who clamour more for Christians than the rabble. Plainly the other orders, in proportion to their authority, are religious from conscience. Nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the knights, from the camp, from the very palace.

Whence the Cassii and Nigers and Albini? Whence those who beset Caesar between two laurel groves? Whence those who practise the wrestler's art to strangle him? Whence those who in arms break into the palace, bolder than all your Sigerii and Partheniï? From among the Romans, if I mistake not — that is, from among non-Christians.

And to that very point, up to the very outbreak of their impiety, they were all making sacrifices for the welfare of the emperor and swearing by his genius, some without, some within; and surely they were giving the name of public enemies to the Christians.

But those too who are now daily detected as partners or applauders of those wicked factions — that gleaning of parricides surviving after the vintage — how with the freshest and most leafy laurels did they screen their doorposts, how with the loftiest and brightest lamps did they becloud their porches, how with the most ornate and proudest couches did they divide the forum among themselves, not to celebrate the public joys, but to learn beforehand their own vows in another's festival, and to inaugurate the example and image of their hope, changing in their hearts the name of the prince!

The same offices are rendered by those who consult astrologers and soothsayers and augurs and magicians about the life of the Caesars — arts which, as being betrayed by deserter angels and forbidden by God, Christians do not employ even in their own affairs. But who has need to pry into the welfare of Caesar, except one by whom something is plotted or wished against it, or hoped and waited for after it? For one does not consult about dear ones in the same spirit as about masters. The anxiety of kinship is one thing, that of servitude another.

If these things are so, that those are detected as enemies who were called Romans, why are we, who are reckoned enemies, denied to be Romans? We cannot both be not Romans and be enemies, when those are found to be enemies who were held to be Romans.

So far is it true that the piety and religion and faith owed to emperors does not consist in offices of this kind, by which hostility too can the rather perform its part as a veil for itself, but in those morals by which divinity commands that loyalty be shown as truly toward all men as it must of necessity be shown toward emperors.

For these works of a good mind are not owed by us to emperors alone. We perform no good under exception of persons, because we do it for ourselves, who look for no payment of praise or reward from man, but from God, the exactor and rewarder of an impartial benevolence.

We are the same toward emperors as toward our neighbours. For to wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of anyone, we are equally forbidden. Whatever is not lawful against the emperor, that is not lawful against anyone; what is lawful against no one, is for that reason perhaps the more not lawful against him who through God is so great.

If we are bidden, as we have said above, to love our enemies, whom have we to hate? Likewise, if, when wronged, we are forbidden to return the like, lest by the deed we become their equals, whom can we injure?

For of this take note among yourselves. How often do you rage savagely against the Christians, partly out of your own minds, partly in obedience to the laws? How often too, even without regard to you, the hostile rabble assails us of its own right with stones and fires? With the very frenzies of the Bacchanals they do not spare even the dead Christians, but tear them from the rest of the tomb, from the asylum, as it were, of death, mangle and rend them in pieces, now no longer whole, now no longer themselves.

Yet what, from men so banded together, so resolved even to death for their wrong, has ever been requited in return — when even one night, with a few little torches, could work an abundance of vengeance, if among us it were lawful to pay back evil with evil? But far be it that a divine sect should avenge itself by human fire, or grieve to suffer that in which it is proved.

For if we wished to act as open enemies, and not merely as secret avengers, would there be wanting to us the strength of numbers and forces? The Moors, no doubt, and the Marcomanni, and the Parthians themselves, or any nations whatever, however great, yet of one place and within their own boundaries, are more numerous than the people of the whole world! We are of yesterday, and we have filled all that is yours: cities, islands, strongholds, towns, market-places, the very camps, tribes, town-councils, the palace, the senate, the forum. We have left you only your temples.

For what war should we not have been fit, not ready, even though unequal in forces — we who are so willingly slaughtered — were it not that, by our discipline, it is more permitted to be slain than to slay?

We could, even without arms, and without rebellion, merely by parting from you in the discord of mere separation, have fought against you. For if so great a force of men had broken away from you into some remote corner of the world, surely the loss of so many citizens, of whatever sort, would have put your dominion to shame; nay, it would even have punished you by that very desolation.

Without doubt you would have been terrified at your solitude, at the silence of affairs, and a kind of stupor as of a dead world. You would have sought whom you might rule. More enemies than citizens would have remained to you.

For now you have fewer enemies, by reason of the multitude of Christians, when almost all the citizens of almost all the cities are Christians. But you have preferred to call them enemies of the human race rather than of human error.

And who would snatch you from those hidden enemies, everywhere laying waste your minds and your health — I mean from the assaults of the demons, which we drive off from you without reward, without pay? This alone would have sufficed for our vengeance, that thereafter the possession would lie open and empty to the unclean spirits.

Yet, reckoning nothing of the recompense of so great a protection, you have preferred to judge a people not only not troublesome, but even necessary, to be your enemies — as indeed we are, but not of the human race, but rather of its error.

Ought not, then, this sect to be reckoned, with a little more leniency, among the lawful associations, seeing that nothing of the kind is committed by it which is wont to be feared from unlawful associations?

For, unless I am mistaken, the cause for forbidding associations rests upon a provident care for public order, lest the city be torn into factions — a thing which might easily disturb the assemblies, the councils, the senate-houses, the gatherings, even the public shows, by the clashing emulation of rival enthusiasms, especially now that men had begun to make their violence a thing of profit, venal and for hire.

But for us, who are cold to all ardour of glory and dignity, there is no need of combination; nor is anything more foreign to us than public affairs. We acknowledge one commonwealth of all: the world.

Likewise we renounce your spectacles, in the same degree as we renounce their origins, which we know to be conceived of superstition, while we hold ourselves aloof from the very matters with which they are transacted. We have nothing to say, to see, to hear, of the madness of the circus, of the shamelessness of the theatre, of the atrocity of the arena, of the vanity of the gymnasium. How do we offend you, if we presume other pleasures?

If we will not know amusements, the injury, if anything, is our own, not yours. But we reject what pleases you; nor do our things delight you. Yet it was permitted to the Epicureans to decree a certain truth of pleasure — that is, equanimity of mind. . .

I will now myself set forth the doings of the Christian society, so that, having refuted the evil, I may show the good. We are a body knit together by the consciousness of our religion, by the unity of our discipline, by the bond of our hope.

We meet together in an assembly and congregation, that, as it were with marshalled forces, we may besiege God with our prayers. This violence is pleasing to God. We pray too for the emperors, for their ministers and the powers, for the state of the world, for the quiet of affairs, for the delay of the end.

We come together for the recollection of the divine writings, if the character of the present times compels us either to forewarn or to recall anything. At all events, we feed our faith with the holy words, we lift up our hope, we fix our confidence, and none the less we make firm our discipline by the inculcation of the precepts. There too are exhortations, chastisements, and the divine censure.

For judgment is passed with great weight, as among men sure of God's sight; and it is the highest foretaste of the judgment to come, if anyone has so sinned that he is banished from the communion of prayer and of the assembly and of all holy intercourse. Approved elders preside, having obtained that honour not by price but by witness of character. For no affair of God's stands by price.

And even if there is a kind of treasury, it is not gathered from any sum paid for office, as though religion were a thing put up for sale. Each man lays by a modest contribution on a fixed day of the month, or when he will, and only if he will, and only if he can; for no one is compelled, but each contributes of his own accord. These are, as it were, the deposits of piety.

For from them nothing is spent on feasts, nor on drinking-bouts, nor on thankless eating-houses, but on the feeding and burying of the poor, on boys and girls destitute of property and parents, and on aged servants of the house, likewise on the shipwrecked, and on any who are in the mines, or in the islands, or in prison — provided it be for the cause of God's sect — these become the foster-children of their own confession.

But it is chiefly this work of love that fixes a brand upon us in the eyes of some. "See," they say, "how they love one another" — for they themselves hate one another — "and how they are ready to die for one another" — for they themselves will be readier to kill one another.

And as for our calling one another brothers, they rave, I suppose, for no other reason than that among themselves every name of kinship is feigned out of mere affection. But we are your brothers too, by the right of nature, our one mother — though you are scarcely men, being evil brothers.

But how much more worthily are they both called and held brothers who have acknowledged one Father, God, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who from one womb of the same ignorance have started in terror toward the one light of truth!

But perhaps we are thought less legitimate, because no tragedy cries out about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers from the common family substance — which among you generally dissolves brotherhood.

And so we, who are blended in mind and soul, have no doubt about sharing our goods. All things are undivided among us, except our wives.

In that one matter we break off our fellowship, in which alone the rest of men exercise fellowship — men who not only usurp the marriages of their friends, but most patiently furnish their own to their friends; out of that, I suppose, discipline of the greatest and wisest of men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends the wives they had married, that children might be begotten elsewhere too — against the wives' will, I do not know.

For why should they care about chastity, which their husbands had so easily given away? O example of Attic wisdom, of Roman gravity! — the philosopher and the censor turned panders!

What wonder, then, if so great a love holds its banquets together? For our little suppers, too, besides being defamed as criminal, you brand as extravagant. Of us, no doubt, was the saying of Diogenes spoken: "The Megarians provide as though they were to die tomorrow, but build as though they were never to die." But a man more readily spies the straw in another's eye than the beam in his own.

With so many tribes and wards and town-councils belching, the air turns sour; the Salii, when they are to dine, will need a creditor; the keepers of the books will reckon up the cost of the tithes and offerings of Hercules; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries, a levy of cooks is proclaimed; at the smoke of a feast of Serapis the firemen will be roused. It is only about the dining-room of the Christians that question is raised.

Our supper shows its meaning by its name. It is called by the word which among the Greeks means love. However much it cost, it is gain to make outlay in the name of piety, since with this refreshment we help all the needy — not in the way in which, among you, parasites contend for the glory of selling their freedom to be fattened amid insults, under the bond of their belly, but in the way in which, before God, greater regard is had to the lowly.

If the cause of our banquet is honourable, judge the rest of its order by that cause. Whatever is of the office of religion admits nothing of vileness, nothing of immodesty. We do not recline before prayer to God is first tasted. As much is eaten as satisfies the hungry; as much is drunk as is profitable to the chaste.

So they are satisfied, as men who remember that even through the night they must worship God; so they converse, as men who know that the Lord hears. After water for the hands, and lights, each is invited into the midst to sing to God, as he can, from the holy Scriptures or from his own talent; hence it is proved how he has drunk.

Prayer likewise closes the feast. Thence we depart, not into bands of cut-throats, nor gangs of vagabonds, nor outbreaks of wantonness, but to the same care of modesty and chastity, as men who have feasted not so much on a supper as on a discipline.

This gathering of Christians may indeed deservedly be called unlawful, if it is like the unlawful ones; deservedly condemned, if anyone complains of it on the ground on which complaint is made against factions.

To whose ruin have we ever met? We are, when assembled, the same that we are when dispersed; the same all together that we are singly — injuring no one, grieving no one. When the upright, when the good, when the pious, when the chaste come together, it is not to be called a faction, but a court.

On the contrary, the name of faction is to be applied to those who conspire in hatred of the good and the upright, who clamour against the blood of the innocent, alleging in defence of their hatred that empty plea too, that they think the Christians the cause of every public calamity, of every misfortune of the people.

If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky has stood still, if the earth has moved, if there is famine, if there is plague — at once the cry is "The Christians to the lion!" So many to a single one?

I ask you, before Tiberius — that is, before the coming of Christ — how many disasters fell upon the world and the cities? We read that Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos, islands, perished with many thousands of men.

Plato relates too that a land greater than Asia or Africa was snatched away by the Atlantic sea. An earthquake too drank up the Corinthian sea, and the force of the waves carried off Lucania, cut away under the name of Sicily. These things surely could not have happened without injury to the inhabitants.

But where then were — I will not say the Christians, the despisers of your gods — but your gods themselves, when the deluge blotted out the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the level country?

For that they are later than the disaster of the flood, the very cities testify in which they were born and died, even those which they founded; for these would not otherwise remain to this day, were they not themselves later than that calamity.

Not yet had Palestine received the Jewish swarm from Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian sect settled there, when a fiery rain burned up Sodom and Gomorrah, regions bordering upon it. The earth still smells of the burning; and if there are any fruits of trees there, they make an attempt only to the eye, but, being touched, they crumble to ashes.

But neither did Tuscany then, nor Campania, complain of the Christians, when fire from heaven overwhelmed Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain overwhelmed Pompeii. No one as yet at Rome worshipped the true God, when Hannibal at Cannae measured out his slaughter of the Romans by the bushel of their rings.

All your gods were worshipped by all, when the Senones seized the very Capitol. And it is well that, if any disaster befell the cities, the same calamity fell upon the temples as upon the walls; so that I now convict them of the fact that these things do not come from the gods, since they fell upon them too.

The human race has always deserved ill of God. First, indeed, as undutiful toward him, since, when it understood him in part, it did not seek him out, but even devised for itself besides other gods to worship; and then, in that, by not seeking out the master of innocence and the judge and exactor of guilt, it grew hardened in every vice and crime.

But if it had sought him out, it would have followed that it should know him whom it sought, and observe him whom it knew, and find him propitious rather than angry whom it observed. It ought, therefore, now also to know him as angry whom it has always known so of old, before the Christians were named.

Whose blessings it enjoyed before it fashioned gods for itself, why does it not understand that its evils too come from him whose blessings it did not feel to be his? It is guilty toward him toward whom it is also ungrateful.

And yet, if we compare the former disasters, lighter ones now befall, ever since the world received the Christians from God. For from that time both innocence has tempered the iniquities of the age, and there have begun to be intercessors with God.

In short, when summer suspends its winter rains, and the year is in anxiety, you indeed, daily fed and ready straightway to dine, with your baths and taverns and brothels in full work, offer rain-sacrifices to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions to the people, seek heaven at the Capitol, look for clouds from the panelled ceilings — turned away from God himself and from heaven;

but we, parched with fasts and wrung dry by all continence, deferred from every fruit of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, beat at heaven with our complaint, we touch God; and when we have wrung out mercy, Jupiter is honoured!

You, then, are the troublers of human affairs, you the lure that ever draws on the public misfortunes — among whom God is spurned and statues are adored. For it ought to be held more credible that he is angry who is neglected than those who are worshipped; or else those gods are most unjust, if for the sake of the Christians they harm even their own worshippers, whom they ought to set apart from the deserts of the Christians.

"This," you say, "may be turned back upon your God too, if he likewise suffers his own worshippers also to be harmed for the sake of the profane." Admit first his dispensations, and you will not turn it back.

For he who has once for all appointed an eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation, which is the condition of judgment, before the end of the age. He is meanwhile impartial over the whole human race, both indulgent and rebuking. He has willed both prosperity to be common to the profane and adversity to his own, that by an equal fellowship we might all experience both his leniency and his severity.

Because we have learned these things from him, we love his leniency, we fear his severity; you, on the contrary, despise both. And it follows that all the strokes of the age come upon us, if anything, by way of warning, and upon you from God by way of chastisement.

And yet we are in no way harmed. First, because nothing concerns us in this age, save to depart from it as quickly as we may; and then, because, if any adversity is inflicted, it is set down to your deserts. But even if some calamities touch us too, as cleaving close to you, we rejoice the rather at the recognition of the divine predictions, confirming, namely, the confidence and the faith of our hope.

But if from those whom you worship all your evils come upon you for our sake, why do you persist in worshipping beings so thankless, so unjust, who ought rather to have helped and championed you in the suffering of the Christians?

But under another head of injuries too we are arraigned, and are said to be unprofitable in business. How so — men who live among you, of the same food, dress, furniture, of the same necessity for life? For we are not Brahmans, nor gymnosophists of the Indians, dwellers in the woods and exiles from life.

We remember that we owe thanks to God, our Lord and Creator; we reject no fruit of his works; we only temper ourselves, lest we use them beyond measure or amiss. And so it is not without your forum, not without your meat-market, not without your baths, shops, workshops, inns, market-days, and the rest of your commerce, that we dwell together with you in this world.

We sail too with you, and serve in the army, and till the ground, and trade; and besides we share our skills, and make our works public for your use. How we can seem unprofitable to your business, with whom and from whom we live, I do not know.

But if I do not frequent your ceremonies, yet on that day too I am a man. I do not bathe at dawn on the Saturnalia, lest I lose both night and day; yet I bathe at an honourable and a wholesome hour, which keeps me both my heat and my blood: I can be stiff and pale after the bath when I am dead.

I do not recline in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom of the beast-fighters at their last supper; yet wherever I dine, I dine from your stores.

I do not buy a garland for my head. What is it to you how I use the flowers, which I buy none the less? I think they are more pleasant free and loose and straying everywhere. But even if they are forced into a garland, we know a garland by the nose; let those look to it who smell it through their hair.

We do not meet at the spectacles; yet the wares that are sold at those gatherings, if I desire them, I will take more freely in their own proper places. Incense indeed we do not buy. If the Arabias complain, let the Sabaeans know that more and dearer of their wares are lavished on burying Christians than on fumigating the gods.

"At any rate," you say, "the temple revenues daily dwindle: how few there are now who throw in their contribution!" For we cannot suffice to bring help both to men and to your begging gods; nor do we think that it should be imparted to others than those who ask. Let Jupiter, then, hold out his hand and receive; for meanwhile our compassion spends more from street to street than your religion from temple to temple.

But the rest of the revenues will give thanks to the Christians, who pay what is due in good faith, even as we abstain from defrauding another of his own; so that, if it were reckoned how much is lost to the revenues by the fraud and falsehood of your declarations, the account could easily be balanced, the complaint under one head being made good by the gain on all the other accounts.

I will frankly confess who they are, if any, who could perhaps truly complain of the unprofitableness of Christians. The first will be pimps, panders, and procurers' touts; then assassins, poisoners, magicians; likewise soothsayers, diviners, and astrologers.

To be unprofitable to these is a great profit. And yet, whatever loss your interest suffers through this sect, it can be balanced by some protection. How highly do you value — I will not now say those who cast out demons from you, I will not now say those who offer up prayers for you too to the true God, because perhaps you do not believe it — but those from whom you can have nothing to fear?

But indeed that loss to the commonwealth, as great as it is real, no one regards; that injury to the state no one weighs, when so many just men are spent, when so many innocent are made away with.

For now we call your own acts to witness — you who daily preside over the judging of prisoners, who discharge accusations by your sentences. So many guilty are reckoned up by you under the various headings of their crimes: which of them there is set down as an assassin, a cutpurse, a temple-robber, a seducer, a robber of bathers — which of them is also entered as a Christian? Or when Christians are brought forward under their own title, which of them is also such as those so many guilty?

With your own people the prison is always seething; with your own the mines are always sighing; with your own the beasts are always fattened; from among your own the producers of the shows always feed their droves of criminals. No one there is a Christian, unless he is plainly only that; or if he is something else too, he is no longer a Christian.

We alone, then, are innocent. What wonder, if it must be so? For indeed it must. Innocence taught us by God, we both know perfectly, as revealed by a perfect Master, and we faithfully keep, as commanded by an Inspector not to be despised.

But to you human estimation handed down innocence, and human dominion likewise enjoined it; hence yours is a discipline neither full nor so much to be feared, as touching the truth of innocence. As great is man's wisdom for pointing out the good as his authority for exacting it: the one as easy to be deceived as the other to be despised.

And so, which is fuller — to say, "You shall not kill," or to teach, "You shall not even be angry"? Which is more perfect — to forbid adultery, or to keep men even from the solitary lust of the eyes? Which is more learned — to forbid evil-doing, or evil-speaking too? Which more thorough — not to permit injury, or not to suffer even the requital of injury?

While yet you may know that those very laws of yours too, which seem to make for innocence, were borrowed from the divine law, as from an older pattern. We have already spoken of the age of Moses.

But how great is the authority of human laws, when it falls to a man both to evade them, and for the most part to lie hidden in his offences, and sometimes to despise them, sinning of his own will or of necessity?

Consider these things too in view of the brevity of any penalty whatsoever, which is not to last beyond death. So too Epicurus cheapens all torment and pain, pronouncing the slight to be contemptible, and the great to be not lasting.

But we who are weighed in the sight of God, the inspector of all, and who foresee an eternal punishment from him, deservedly are the only ones who attain to innocence — both for the fulness of our knowledge, and for the difficulty of concealment, and for the greatness of the torment, not lasting but everlasting — fearing him whom even he ought to fear who judges those that fear; fearing God, that is, not the proconsul.

We have taken our stand, as I think, against the whole indictment of crimes which demands the blood of the Christians. We have shown our whole condition, and by what means we can prove it to be such as we have shown — namely, by the trustworthiness and the antiquity of the divine writings, and likewise by the confession of the spiritual powers. Who will dare to refute us — not by craft of words, but by the same method by which we established our proof — concerning the truth?

But while our truth is being made manifest to each, meanwhile unbelief — while it is convinced of the goodness of this sect, which is now known by use and intercourse — does not, indeed, reckon it a divine business, but rather a kind of philosophy. "The same things," it says, "the philosophers too counsel and profess — innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity."

Why then are we, who are likened to them in discipline, not made equal to them in the licence and impunity of that discipline? Or why are not they too, as our equals, pressed to the offices which we, in not performing, are imperilled?

For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear, or to bring out useless lamps at midday? Nay rather, they openly destroy your gods too, and accuse your superstitions in their treatises, with your approval. Most of them even bark against the princes, while you bear with them, and are more readily rewarded with statues and salaries than condemned to the beasts.

But rightly. For they are surnamed philosophers, not Christians. This name of philosophers does not put demons to flight. Why not? since philosophers rank demons next after the gods. It is a saying of Socrates: "If the demon permit." The same man, too, though he had some perception of the truth in denying the gods, yet at his end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius — in honour, I suppose, of his father, because Apollo had pronounced Socrates the wisest of all men.

O thoughtless Apollo! He rendered testimony to the wisdom of a man who denied that there were gods. In proportion as truth is hated, so does he who maintains it in good faith give offence; while he who falsifies and affects it wins favour for that very reason chiefly with the persecutors of truth.

This truth, which the buffoons and corrupters, the philosophers, affect in enmity, and by affecting corrupt, as men who hunt after glory — Christians both necessarily seek and wholly maintain, as men who care for their own salvation.

So that we are equal to you neither in knowledge nor in discipline, as you suppose. For what certain answer did that Thales, prince of natural philosophers, return to Croesus when he questioned him about divinity, often frustrated in his respite for deliberation?

The lowest Christian workman both finds God and shows him, and thereupon assigns in deed too the whole that is sought concerning God; although Plato affirms that the maker of the universe is neither easy to find, and, when found, hard to expound to all.

For the rest, if we make our challenge on the score of chastity, I read a part of the Attic sentence pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youth. The Christian does not even change his sex. I know of Phryne too, the harlot, yielding to the ardour of Diogenes as he reclined above her; and I hear that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school perished in adultery.

The Christian is born a man for his own wife alone. Democritus, by blinding himself because he could not look upon women without lust, and grieved if he had not gained his desire, confesses his incontinence by his remedy.

But the Christian, with eyes unharmed, does not see women: he is, in mind, blind against lust.

If I am to defend us on the score of uprightness — behold, Diogenes with muddy feet tramples the proud couches of Plato with another pride: the Christian is not proud even toward a poor man. If I contend on the score of modesty — behold, Pythagoras among the Thurians, Zeno among the Prienians, aim at tyranny: the Christian aims not even at the aedileship.

If I close with you on the score of equanimity — Lycurgus chose to starve himself to death, because the Lacedaemonians had amended his laws: the Christian gives thanks even when condemned. If I make comparison on the score of good faith — Anaxagoras denied to his hosts a deposit entrusted to him: the Christian is called faithful even by those outside.

If I take my stand on the score of simplicity — Aristotle basely drove his familiar friend Hermias from his place: the Christian does not injure even his enemy. The same Aristotle as basely flatters Alexander, to be ruled by him, as Plato sells himself to Dionysius for his belly's sake.

Aristippus, in his purple, under a great show of gravity, plays the prodigal; and Hippias, while he plots treason against the state, is slain. This no Christian has ever attempted on behalf of his own people, scattered though they be with every atrocity.

But someone will say that some of our number too depart from the rule of discipline. They cease, however, to be held Christians among us; whereas those philosophers, with such deeds upon them, persevere in the name and honour of wisdom.

So then, what likeness is there between a philosopher and a Christian? — between the disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven? between the trafficker in fame and the trafficker in life? between the worker of words and the worker of deeds? between the builder and the destroyer of things? between the friend and the enemy of error? between the falsifier of truth and its restorer and expounder? between its thief and its guardian?

Truth is more ancient than all things, unless I am mistaken; and this too serves me — the antiquity already established of the divine literature — that it may readily be believed it has been a treasury for every later wisdom. And were I not now sparing the bulk of my volume, I would run out into this proof too.

What poet, what sophist, who has not at all drunk from the fountain of the prophets? Thence, then, the philosophers slaked the thirst of their genius; so that, in what they have of ours, they liken us to themselves. Hence too, I suppose, philosophy was even cast out by certain peoples — by the Thebans, I mean, and by the Spartans and the Argives —

while they aim at our things, and, being men greedy of glory, as we have said, and given over to mere eloquence, if they stumbled upon anything in the holy Scriptures, after the manner of their own curiosity they turned it to their own works; neither believing them sufficiently to be divine, that they might forbear to interpolate them, nor sufficiently understanding them, as being even then still half-veiled, obscured even to the Jews themselves, whose property they seemed to be.

For even if there was any simplicity of truth, the more did human scrupulosity, scorning belief, alter it; whereby they confounded into uncertainty even what they had found certain.

For, having merely found God, they did not discourse of him as they had found him, so that they dispute both about his quality, and about his nature, and about his abode.

Some affirm him to be incorporeal, others corporeal — as the Platonists and the Stoics respectively; some say he is of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras; another of fire, as it seemed to Heraclitus. And the Platonists hold him to be careful of things; on the contrary, the Epicureans hold him idle and unemployed, and, so to speak, no one as regards human affairs;

but the Stoics place him outside the world, to whirl this mass from without after the manner of a potter; the Platonists within the world, to remain, after the example of a pilot, within that which he governs.

So too about the world itself they vary, whether it was born or unborn, whether it is to pass away or to remain. So too about the state of the soul, which some contend to be divine and eternal, others dissoluble; as each has thought, so has he laid it down or refashioned it.

Nor is it any wonder if the genius of the philosophers perverted the old instrument. From their seed certain men have adulterated even this new-budded furniture of ours by their own opinions into philosophic notions, and out of the one way have cut many crooked and inextricable byways. This I have suggested for this reason, lest the variety known to exist in this sect should seem to liken us in this also to the philosophers, and lest from the variety of defences one should judge of the truth.

But we readily prescribe to our adulterators that the rule of truth is that which comes transmitted from Christ through his companions, to whom these various commentators will be proved somewhat later in time.

All things against truth have been built up out of truth itself, the spirits of error working this rivalry. By these have such adulterations of the saving discipline been suborned; by these certain fables too have been brought in, which by their likeness might weaken the faith of the truth, or rather might win it to themselves; so that one might therefore think Christians not to be believed, because neither poets nor philosophers are; or might think poets and philosophers the rather to be believed, because they are not Christians.

And so we are laughed at when we proclaim that God will judge. For thus even the poets and philosophers set a tribunal among the dead. And if we threaten Gehenna, which is a treasury of hidden fire underground for punishment, we are likewise laughed to scorn. For thus too among the dead there is the river Pyriphlegethon.

And if we name paradise, a place of divine pleasantness appointed for the receiving of the spirits of the holy, cut off from the knowledge of the common world by a kind of fiery wall of that zone — the Elysian fields have taken up the faith of it. Whence, I ask you, come these things so very like, in the philosophers or the poets? From nothing but our mysteries.

If from our mysteries, as from the earlier source, then ours are the more trustworthy and the more to be believed, whose very images find belief. If from their own conceits, then our mysteries will be held to be images of later things — which the nature of things does not allow. For never does the shadow go before the body, nor the image before the truth.

Come now, if some philosopher affirm — as Laberius does, after the opinion of Pythagoras — that a man is made out of a mule, a snake out of a woman, and bend all the arguments of his eloquence to that opinion by the power of his rhetoric, will he not move assent and fix belief, so that men should abstain even from animals for that reason? Should anyone hold the persuasion, lest perchance in his beef he should be eating some great-grandfather of his? But if a Christian promise that a man shall return from a man, the very Gaius come back as Gaius, he will be driven off by the people with stones rather than even with gatherings of approval.

If by any law souls are made to pass back into bodies, why should they not return into the same substance, since this is what it means to be restored — to be that which one was? They are no longer the same as they were, since they could not have been what they were not, unless they ceased to be what they had been.

There would even be need, in many places, of leisure for the work, if we wished to sport in this matter — who might be seen reformed into what beast. But it is rather for our own defence, since we maintain that it is far more worthy of belief that man shall return from man, any man for any other, provided it be man; so that the same quality of soul may be restored into the same condition, even if not into the same shape.

Certainly, because the ground of the restitution is the appointment of judgment, of necessity the very same man who had been will be brought forth, to receive from God the judgment of good or of the contrary desert. And therefore the bodies too will be presented again, because the soul alone can suffer nothing without solid matter, that is, the flesh; and because, whatever souls must suffer at all by the judgment of God, they have deserved it not without the flesh, within which they did all things.

"But how," you say, "can the dissolved matter be brought forth?" Consider yourself, O man, and you will find the proof of the thing. Reflect what you were before you existed. Surely nothing. For you would remember, if you had been anything. You, then, who were nothing before you existed, and likewise became nothing when you ceased to exist — why can you not be again out of nothing, by the will of that same Author who willed you to be out of nothing?

What new thing will befall you? You who were not, were made; when you shall again be not, you shall be made. Render, if you can, the reason by which you were made, and then ask the reason by which you shall be made. And yet surely you shall the more easily be made what you once were, since you were made, with equal ease, what you never were before.

Doubt will be felt, I suppose, of the powers of God — of him who imposed this so great body of the world out of that which was not, no less than out of the death of vacancy and emptiness, animated by the Spirit, the animator of all souls, and itself signed as the very example of human resurrection, for a witness to you.

The light, daily slain, shines again; and the darkness in turn, by retiring, gives place; the dead stars come to life again; the seasons begin where they end; the fruits are consummated and return; surely the seeds rise up the more fruitfully only when corrupted and dissolved; all things are preserved by perishing, all things are refashioned out of destruction.

You, man, so great a name — if you understand yourself, learning it even from the inscription of the Pythian priestess — lord of all things that die and rise again: will you die to this end, that you may perish? Wherever you have been dissolved, whatever matter has destroyed you, swallowed you, abolished you, reduced you to nothing — it will give you back. The very nothing is his whose is the whole too.

"Then," you say, "we must always die and always rise again?" If the Lord of all things had so appointed, you would against your will undergo the law of your condition. But as it is, he has appointed no otherwise than he has foretold.

The same reason which composed the universe out of diversity — so that all things should stand fast in unity out of rival substances, out of void and solid, out of animate and inanimate, out of comprehensible and incomprehensible, out of light and darkness, out of very life and death — that same reason has knit together the age too under an appointed and distinct condition, so that this first part, which we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down in a temporal span to its end, but the part that follows, which we await, is propagated into infinite eternity.

When, therefore, the end and limit, the boundary that gapes between, shall be at hand — so that the very fashion of the world, likewise temporal, may be transferred, which has been spread before that ordering of eternity like a curtain — then shall the whole human race be restored, to discharge the account of what it has deserved in this age, of good or of evil, and thereafter to be paid out into the measureless perpetuity of eternity.

And therefore there shall then be neither death any more, nor resurrection again and again, but we shall be the same that we are now, and no others afterward — the worshippers of God, indeed, with God forever, clothed over with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and they who have not been wholly toward God, in the punishment of a fire likewise unceasing, having out of its very nature, namely, a divine supply of incorruptibility.

The philosophers too know the difference between the hidden and the common fire. So far other is that which is for human use than that which appears in the judgment of God, whether drawing down lightnings from heaven, or belching up from the earth through the summits of mountains; for it does not consume what it burns, but, while it draws upon it, repairs it.

So the mountains remain ever burning; and he who is struck from heaven is safe, so that he is now reduced to ashes by no fire. And this shall be a witness of the eternal fire; this an example of the unceasing judgment that feeds the penalty. The mountains burn and endure. What of the guilty and the enemies of God?

These are the things which in us alone are called presumptions; in the philosophers and poets, the height of knowledge and signal genius. They are prudent, we are inept; they are to be honoured, we to be derided — nay, the rather even to be punished.

Grant now that the things we maintain are false, and deservedly presumption; yet they are necessary: inept, yet useful; since those who believe them are constrained to become better, for fear of an eternal punishment and in hope of an eternal refreshment. It is not therefore expedient to call false, nor to hold inept, things which it is expedient to presume true. On no ground is it lawful at all to condemn things that do good.

With you, therefore, this very thing is presumption, which condemns useful things. So neither can they be inept; certainly, even if false and inept, yet harmful to none. For they are like many other things to which you assign no penalties — vain and fabulous things, unaccused and unpunished, as harmless.

But in things of this kind, if anything is to be judged worthy of derision, it should be of derision, not of swords and fires and crosses and beasts; at which iniquity of cruelty not only this blind rabble exults and insults, but some of you too, who hunt for the favour of the crowd out of that iniquity, make it your boast.

As if all that you can do against us were not our own choice. Certainly, if I will it, I am a Christian. Then you will condemn me only if I wish to be condemned; but since what you can do against me you cannot, unless I will, what you can do is now a matter of my will, not of your power. So the rabble too rejoices vainly over our vexation.

For ours, in like manner, is the joy which it claims for itself — we who would rather be condemned than fall away from God; whereas those who hate us ought to grieve, not to rejoice, since we have obtained what we chose.

"Why then," you say, "do you complain that we persecute you, if you wish to suffer, since you ought to love those through whom you suffer what you wish?" Plainly we wish to suffer, but in the manner in which a soldier wishes for war. No one indeed suffers willingly, since suffering means both fear and peril.

Yet a man both fights with all his might, and, winning in the battle, rejoices in the battle, though he had complained of the battle, because he gains both glory and spoil. It is a battle for us when we are summoned to your tribunals, that there, at the hazard of our life, we may contend for the truth. But the victory is to obtain that for which you contended. That victory has both the glory of pleasing God and the spoil of living forever.

"But you are cut down." Yes, when we have prevailed. So then we conquer when we are slain; in fine, we escape when we are led off. Call us now "faggot-fellows" and "half-axle men," because we are bound to a stake of half an axle and burned in a circle of faggots. This is the dress of our victory; this is our embroidered robe; in such a chariot do we triumph.

Deservedly, then, we do not please the vanquished; for on this account we are reckoned desperate and ruined men. But this desperation and ruin, among you, in the cause of glory and fame, lift up the standard of valour.

Mucius left his right hand willingly upon the altar: O sublimity of soul! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Aetna at Catana: O vigour of mind! Some foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: O proclamation of chastity!

Regulus, that one man might not live in exchange for many enemies, endured crosses over all his body: O brave man, and victor even in captivity! Anaxarchus, when he was being pounded with a pestle to the death, like barley-groats, kept saying, "Pound, pound the husk of Anaxarchus, for Anaxarchus you do not pound": O magnanimity of the philosopher, who even jested about such a death of his own!

I pass over those who bargained for praise with their own sword, or with some milder kind of death. For behold, you crown even the contests of torments.

The Attic harlot, when the executioner was already wearied, at last spat into the face of the raging tyrant her own tongue, which she had bitten off, that with it she might spit out her voice too, lest she should be able to confess the conspirators, even if, overcome, she had wished.

Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy could offer, having answered, "Contempt of death," and being exposed unmoved to the tyrant's scourges, sealed his sentence to the death. The Spartan scourges too, made bitter under the very eyes of kinsmen who urge them on, confer upon their house an honour of endurance as great as the blood they have shed.

O glory permitted, because human! to which neither desperate presumption nor desperate persuasion is imputed in the contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity; to which it is granted to suffer so much for fatherland, for empire, for friendship, as it is not lawful to suffer for God!

And yet for all these you cast statues and inscribe images and carve titles unto eternity. So far as you can, by your monuments, you yourselves in a manner bestow a resurrection upon the dead. But he who hopes for the true resurrection from God, if he suffers for God, is mad.

But go to, good governors — much better in the people's eyes if you sacrifice the Christians to them: rack us, torture us, condemn us, grind us down; for your iniquity is the proof of our innocence. For this reason God suffers us to suffer these things. For but lately, by condemning a Christian woman to the pander rather than to the lion, you confessed that among us a stain upon chastity is reckoned more dreadful than any penalty and any death.

Yet nothing whatever does your every more refined cruelty profit you; it is rather an enticement to the sect. We are made more, as often as we are mown down by you: the blood of the Christians is seed.

Many among you exhort to the endurance of pain and of death: Cicero in the Tusculans, Seneca in his work On Chance, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus. And yet their words do not find so many disciples as the Christians do, teaching by deeds.

That very obstinacy which you reproach is the teacher. For who is not stirred, at the contemplation of it, to inquire what there is in the matter within? Who, when he has inquired, does not draw near? When he has drawn near, does not long to suffer, that he may purchase the whole grace of God, that he may obtain full pardon from him by the exchange of his own blood?

For all sins are forgiven to this work. Hence it is that we give thanks then and there for your sentences. As there is a rivalry between the divine thing and the human, when we are condemned by you, we are absolved by God.