Apology of Tertullian - Bindley

THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN
FOR THE CHRISTIANS.

Q. S. F. Tertulliani Apologeticus Adversus
Gentes pro Christianis. Edited, with Intro-
duction and Notes, by T. H. BINDLEY, M.A.,
Merton College, Oxford. (Clarendon Press.)
Spectator, Sept. 28. "The Apology for the Christians is
one of the most interesting and useful of Tertullian's
treatises, and we welcome this scholarly edition with
especial pleasure. The work might advantageously be
recommended to Candidates for Holy Orders by the
Bishops' excamining chaplains, for it contains within a brief
compass much that is valuable on questions of dogmatics,
apologetics, and early Church history•.•. The plan and
execution of this edition are both good, the annotations
being an advance upon anything of the kind we have seen
in English."
Saturday Review, Nov. 9. "We have to thank Mr. Bindley
for a good edition of one of the most interesting documents
of the early Church, the Apology ofTertullian. Mr. Bindley
has read up his subject thoroughly, and gives the results of
his studies in a compact and serviceable form. Language,
doctrine, ritual, and archreology have, each and all, received
due attention, and for examination purposes, perhaps,
nothing more could be desired."
THE APOLOGY
OF
TERTULLIAN
FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
Translated with Introduction, Analysis, and Appendix

containing the Letters of Pliny and Trajan
respecting the Christians,
BY
T. HERBERT BINDLEY, M.A.

MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD.
farker anb <!to.

6 SOUTHAMPTON-STREET, STRAND, LONDON;
AND BROAD•STREET, OXFORD.
1890.
PRINTED BY PARKER AND C0"9
CHOWN YARD, OXFORD.
PREFACE.
THE present volume grew naturally out of my

special study of the APOLOGETICUS of Tertullian
when preparing an annotated edition for the Delegates
of the Clarendon Press. It is hoped that this transla-
tion may be helpful to Theological students who are
at work upon the original text, and for them it has
been more particularly prepared. Yet it is not
unlikely that there will also be some English readers
interested in the early records of Christianity who
may be glad to possess this famous apologetic tract
of the second century, and to whom its presentation
in an English dress will be acceptable. The transla-
tion is made from the text of the Clarendon Press
edition (Oxford: 1889).
T. H.B.
Ixworth,
November 19, 1889.
10859
CORRIGENDA.
Page 4, line 5 from bottom,.fo:r of which the criminal is proud,

read to be found guilty of which is a man's pride,
,, 23, line 2,for II. 1. read II. i.
,, 30 note, /":r Latiari. read Latiaris.
,, 34, line 2 I, for II. I. read ii. I.
INTRODUCTION.
THE life of Tertullian, so far as we know it, may

be briefly told. He was born at Carthage about
the year A.D. 160, and was brought up amid the
pagan surroundings of that provincial metropolis.
His father, whose name is not known, was a centurion
in attendance upon the proconsul of Africa, and he
took care that his son, who was probably intended
for public life, should receive an excellent education
in the celebrated schools of his native city. Before
his conversion it is believed that Tertullian practised
in the provincial law-courts; and the constant recur-
rence of legal phraseology in his writings bears out
the truth of Eusebius' statement that he was inti-
mately acquainted with Roman law (H. E. ii. 2).
That he was also well versed in the art of rhetoric,
the reader of the APOLOGY will at once admit : the
arguments are accumulated with the skill, and some-
times with the one-sidedness, of an advocate holding
a brief in his own case, and pleading with an im-
passioned earnestness born of deep personal convic-
tion.
Tertullian's conversion may be dated in r 96 a, and
he was ordained priest in the Carthaginian Church.
He was married, but childless. His character reflect,
a So Pusey and others : see, however, Plummer, Church of

he Early Fathers, p. I 12.
Vlll INTRODUCTION.
the typical African temperament,-fervid, impatfent,

impetuous, and with a considerable vein of latent
puritanism. It was this unrestrained impulsiveness
of nature that soon beguiled him to break away from
the wise moderation of the Church and to embrace
the heresy of Montanus,-a Phrygian fanatic, who
claimed to be the recipient of a new Revelation of
the Paraclete, and whose system of discipline was
rigorously severe. The lapse of so gifted a champion
of the faith was, as Vincent of Lerins tells us ( Common.
18), a severe temptation to the Church, and his later
error naturally 'cast some discredit on the authority
of his approved writings' (Hil. in Matt. 5).
Tertullian lived to an extreme old age, according
to the report mentioned by Jerome (de vir. itlustr. 53),
and his death may be placed about the year 240.
A small sect, called after him 'Tertullianists,' lingered
in Carthage to the time of Augustine (Heer. 86).
The APOLOGY was written in the year 197, very
soon after his conversion, and the reader may, happily,
forget the subsequent lapse of its author into heresy.
The work is one of the best and most interesting
examples of Western apologetic writings, both on ac-
count of the cogency and brilliance of its defensive
pleading for Christianity, and from the graphic pic-
ture which it portrays of paganism as it existed in
the great metropolis of Africa particularly, and in the
Roman Empire general1y, at the close of the second
century. It may be said at once that there is much
in this picture which is painful; few English readers
will have been prepared for the hideous disclosures
INTRODUCTION. IX
which Tertullian's exposure of heathenism necessarily

entails; yet it may prove a useful lesson, if it in any
way brings home to us what and how deep was the
moral darkness of the world which it was the divine
office of the Christian Church to enlighten and
purify.
The immediate purpose of the APOLOGY was to
protest against the wholesale condemnation of a body
of men on the mere presumption of a criminality
which had never been proved. The inveterate hos-
tility manifested towards the Christians forbade them
the rights even of ordinary criminals. They were
prosecuted under the laws, and persecuted by a panic-
stricken populace, whose unreasoning animosity, and
ig-norance of the true nature of the Christian religion,
led to the formulation of execrable charges which the
Christian Apologists had to meet and repel b_ Some
of these, e.g. those in ch. 7-9, were due to the close
bonds which united the Christians together in a true
fraternity, and to the care with which they shielded
the higher mysteries of their religious worship from
any risk of profanation by the heathen outsiders 0 •
Others again, e.g. those in ch. 40-44, arose from
mere popular irrational dislike, which seized anything
as a handle against a section of society whose purity
and integrity of life were a standing rebuke to the
dissolute morals of the age.
The two main charges brought against the Chris-
tians,-Sacrilege and Disloyalty to the Emperor,-
b Comp. Lightfoot, Philippians, pp. 26 ff.
• Comp. Gore, Christian Ministr_y, pp. 30 f.
X INTRODUCTION.
stood on a different base. They were reasonable

enough from the heathen point of sight, and the
Apologist could only refute them by attacking the
whole groundwork and fabric of the Roman religion
of the time. This attack upon paganism is carried
on simultaneously with the defence of Christianity.
Tertullian's favourite weapon is sarcastic retort, and
his pagan readers must have winced, not once nor
twice only, under the lash of his stinging epigrams
and biting irony.
The APOLOGY natural1y contains but few references
to the internal life of the Church. Sufficient is re-
lated to disarm the suspicions of the heathen, but no
more. A full statement of Christian doctrine or
mode of worship is not to be looked for. This
reserve, which is maintained by all the Apologists
when addressing those outside the Church, is sig-
nificant of their jealous reverence for the sanctity of
their faith. Hence those passages are the more
valuable and interesting which treat of the Being
of God, of the Divinity of Christ, the God-Man, and
His earthly life (ch. 17-21), and of the nature of
the bond of Christian unity (ch. 39). It will be ob-
served ·that the only passage adduced from the New
Testament d in the whole of the APOLOGY ( 1 Tim.
ii. 2 ; see ch. 3 1) is quoted merely in self-defence on
a point of Christian practice.
d See Lightfoot, Supernatural Religion, p. 275, where for
' New Testament' we should, I think, read ' Gospels.' So
Westcott in the passage referred to in Lightfoot's note (Hutory
of the Canon, pp. II6 f.).
ANALYSIS.
I. PREFACE,
r. It is unjust to condemn the Christian religion unheard
and unknown (ch. 1).
We are denied the rights of ordinary criminals, and
the use of torture is most inconsistently employed in
our case.
The mere name of ' Christian ' is made criminal
(ch. 2).
The blindness or your hatred over-reaches itself and
involuntarily eulogizes us (ch. 3).
2. We propose to refute and retort every charge you bring
against us ; but first let us examine the nature of
the laws under which we are condemned (ch. 4).
They are to be traced to an ancient decree, and to the
rescripts of the worst emperors (ch. 5). But your
ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by your-
selves, both as regards personal and social questions,
as well as religious restrictions (ch. 6).
II. REFUTATION OF THE PRINCIP-AL ACCUSATIONS.
i. Secret crimes.
We are accused of infamous secret atrocities,-infan-
ticide, a feast of blood, and incest; though no proof has
ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is responsible
for the charge (ch. 7). Whereas natural instinct would
revolt from such crimes, and the burdened conscience
of one unwittingly led to perpetrate them would be
intolerable ( ch. 8).
You yourselves are guilty of sacrificing children and
adults in your worship of various deities, and of eating
blood in several loathsome rites and horrible repasts;
XU ANALYSIS.
whereas your knowledge of our horror of eating blood

is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us.
Incest, too, is one of your commonest crimes (ch. 9).
ii. Open crimes.
I. Sacrilege.
We are accused of Sacrilege and Disloyalty to
the emperor.
We shall prove that your gods are no gods, for
they once were men (ch. 10); and no reasons
exist for their subsequent deification, since their
aid in Nature is, and always has been, unnecessary,
while their gross immoralities would rather con-
demn them to Tartarus than raise them to Heaven
(ch. II).
Your gods are nothing but names of dead men,
and images made of the commonest materials,
which you treat with the same indignities that you
heap upon us (ch. 12). In fact, you act most
sacrilegiously towards your gods, whether private
or public (ch. 13); for you cheat them in your
sacrifices, and mock them in your poetic and
philosophic literature (ch. 14). You insult them
in your burlesques and at your theatres (ch. 15).
You hold grotesque views respecting our Deity.
We neither worship an ass's head, nor the Cross,
nor the Sun, nor a biformed monstrosity resem-
bling some of your gods (ch. 16).
We worship one God, the Omnipotent and
Invisible Creator, to Whom Nature and the human
soul bear witness (ch. 17), Who hath given us
a revelation of Himself through Scriptures and
Prophets, whose writings are open to all (ch. 18).
The antiquity of these writings proves their
trustworthiness; for they are more ancient than
your oldest records (ch. 19); and their majesty
and divinity are proved by the daily fulfilment of
their predictions ( ch. 20 ).
ANALYSIS. xiii;
We worship the same God as the Jews, but,
unlike them, we acknowledge Christ, the Son of
God, to be God. He is the True Word, Reason,
and Power of God, Who, begotten eternally by
His Father, and being Co-essential with Him was
made Flesh. The Jews misunderstood His Advent,
His Work, and His Doctrine. They put Him to
death, but He rose from the dead, as was predicted,
and after forty days ascended into Heaven. Mean-
while His gospel is being spread throughout the
world by His disciples (ch. 21).
We, with your philosophers, assert the existence
of dremons, spiritual beings of malefic power, who
falsely claim to be divine (ch. 22). These dremons
and your gods are identical, as their own confession
when confronted by a Christian will prove, Fur-
ther, you may learn from them Who is the True
God. Our dominion over them is derived from
the power of Christ (ch. 23).
Your charge of sacrilege thus falls to the ground,
for there can be no religious duties towards gods
that have no existence. In any case, we claim the
civil right of religious liberty, which you grant to
every one but us (ch. 24).
You assert that Roman prosperity is due to
Roman piety. Yet your chief deities are for-
eigners, who once reigned on earth, and therefore
must some time have worshipped your earliest
deities. Besides, your elaborate piety is of later
growth than your prosperity, which has in reality
been advanced by your impieties (ch. 25).
All rule and sovereignty are in the gift of the
One God Who is above all (ch. 26).
Your animosity against us is incited by dremo-
niacal agency (ch. 27 ).
2, Disloyalty.
You are driven by the same evil influence to
xiv ANALvs rs.
force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare.

This we refuse to do, and are therefore accused,
secondly, of Disloyalty to Ci:esar (ch. 28).
The gods are the creatures of Ci:esar, and cannot
therefore have his welfare in their keeping (ch. 29).
We offer for Ca>sar's welfare prayers and true
sacrifices to the True God, in Whose hands alone it
is {ch. 30). And our prayers for him are nc.
pretence, but part of our bounden religious duty
(ch. 31 ), and rendered necessary by our belief that
the continuance of the Roman Empire delays the
end of the world (ch. 32).
We are in fact far more tmly loyal than you
are ; for we recognize the Divine will in the
appointment of the Ci:esars, although we refuse to
acknowledge the divinity of the Cresars themselves
(ch. 33).
• Lord' is no proper title of Ci:esar, but belongs
to God (ch. 34). Yet we are called 'public ene-
mies ' because we refuse to join in your useless
acts of worship and disgraceful festivities. The
real traitors are always found amongst yourselves,
whether in the lower or higher ranks of society
(ch. 35). We are necessarily well-disposed to
every man whether Ci:esar or neighbour (ch. 36).
We are forbidden to retaliate, otherwise we
might easily take our revenge, either by secret
means, or as open enemies, or even by merely
withdrawing from your midst, and leaving you
defenceless against the attacks of the di:emons
( ch. 37). The Christian society ought to be re-
cognized by the law, since it is a harmless and
unambitious association (ch. 38).
III. REFUTATION OF MINOR CHARGES.

1. The purposes of our assembly are pious, pure, and
charitable. Our well-known love for each other is
ANALYSIS, xv
blamed, and our simple 'love-feast ' denounced as ex-

travagant (ch. 39).
2. Our existence is supposed to provoke the gods to send
calamities and disasters upon the empire; yet such
occurrences happened before the rise of Christianity,
Your very gods, too, suffer in the calamities which
are supposed to come from them. In reality, the
presence of the Christians has mitigated the violence of
God's judgements upon the world (ch. 40); for these
judgements are attributable to your misdeeds (ch. 4c).
3. You accuse us of worthlessness to trade,-a charge

which is sufficiently refuted by our habits of life ( ch.
42). We are certainly profitless to the bad, but this
is a real gain ( ch. 43).
The real loss to the state, which is involved in your
injustice to us, is overlooked (ch. 44).
Our ethical standard is far higher and more awe-
inspiring than yours (ch. 45).
4. Our sect is regarded as a school of philosophy; yet you
refuse us the licence allowed to philosophers. Really
we differ from the philosophers both in the extent and
definiteness of our knowledge, and in our moral stand-
ard {ch. 46).
Philosophers have derived their wisdom from our
Scriptures, which they distorted ; and they have vainly
speculated on subjects not revealed. Heretics, simi-
larly, have distorted the New Testament; and many
of our doctrines have been anticipatorily counterfeited
by the agency of evil spirits (ch. 47}.
The philosophical speculation on the transmigration
of souls is admitted, but our doctrine of the resurrec-
tion of the body scouted; although Nature illustrates
it, and the mystery of our present existence forbids
a hasty rejection of our belief respecting the future.
On this subject Revelation must suffice (ch. 48).
XVI ANALYSIS.
IV. CONCLUSION.
Why do you censure us for holding tenets which are
atleast harmless, if not positively beneficial (ch. 49)?
Our sufferings are our glory and triumph. How is
it that in your view our endurance redounds to
our discredit, while the fortitude of others meets with
your approbation? You may gain popularity by your
injustice, but our sufferings and practical example con-
tinually attract new converts {ch. 50),
THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN FOR
THE CHRISTIANS.
CHAPTER I.
I. 1. The injustice of condemning the Christian
Religion unheard and unknown.
JF it be not permitted you, provincial governors of
the Roman Empire, presiding for the administration
of justice in your open and appointed court almost at
the very head of the state, to publicly investigate and
openly examine what are the clear facts in the case
of the Christians ;-if your authority either fears or is
ashamed to enquire in public concerning the due
exercise of justice in respect of this kind of offence
alone ;-if, in fine, hostility to this sect, carried to
extremes (as was recently the case) in judgements
passed upon members of your own households, bars
the way to its defence ;-let the truth reach your ears
at all events by the secret agency of a silent writing.
Christianity pleads no excuse for her cause, for
neither does she marvel at her present position. She
knows th<tt she is a sojourner upon the earth, that
amongst strangers she readily finds enemies, but that
her nativity, her home, her hope, her favour, her
dignity are in Heaven. One boon meantime she
craves, that she be not condemned unknown. What
B
2 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
is there in this request derogatory to the laws, supreme

in their own sphere, if she be heard ? Will not their
power rather be extolled hereby, that they will con-
demn the truth even after she has been heard?
Whereas if men condemn her unheard, besides the
odium of an injustice done, they will be suspected, and
justly, of not being altogether unconscious that they
are refusing to hear that which, if they heard, they
could not condemn.
This, then, is the first point we bring before you,
-the injustice of your hatred of the Christian name.
And the very pretext which seems to excuse this in-
justice, namely ignorance, both aggravates and clenches
it. For what can be more unjust than for men to hate
that of which they are ignorant, even supposing it to
deserve their hatred? For then only does it deserve
hatred when it is ascertained whether it deserve it.
But if a knowledge of the deserts be wanting, how is
the justice of the hatred defended, which ought to be
proved not from the mere existence of the hatred but
from cognizance of the case? \Vhen, however, men
hate because they are ignorant of the nature of the
object of their hatred, what is there to prevent it
really being of a nature such as they ought not to
hate?
Thus in both ways we prove them wrong; namely,
that they are ignorant in their hatred, and that in
their ignorance they hate unjustly. A proof of their
ignorance, which while it excuses their injustice, also
condemns it, is found in the fact that all, who
formerly hated because they were ignorant of the
I.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, 3
nature of what they hated, at once c~ase to hate as
soon as they cease to be ignorant. From being such,
they become Christians, particularly when they have
gained full knowledge ; and they begin to hate what
they had been, and to profess what they had hated ;
and our numbers are as great as we are computed to
be. The cry is that the state is beset, that the
Christians are in the rural di1,tricts, in the villages,
and in the islands ; it is deplored as a public ca-
lamity that persons of both sexes, of every age, of
every class, even people of high rank, are going over
to this name a.
And yet not even from this very fact do men men-
tally advance . to an appreciation of some possible
good latent in our religion; they do not allow them-
selves a more consistent surmise; they do not wel-
come a closer investigation. Respecting this subject
alone the natural curiosity of men lies dormant : they
love to remain ignorant, while others rejoice to have
learnt. How much more might Anarcharsis have
stigmatized these men,-the inexperienced passing
judgement on the experienced,-than the unmusical
criticizing the musical! They prefer to remain ignor-
ant, because they already hate; and by this preference
they prejudge that of which they are ignorant to be
such as, if known, would preclude their hatred; since
if no just ground for hatred be found, the right course
would obviously be to cease hating so unjustly;
whereas if the justice of their hatred were to be
established, not only would the hatred lose none of
• Comp. ch. 37; Plin. Epist. x. 96.
its force, but it would actually gain a reason for its

continuance from the sanction of justice itself.
'But,' it may be said, 'a thing is not therefore good
because it attracts the many. What numbers are
previously disposed to evil! How many desert to the
side of error ! ' Who denies it? Nevertheless that
which is truly evil, not even do those whom it sweeps
along dare to defend as being good. There is a
sense of shrinking or shame instinctively attached to
all evil. Lastly, evil-doers crave concealment, they
shun publicity, they quake when detected, they deny
when accused, not even when put to the rack do they
readily or invariably confess. They are undoubtedly
disconsolate when condemned; in their consciences
they recount their deeds, but impute to fate or the
.ctars the promptings of an evil mind; for they refuse
.o acknowledge as their own what they recognize as
evil. But with Christians the case is totally different.
No one is ashamed; no one feels regret, except in-
deed that he did not become a Christian sooner. If
he is censured, he glories in it; if accused, he pleads
no defence; if interrogated, he even voluntarily con-
fesses ; if condemned, he gives thanks. What kind
of evil, then, is this, which lacks the essential cha-
racteristics of evil,-fear, shame, prevarication, regret,
sorrow? What kind of evil is this of which the crim-
inal is proud, to be accused of which is his prayer,
and to be punished for it his happiness ? You cannot
call this madness,-you, whose ignorance of the sub-
ject is clearly proved.
II.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 5
CHAPTER II.
We are denied the rights of ordinary criminals, and
the use of torture is most inconsistently employed in
our case. The name alone of 'Christian' i's made
criminal.
EVEN if it is certain that we as a matter of fact are
the most guilty of men, why do we fare at your hands
otherwise than our fellow-criminals, when surely the
same treatment ought to be applied to offences of
a similar nature? When others are charged with
similar crimes to those we are charged with, they
employ both their own right of speech and a hired
advocate to maintain their innocence. The oppor-
tunity of rejoinder and cross-examination is open to
them, since it is illegal for them to be altogether
condemned undefended and unheard. But Christians
alone are forbidden to say anything either in self-
exculpation, or in defence of the truth, or in hin-
drance of a miscarriage of justice: attention is given
to that only which is required by the public hatred,-
namely, a confession of the name, not an enquiry
into the charge. Whereas when you judicially ex-
amine into the case of some criminal, you are not con-
tent to pronounce the verdict at once upon his con-
fession of the mere name of murderer, or sacrilegious
or incestuous person, or public enemy (to adopt our
own indictments), without eliciting the attendant
circumstances,-the nature of the deed, its frequency,
the place, the method, the time, the accessories, the
accomplices. Yet in our case you do nothing of the
kind; although the information ought just as much

to be extorted (whichever the charge may be that is
falsely cast in our teeth), as to how many murdered
infants each had already tasted of, how often incest
had been committed under cover of the darkness,
who were the cooks, what dogs were present. 0 how
high would be the reputation of that magistrate who
had unearthed any one who had already eaten one
hundred infants! And yet we find enquiry into our
case forbidden! For Pliny Secundus, when governor
of a province, after the condemnation of some Chris-
tians and the degradation of others, being distressed
at their very number notwithstanding, consulted
Trajan the Emperor b as to what he should do in the
future, alleging that beyond their obstinate refusal to
sacrifice, all he had discovered was that they were in
the habit of assembling at dawn to sing to Christ as
God 0 , and to bind themselves together under a strict
rule, forbidding homicide, adultery, fraud, perfidy,
and all other crimes. Then Trajan wrote back that
persons of this class were not indeed to be enquired
after, but if brought up before the court, were to be
punished.
What an inevitably inconsistent decision l It for-
bids them to be inquired after, as though innocent,
and yet bids them be punished, as though guilty. It
is at once lenient and merciless; it ignores while it
b See his letter to Trajan with the Emperor's reply translated
in the Appendix.
c Christo ut Deo. On the reading, see Lightfoot, Ignatius,
i. 57, ii. 533.
II.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 7
punishes. How strangely does this judgement over-
reach itself! If it condemns, why does it not also
institute enquiry? if it does not institute enquiry, why
does it not also acquit? Military stations are ap-
pointed by lot throughout every province for tracking
robbers; against traitors and public enemies every
civilian is in arms ; the enquiry is extended further
to their confederates and accomplices. The Chris-
tian is the only person against whom an enquiry may
not be set on foot, though he may be produced in
court ;-just as if the enquiry was for any other
purpose than the production before the magistrates !
And so you condemn the man brought before you,
though no one wished him to be sought out; a man,
I take it, who did not at first deserve punishment
because he was guilty, but because, being forbidden
to be sought out, he was found !
Nor likewise in another point do you act towards
us according to your ordinary procedure in judging
criminals; for you apply torture to others, when
denying, to make them confess; to the Christians
alone, to make them deny ; whereas if there were
criminality, we should indeed deny, and you as surely
would compel us under torture to confess. Nor
could you pretend that an investigation of Christian
criminality might be dispensed with on the ground
that the mere profession of Christianity would prove
it; for to this day, although cognizant of what con-
stitutes murder, you nevertheless elicit from a con-
fessed murderer the circumstances attendant upon the
committal of the deed : whence, still more perversely,
having assumed our guilt from our confession of the

name, you compel us under torture to retract our
confession, so that in our denial of the name we may
of course equally deny also the crimes of which you
had presumed us guilty from our Christian profession.
I must suppose of course that you do not wish us to
perish, whom you believe to be the worst of men ! It
is doubtless your custom thus to speak to a murderer :
' Deny it;' to order one who is guilty of sacrilege to
be tom in pieces if he persists in confessing it ! If,
then, you do not so act in the case of criminals, you
thereby adjudge us to be quite free from guilt ; since,
assuming our perfect innocence, you will not have us
persist in that confession which you know you are
bound to condemn-on grounds of necessity however,
not of justice.
A man exclaims, ' I am a Christian.' He tells
you what he is; you wish to hear what he is not.
Presiding judicially with the object of eliciting the
truth, it is from us alone that you are at pains to hear
falsehood. 'I am,' says he, 'that which you ask
whether I am ; why torture me to get a false state-
ment? You torture me if I confess, what would you
do if I denied?' Truly you are not so accommodat-
ingly credulous in the case of others who deny; to us,
upon our denial, you give immediate credence. Let
this crooked dealing of yours lead you to suspect the
existence of some secret hidden power, which com-
pels you to act in opposition to the recognized forms
and essentials of legal trial,-nay, in opposition to
the very laws themselves. For, unless I am mis-
n.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, 9
taken, the laws order evil-doers to be unearthed,
not to be concealed; they enjoin that confession
shall lead to condemnation, not to acquittal. This
is laid down by the decrees of the senate, by the
commands of emperors, and by the government whose
servants you are. The authority vested in you is a
constitutional, not a despotic one. For with despots
torture is made use of as a form of punishment ; with
you its use is moderated and confined to purposes of
examination only. Abide by your law in this respect
up to the time of confession, and if torture is antici-
pated by confession, it will be superfluous. Sentence
must be pronounced: the culprit must be dischargerl
from the obligation of the penalty by undergoing it,
and must not be released from it. No one, in fact,
desires to acquit him; it is not lawful to wish it ;
and therefore no compulsion is put upon any one to
deny. You regard a Christian as a man guilty of
every crime, hostile to the gods, to the emperors, to
the laws, to morals, to all the dictates of nature; and
yet you compel him to deny that you may be able to
acquit him ; for his denial will alone allow you to do
so. You are in collusion to defeat the laws. You
wish him to deny that he is guilty, so that you may
return him as guiltless (though very much indeed
against his will), and not as a criminal, in respect of
his past life. Whence comes this perversion of in-
tellect which neither leads you to grasp the fact that
more credit is to be given to a voluntary confession
than to a compulsory denial, nor to consider the
possibility that, if the arcused is compelled to deny,
IO THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLTAN [cHAP.
he may deny untruly, and when acquitted, straight-
way behind your tribunal laugh at your malevolence,
a Christian once more ?
Accordingly, since in every particular you deal
with us otherwise than with other criminals, by direct-
ing your efforts solely towards excluding us from the
use of this name (for we are excluded if we consent
to perform certain actions like others who are not
Christians d), you can well understand that there is no
question of crime in the case, but only of a name,-
a name persecuted by some system of malevolent
agency which aims primarily at making men refuse to
gain a clear knowledge of what they know they are
clearly ignorant of. Consequently they both believe
things of us which are unproven, and they refuse to
have them enquired into, fearing that they should be
proved to be other than they prefer men to believe
them to be; their object being that the name which
is opposed to that hostile system may be, by its own
confession alone, condemned on the presumption,
not the proof, of criminality. Hence we are tortured
if we confess, and are punished if we persist, and are
acquitted if we deny, because the contention is about
a name.
d The allusion is to the tests to which in early days the
Christians were suhjected. The most usual of these were
throwing a few grains of incense upon the altar, invoking the
genius of the emperor, or reviling Christ (comp. ch. 9, 30; and
Pliny's letter). Failure under these trials constituted an act of
apostasy, and a denial of Christ. Certain employments, too,
such as idol-making, astrology, &c., were held to be incom-
patible with the Christian profession : see Bingham, xi. 5. 6 ff.
III.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. II
Why, lastly, do you read out from the judicial

tablet that so and so is a Christian, why not add that
he is a murderer? If a Christian be a murderer,
why not also a committer of incest, or anything else
you credit us with being? Is it in our case alone that
you are too much ashamed or disgusted to give the
exact names of our offences when you pronounce the
verdict? If a Christian is guilty of no crime, it is
indeed a dangerous name if the crime lies in the
name alone.
CHAPTER III.
The blindness ofyour hatred over-reaches itself, and
involuntarily eulogizes us.
WHY, the majority in their blindness are so driven

into hatred of it, that even while bearing good
testimony to any one they join with it reproach of
the name: 'A good man, Caius Seius, only he is a
Christian.' Or again, ' I wonder at a sensible man
like Lucius suddenly becoming a Christian.' No one
considers whether it is not because he is a Christian
that Caiu'> is good, and Lucius prudent, or therefore
a Christian because prudent and good. They praise
what they know, they blame what they are ignorant
of; and what they do know they mar by their ignor-
ance, although it would be more equitable to form
a judgement upon the hidden from the seen than to
condemn the seen from the hidden.
Others stigmatize on the very grounds on which
they praise them, those whom they knew formerly in
J2 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
their pre-Christian days as vagabonds, worthless, and

base. In the blindness of their hatred they are
driven into pronouncing a eulogium. 'What a wo-
man ! how wanton, how gay! What a youth ! how
profligate, how licentious ! They have become Chris-
tians.' Thus the name is credited with their reform.
Some even strike· a bargain between their own in-
terests and such hatred, being content to suffer loss,
provided only they can rid their homes of the objects
of their hatred. The husband, no longer jealous,
casts off his wife now chaste : the father, formerly
patient, disinherits his son now dutiful : the master,
formerly mild, banishes from his sight his slave now
faithful : each one, as he is reformed by this name,
becomes offensive. The improvement counts for
nothing in comparison with hatred of the Christians.
Now then, if this hatred is directed against the
name, what is the guilt attaching to names? What
accusation can be brought against words, except that
a certain pronunciation of a name sounds barbarous,
or is unlucky or abusive or obscene? But 'Christian,'
as far as its etymology goes, is derived from ' anoint-
ing.' And even when it is incorrectly pronounced
by you 'Chrestian •' (for not even is your acquaint-
ance with the name accurate), it is formed from
'sweetness' or 'kindness.' In innocent men, there-
fore, even an innocent name is hated.
But you will say that the sect is hated at all events
on account of its Founder's name. Yet what is there
• Renan, Les Aj>/Jtres, p. 235, 'La pronunciation vulgaire, en
effet, etait chrestiani.' See Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 16, note.
IV.} FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
novel in the fact of any school taking an appellation

for its adherents from its master's name? Are not the
philosophers named from their masters, Platonists,
Epicuneans, Pythagorreans? and even from their
places of meeting and resort, Stoics, Academics?
physicians too from Erasistratus, grammarians from
Aristarchus, and even cooks from Apicius? Nor does
this adoption of the name, transmitted with the
system from its founder, offend any one. Of course
if any one proves the sect to be a bad one, and conse-
quently its Founder to be a bad man, he will also
prove the name bad and deserving of hatred from
the guilt of the sect and its Founder. It were there-
fore proper, before hating the name, first to form
a judgement either of the sect from its Founder, or
of its Founder from the sect. But now, without any
investigation or knowledge of either, the name is
seized upon and made the subject of attack, and
a single word pre-condemns the sect and its Founder,
both alike unknown,-and all because they are so
named, not because they are convicted of guilt.
CHAPTER IV.
2. We propose to refute and retort every charge ;·ou
bring against us; but first let us examine the nature
ef the laws under which we are condemned.
AND so, having as it were prefaced thus much for
the purpose of holding up to contempt the injustice
of the public hatred towards us, I will now take up
a position for the defence of our innocence ; nor

shall I merely refute what is laid to our charge, but
also retort the charges upon those who make them;
so that from this also all may know that those crimes
are not to be found amongst Christians which our
accusers are well aware do exist amongst themselves;
and that at the same time they may be put to the
blush, being as they are accusers (respecting whom
I will not say that they are the worst of men posing
as accusers of the best, but) of those who are from
their point of view their fellow-criminals. We shall
reply to each charge, both those which we are accused
of perpetrating in secret, and those which we are
detected in committing openly; those in which we
are deemed wicked, those in which we are deemed
foolish ; those for which we are to be condemned,
those for which we are to be ridiculed.
But whereas, since the truth of our cause meets
you at every point, as a last resort the authority of
the laws is set up as a barrier against it, so that
either it is said that no question ought to be re-
opened after the laws have once decided it, or else
that, however unwillingly, the necessity of obedience
takes precedence of any care for the truth, I will first
engage you in argument on this point of the laws,
regarding you as their guardians.
First, then, how sternly you lay down this decision :
'Your existence is illegal!' And this you lay down
as a preliminary objection without any more lenient
modification. You exhibit violence and unjust tyr-
rany from out of your citadel if you therefore say it
rv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 15
is unlawful merely because you wish it, not because
it ought to be so. Of course if you do not wish
it to be lawful because it ought not to be so,
without doubt what is wrong ought not to be law-
ful. And as a matter of fact, on this very ground
it is already decided that what is right is law-
ful. If I shaU find that to be good which your
law has forbidden, does it not surely by that pre-
decision lose the power to forbid me that which, if it
were wrong, it would rightly forbid ? What if your
law has erred? it is I suppose of human origin, for
it did not fall from heaven. Is it a matter for wonder
either that man should err in framing a law, or that
he should become sensible again in repealing it ?
Were not the laws of Lycurgus himself revised by the
Spartans, and did not this revision inflict such grief
upon their author that he starved himself to death in
retirement? Do not you yourselves, too, day by day,
in your attempts to illumine the darkness of past
ages, cut down and fell with the new axes of imperial
rescripts and edicts the whole of that old and tan-
gled forest of laws? Did not Severus, that steadiest
of princes, only the other day repeal those ridiculous
Papian laws which bade children be brought up
before the Julian law enforced marriage,-laws whose
antiquity gave them such high authority? But there
were laws also formerly which authorized those sen-
tenced under them to be cut in pieces by their
creditors, yet by common consent this cruelty was
afterwards abolished, and a mark of disgrace substi-
tuted for capital punishment; it was thought better
to bring about, by the appointment of a confiscation

of goods, the flush of shame rather than the rush of
life-blood f, How many laws needing amendment
yet lie hidden, which neither their own antiquity nor
the dignity of their framers, but their intrinsic justice
alone commends; and therefore when proved to
be unjust, they are deservedly to be condemned,
although they condemn.
Nor are they merely unjust ; they are stupid too,
if they condemn a mere name. If, however, they
punish deeds, why in our case do they punish deeds
on the ground of a name alone,-deeds which it is
determined in other cases must be proved by the
committal of them, not by a name ? I am guilty of
incest; why do they not enquire into it? or infanti-
cide ; why do they not extort the details? I commit
a crime against the gods, or against the Caesars; why
am I not heard when I have means of exculpating
myself? No law forbids the investigation of a pro-
hibited act; because no judge can rightly inflict
punishment unless he knows that an illegal act has
been committed. Nor can any citizen loyally obey
the law, if ignorant of the nature of punishable
offences. No law is bound to satisfy itself alone
as to its own intrinsic justice, but also those from
whom it looks for obedience. A law excites sus-
picion if it is not willing to be approved, and it is
unjust if, when disapproved, it tyrannizes.
r Su!Iundere maluit hominis sanguinem quam efiundere.
v.J FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 17
CHAPTER V.
They are to be traced to an old decree, and to the
rescripts of the worst emperors.
Now, to consider somewhat concerning the origin
of laws of this kind. There was an old. decree g that
no god should be consecrated by the emperor without
the approval of the senate. Marcus .Mmilius is a
witness of this in the case of his god Alburnus.
And this makes in our favour, that amongst you
divinity is weighed out at human caprice. Unless
a god shall have pleased man, he shall not be a god;
man must now be propitious to a god. Tiberius,
then, in whose time the Christian name entered into
the world, laid before the senate h tidings from Pales-
tine which had revealed to him the truth of that
Divine Power there manifested, and supported the
motion with his own first vote. The senate, because
it did not itself approve, rejected the proposal.
Cresar maintained his own opinion, and threatened
danger to those who accused the Christians. Con-
sult your own records : there you will find that Nero
was the first to furiously attack with the imperial sword
this sect then rising into notice especially at Rome i,
But in such an originator of our condemnation we
I Cicero delegibus, ii. 8. 19, 'Let no one have gods apart, and
let not men worship in private new or strange gods, except they be
publicly adopted. '-See Westcott, Epistles of S. John, p. 258.
h This statement, for which Tertullian is the sole authority,
is probably groundless.-See Merivale, Hist. Rom., vi. 439.
1 See Lightfoot, Philippians, pp. 23 ff.
C
THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
indeed glory. For. whoever knows him can under-
stand that nothing but what was sublimely good was
condemned by Nero. Domitian also, somewhat of
a Nero in cruelty, attempted the same, but inasmuch
as he had some human feelings, he soon stopped the
proceedings, and those whom he had banished were
recalled j_ Such have ever been our persecutors,-
the unjust, the impious, the base, whom you your-
selves have been accustomed to condemn, and to
restore those condemned by them.
Eut out of so many princes from that time down to
the present, men versed in every system of knowledge:
produce if you can one persecutor of the Christians.
We, however, can on the other side produce a pro-
tector, if the letters of the most grave Emperor
Marcus Aureliusk be searched, in which he testifies
that the well-known Germanic drought was dispelled
l At the commencement of the next reign, A.D. 96.
k Tertullian refers to the story of the " Thundering Legion "
(Legio fulminata), of which the historical facts are these. Dur-
ing the intense heat of the summer of the year I 74, in his
expedition against the Quadi, M. Aurelius was surprised near
Camuntum, and cut off from all water supplies. At this junc-
ture an opportune storm relieved the wants of his soldiers, who
were then led on to victory. The rain was attributed by the
Christians in the army to their own prayers: by the pagans to
the prayers of Aurelius (Capitol. M. Ant. Phil. 24), to Jupiter
Pluvius (Ant. Col.), or to the incantations of two magi, Amu-
phis and Julian (Dion Ca.rs. lxxi. 8 ff.). Tertullian hazards
a conjecture that among the state-papers would be found Aure-
lius' letter to the Senate (Dion I.e.), and that it would contain
a reference to the Christians. He does not profess to have seen
the letter. The lack of systematic records of. the persecutions
VI.] FOR THE -CHRISTIANS. 19.
by the shower ·obtained through the prayers of Chris-

tians who happened to be in the army. And although
he did not openly abolish the penalty incurred by
members of that sect, yet in another way he openly
averted it by the addition of a condemnatory sen-
tence on the accusers, and that a more terrible one.
Of what kind, then, are those laws of yours, which
only the impious, the unjust, the base, the foolish,
the insane, put in force against us ; which Trajan
partially frustrated by forbidding Christians to be
enquired for; which no Hadrian, although a keen
investigator of all things curious ; no Vespasian 1,
although the vanquisher of the Jews ; no Pius, no
Verus, sanctioned? It might be thought that the
worst of men would surely be rooted out by all the
best, as being their opponents, more readily than by
their own accomplices.
CHAPTER VI.
Your ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by
yourselves, both as regards personal and social ques-
tions, as well as religious restn'ctions.
Now I wish these most religious guardians and
devotees of laws and ancestral institutions to answer
will explain Tertullian's ignorance of_ the exceptionally cruel
sufferings of the Christians during this emperor's reign. Light-
foot, Ignatius, i. 16, 473; Philippians, 317 f. For further refer-
ences of Tertullian to the Roinan archives, see ch. 2 I.
l Tertullian was not acquainted with a persecution under this
emperor referred to by Hilary of Poitiers, contr. Arian. 3 ;.
comp. Sulp. Sever., Chron, ii. 30; Lightfoot, Ignatius, i, 1_5 f.
.20 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
for their own loyalty and respect and devotion to the

decrees of their forefathers, and to say if they have
not broken away or deviated from any of them, or
if they have not annulled some which were necessary
and excellently adapted to secure propriety generally.
What, pray, has become of those laws which checked
extravagance and ostentation m? which decreed that
not more than one hundred pence should be allowed
for a supper, nor more than one fowl, and that not
specially fattened, served up; which banished from
the senate on a grave charge of ostentation a patrician
who possessed ten pounds weight of plate ; which
immediately suppressed the theatres as they sprang
up to the deterioration of morals ; which allowed the
distinctions belonging to rank and honourable birth
to be assumed neither rashly nor with impunity? For
I see suppers now which can only be called ' cente.
narian' from the 'hundreds' of pounds spent upon
them n; and silver mines wrought into dishes,-it
were of little moment if it were only for senators, and
not for freedmen, or those still in slavery. I see also
theatres, for one is no longer sufficient, nor may they
be uncovered. It was of course lest immodest plea-
sure should be chilled, particularly in winter, that the
Spartans first invented the disgrace of a cloak at the
games ! I see, too, no distinction left in dress between
matrons and prostitutes. \Vith regard to women, in-
deed, even those regulations of our ancestors which
m On the luxury and extravagant living of the Romans, see
Merivale, v. 85, 289 ff.

11 See Merivale, Hist. Rom,, vi. 68.
VI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 2I
protected modesty and sobriety have fallen into dis-

use; when no.woman knew aught of gold, save on the
one especial finger which her spouse had pledged to
himself with the wedding-ring; when women abstained
from wine so rigorously that her own relatives starved
to death a matron for breaking open the bins of a
wine-cellar. In the time of Romulus a woman who
had touched wine was put to death with impunity by
her husband Mecenius. Hence arose the necessity
of their offering kisses to near relatives, that they
might be judged by their breath. Where is that
conjugal happiness, so successful in the point of
morals at all events, by reason of which not one
family for nearly six hundred years from the founda-
tion of the city took action for a divorce? But now
in the case of women every limb is heavy with gold,
no kiss is free on account of wine; moreover a
divorce is now the subject of prayer, as though it
were the natu,ral fruit of marriage.
Even as regards your gods themselves, what your
ancestors wisely decreed, you, their most obsequious
sons, have rescinded. Father Bacchus with his mys-
teries, the consuls by the authority of the senate
banished, not only from the city but from the whole
of Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with his
dog-headed Anubis, Piso and Gabinius the consuls,
who at any rate were not Christians, forbade the
Capitol, that is, expelled from the assembly of the
gods, and rejected, having overthrown their altars;
thus restraining the vices of shameful and idle super-
stitions. Upon these gods, whom you restored, you
have conferred the highest majesty. Where is your

religious awe? where the veneration due from you to
your ancestors? In dress, in food, in style of living,
in sentiment, nay in language itself, you have re-
nounced your progenitors. You are ever praising
the past, yet you live day by day in a round of
novelty. From which it is clear that, in departing
from the virtuous regulations of your ancestors, you
retain and preserve customs which you ought not,
whilst you fail to preserve those which you ought.
Besides, that very tradition of your forefathers which
now for the first time you seem to most faithfully
guard, in respect of which you pronounce the Chris-
tians principally guilty of transgression, I mean zeal
in the worship of the gods,-a matter on which
antiquity especially erred,--although you may have
rebuilt the altars of the now Roman Serapis, although
you may have offered your phrenzied orgies to the
now Italian Bacchus,-that very tradition I will in
its proper place O shew that you have equally de-
spised and neglected and destroyed in the face of
their authority. At present I shall reply to that dis-
graceful report of our secret atrocities, and so clear
the way to deal with our more open crimes.
o Chap. XIII.
vn.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
CHAPTER VII.
II. r. We are accused of infamous secret atrodti'es,-

infanticide, a feast of blood, and incest, although no
proof has ever been forthcoming, and only rumour is
responsible for the charge.
WE are called the most infamous of men on the

charge of an infanticidal religious rite and a banquet
thereat, and incest after the feast ;-incest which dogs
that overturn the lights (our pimps forsooth) bring
about through the shamelessness which is occasioned
by the darkness and impious lusts. Yet we are ever
but called so, nor are you at any pains to drag into
light what we have been so long charged with.
Either therefore elicit the facts if you believe them,
or forego belief if you have not brought them to
light. Your want of straightforwardness lays you
open to the preliminary objection that what you do
not dare to investigate has in fact no existence. A
very different duty from investigation is that which
you bid your executioner carry out against the Chris-
tians, namely, not to make them say what they do,
but to make them deny what they are.
The origin of this religion dates, as I have already
said, from .the time of Tiberius. On its first appear-
ance the Truth encountered hostility from the preju-
dice it always excites. She had as many enemies as
_there were strangers to her : the Jews indeed pecu-
liarly so, from jealousy; the soldiers, from habits of
THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
extortion; even those of our own households P, from

the force of circumstances. We are daily beset,
daily betrayed, we are unexpectedly seized, and
oftenest in our actual assemblies and meetings. Yet
who even thus ever chanced on a squalling infant?
Who ever kept us for the judge with our months
bloody as he found them, like Cyclops and Sirens?
Who ever detected in their wives any traces of un-
chastity? Who ever first found out and then con-
cealed such crimes, or sold his information with the
culprits in his grasp? If we are always escaping
detection, when was our guilt made known? nay, by
whom could it he divulged? Certainly not by the
criminals themselves, since the duty of secrecy is
imperatively demanded in all mysteries. The Samo-
thracian and Eleusinian mysteries are kept secret;
how much more, then, such as, if disclosed, would at
once provoke human punishment and for which Di-
vine wrath would be reserved? If then they are not
themselves their own betrayers, it follows that out-
siders must have furnished the information. And
whence have outsiders derived their acquaintance
with the facts? when from religious initiations the
profane are always excluded, and precautions are
taken against witnesses,-unless indeed the impious
know less of fear !
The nature of rumour is known to all. As your
own poet says 4 -
, Rumour is an ill, and none more swift.'
Why is Rumour an ill ? because swift ? because a tale-
P S. Matt. x. 36. 1 Vergil, Aen. iv. 174.
VII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
bearer? or because generally false? for not even

when in the act of bringing true news is it free from
the taint of falsehood,-detracting from, adding to,
altering the truth. Why, such is its condition of
being, that it would not steadily persist unless it
spread falsehood, and it only flourishes so long as it
offers no proofs ; since, when it has brought proofs,
it ceases to exist, and hands over the fact as if its
duty of news-bearing were discharged ; and thence-
forward it is held as a fact, and is call<:d a fact. Nor
does any one say for instance: 'They say this
happened at Rome ; ' or, ' There is a rumour that
he is appointed to the province ; ' but, ' He is ap-
pointed to the province;' and, 'This happened at
Rome.' Rumour, a name for uncertainty, has no
place where certainty exists. For would any but
a rash man believe Rumour? A wise man trusts not
to the uncertain. Any one can judge this, no matter
how wide the circuit of its diffusion, no matter how
strengthened by emphatic assertion. A tale which
has originated at some time or other with a single
authority, from him is bound to insinuate itself into
the propagating channels of tongues and ears. And
a flaw in the insignificant source so obscures the rest
of the report, that it never strikes any one whether
the first lips did not originate a falsehood, as often
happens either from a jealous imagination or whim-
sical suspicion, or the mere love of lying which in
some persons is not an acquirement, but innate.
Well is it, then, that according to your own pro-
verbs and maxims, 'time reveals all things,' in the
THE.APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
order of Nature which has so arranged it that nothing
be long hidden, even though rumour has not dis-
seminated it.
Justly, therefore, has Rumour alone all this time
been privy to the crimes of the Christians. This is
the informer you produce against us,-one which has
never yet been able up to the present time to prove
the charge it in times past cast in our teeth, though
in so long a period of time it has strengthened it
into a general belief.
CHAPTER VIII.
Whereas natural instinct would revolt from such crimes,

and the burdened conscience if one unwittingly led lo
perpetrate them would be intolerable.
Now in order that I may appeal to the trustworthy
testimony of Nature herself against those who assume
the credibility of such crimes, lo, we place before
you the reward of these atrocities ; Eternal Life is
promised in return. Believe it for the time being,
for argument's sake. And then I ask you this;
whether, although you believe it, you think it worth
while to attain it at such a cost to your conscience.
Come, plunge your knife into an infant, harmless,
innocent, and helpless; or if this be the duty of
another, do you at least stand by while this human
.being dies before it has really lived; wait for the
flight of the newly-entered soul ; catch the immature
blood; soak your bread in it; feed freely upon it
vm.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 27
Meantime reclining at the feast, note the positions
of your mother and sister; observe them diligently,
so that when the darkness has been ushered in by
the dogs, you may make no mistake. For you will
contract pollution unless you commit incest. Thus
initiated and sealed, you will live for ever. I want
you to say whether Eternity is worth all this ; and
if it is not, in that case it ought not to be believed
to be so. Even if you did believe it, I say that
you would not do it; and even if you wished to do
it, I say that you could not. Why, then, should
others be capable of doing what you cannot? why
should not you be able to do it if others can ? We,
I suppose, are of another nature-monstrosities like
the Cynop::e or Sciapodes ! with different rows of
teeth, and other nerves for incestuous lust ! You
who can believe these things of a human being can
also do them. You, too, are a man yourself, and
so is also a Christian. You who cannot do it ought
not to believe it. For even a Christian is a man ;
and whatever else you are yourself, he is also.
But you may say that deceit and imposition are
practised upon the ignorant neophytes. For they
might be unaware of any such assertions about the
Christians as ought at any rate to have been enquired
into and investigated with all carefulness. And yet
it occurs to me that it is customary for those who
are desirous of being initiated to go first to the
director of the sacred ritual and to take down the
requisite preparations. He of course would say:
' An infant is indispensable, one quite young, and
ignorant of the meaning of death, who will smile

under your knife ; bread likewise, in which to soak
up the juicy blood ; candlesticks, too, and lights, and
some dogs and bits of offal to make them strain
forward and overturn the lights; above all, you must
bring your mother and sister with you.' What if
they will not come; or if you have none? What,
in fine, are solitary candidates without relatives to
do? He will not be a valid Christian, I suppose,
who is not a brother or a son. Grant, if you like,
that all these preliminaries have been prepared for
neophytes without their knowledge; at least they
learn them afterwards, and bear up under the shock,
and condone it. They fear, you say, lest they should
be punished ; whereas if they were to proclaim the
infamy they would deserve every protection, and they
would prefer even voluntary death to life with such
a consciousness of guilt. But granting that they are
afraid; why do they still continue Christians? For
it follows that you no longer wish to be that which
you never would have become, had you known
beforehand.
IX.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 29
CHAPTER IX.
You yourselves an guilty of sacrijidng children and
adults in your worship of various deities, and of
eating blood in several loathsome rites and horrible
repasts. Your knowledge of our horror of eating blood
is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us.
Incest, too, i's one of your commonest crimes.
FoR a more thorough refutation of these charges
I will shew what deeds are performed by you partly
in public, partly in secret, whence perhaps you have
been led to credit them also about us.
In Africa infants were openly sacrificed to Saturn
down to the proconsulate of Tiberius•, who exposed
the priests themselves on the very trees that over-
shadowed their own temple of crimes, as on votive
crosses ; as the soldiery of our own country• who
did that work for the proconsul can testify. And
even now this accursed crime is secretly continued.
It is not the Christians alone who defy you ; no
crime is permanently eradicated, nor does any god
change his character. Since Saturn did not spare
his own sons, he naturally persisted in not sparing
the children of others; whom indeed the parents
themselves used to offer to him and present as
• Usque ad proconsulatum Tiberii. This Tiberius was prob-
ably a proconsul of Africa in the second century (Dollinger,
Gent. and Yew, i. 488).
• Patrire nostrre : Codex Fuld. patris nostri, 'my father's
own soldiers.'
willing victims, the infants being caressed lest they

should be sacrificed weeping. And yet this parental
child-murder is much more heinous than man-
slaughter.
Adults were sacrificed to Mercury amongst the
Gauls. I dismiss the Tauric fables to the theatres
where they belong. Lo, in that most religious city
of the pious descendants of iEneas there is a certain
Jupiter t whom in his own games they deluge with
human blood. 'But,' you say, ' only the blood
of a criminal condemned to the beasts.' And there•
fore, I suppose, of less moment than the blood
of a man! Is it not rather worse, because that of a
bad man? At all events the blood is shed in man-
slaughter. Jupiter must be Christian, as your view
of Christian goes; and the only son of his fathet
for cruelty l
But since in the case of infanticide it matters
nothing whether it be committed under religious
sanctions or out of mere caprice (although it does
matter whether it is parental child-murder or man-
slaughter), I will appeal to the people. How many
of those who stand around panting for the blood of
the Christians,-how many, think you, of yourselves
even, magistrates most just and severe against us,
shall I prick in their consciences, who are in the.·
habit of strangling the children born to them ? Since
there is a difference, too, in the kind of death,
surely that is the more cruel method by which you
$queeze·. out their breath under water, or expose
' Jupiter Latiari.
IX.] · - FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 31
them to cold and hunger and the dogs; for an adult,
too, would choose death by the knife in preference.
But to us, to whom murder has once for all been
forbidden, it is unlawful even to destroy the fetus
in the womb whilst the blood is still forming into
a human being. Prevention of birth is premature
murder; nor does it alter the question whether one
takes away a life already born, or destroys one which
is in process of formation. That also is a human-
being, which is about to become one, just as every
fruit exists already in the seed.
As for feeding upon blood and tragic dishes of
that kind, read whether it is not somewhere related
(it is in Herodotus x, I think) that certain nations
have appointed the tasting of blood, drawn from
the arms of both parties, for the ratification of a
treaty. Some such tasting th-ere was, too, under
Catiline. They say also that among certain Scythian •
tribes a dead person is eaten by his own relatives.
I am going far afield. To-day, at home, bloorl from
an incised thigh, caught in a shield and given to
her own worshippers, seals those dedicated to Bel-
lona. What about those, too, who for the cure
of epilepsy at the gladiatorial show in the arena
drink with greedy thirst the fresh blood flowing from
the throats of the criminals ?
What about those, likewise, who sup off the flesh
of wild beasts from the arena, and eat a meal qff
boar or stag ? That boar in the struggle wiped
the blood off the victim whom he first made
u Herod. i. 74; iv. 70.
32 THE APOLOGY OF 1'ERTULLIAN [CHAP.
bloody ; that stag wallowed in the blood of a

gladiator. The paunches of the very bears are
eagerly desired, loaded with as yet undigested
human entrails. Flesh which has fed on man is
immediately rejected by man's stomach. You that
eat these things, how far are you removed in your
repasts from the feasts of the Christians? But do
they do less who with beastly lust open their mouths
to human bodies, because they devour what is alive ?
Are they the less consecrated to filth by human
blood because they lick up only what is about to
become blood? They eat not infants indeed, but
rather adults. Your crime may well blush in the
presence of Christians, who do not reckon the blood
even of animals amongst articles of food, and who
accordingly abstain also from things strangled x, and
those that have died of themselves Y, lest we should
be defiled by any blood secreted in the entrails.
Lastly, among the tests applied to the Christians
you present to them sausage-skins filled with blood,
simply because you are quite certain that it is unlaw-
ful for them, and you wish through it to inveigle
them into error. Moreover, what folly it is for you
to credit with a thirst for human blood the very
people on whom you confidently rely to shrink with
horror from the blood of cattle,-unless perchance
you have found the former more palateable. And
" For the prohibition of blood under each dispensation, prre•
Mosaic, Mosaic, and Christian, see Gen. ix. 4; Levit. xvii. IO ff;
Acts xv. 20. Comp. note at the end of Apology in Lib. Fathers,
pp. 107 ff. 1 Levit. xxii. 8.
rx.J FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 33
indeed this also ought to be applied as a test to the
Christians in the same manner as the brazier and the
incense-box. For they would be tested just as much
by their desire for human blood as by their refasal to
sacrifice ; and in other respects they would have to
be put to death if they tasted, just as if they had
refused to sacrifice. And, at all events, you would
never be in want of human blood at your trials and
condemnations of prisoners.
Similarly again, who are more incestuous than those
whom Jupiter himself has taught ? Ctesias relates
that the Persians cohabit with their own mothers.
The Macedonians, too, are suspected of the same,
because, when they first heard the tragedy of CEdipus,
they laughed at the incestuous king's grief, and
exclaimed, ff>,.avvE 'nJV P,1/T•pa. Just consider now what
opportunities there are for the contraction of inces-
tuous unions, the promiscuousness of your profligacy
supplying the occasions. In the first place, you ex-
pose your children to be taken up by any passing
stranger who may be moved to pity them, or you
surrender them to be adopted by better parents. All
memory of a progeny thus cast off must some time or
other be lost ; and should a mistake once occur,
thence the propagation of the incest will still go on,
progeny and crime creeping on together. Secondly,
wherever you are, at home, abroad, or over the sea,
lust is your companion; and your promiscuous em-
braces may easily anywhere beget children to you
unawares, even from however small a portion of the
seed; so that the progeny thus scattered may through
D
human intercourse meet with members of its own

kin and not recognize them as unions of incestuous
blood. We, on the contrary, are protected from such
a consequence by a most persevering and most con-
stant chastity ; and in proportion as we are safe from
carnal defilements and all post-nuptial infidelity, so
are we also from the possibility of incest. Some, far
less troubled, completely withstand the attack of this
sin by a virgin continence,-old men in years, chil-
dren in innocence.
If you would only observe how that these sins are
to be found amongst yourselves, you would at the
same time perceive that they do not exist amongst
Christians. The same eyes would have informed
you on both points. But two kinds of blindness
readily go together; so that those who see not what
is, seem to see what is not. I shall shew this to be
the case throughout.
Now I come to our more open crimes.
CHAPTER X.
II. r. We are accused of sacrilege and disloyalty. We

shall prove that your gods are no gods ; far they
once were men.
' You do not worship the gods,' you say to us,

'and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.'
It follows that we do not sacrifice for others, for the
same reason that we do not sacrifice for ourselves-
x.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 35
in a word, from our not worshipping the gods. Con-
sequently we are judicially charged with sacrilege and
disloyalty. This is the chief point in the case, or
rather it is the whole case, and it certainly demands
investigation, if neither prejudice nor injustice is to
be the judge, the one despairing of, and the other
rejecting the truth. We cease to worship your gods
from that moment when we recognize that they do
not exist. This, therefore, you ought to demand,-
that we prove these gods to have no existence, and
on that ground that they ought not to be worshipped,
since worship would only be due to them in the
event of their being really gods. Then, too, it will
of course follow that the Christians must be punished,
if it remains an established fact that those gods do
exist, whom they refused to worship because they
believed them to have no such existence.
'But,' you say, 'to us they are gods.' We pro-
test, and appeal from yourselves to your conscience :
let that judge us, let that condemn us, if it can deny
that all those gods of yours were men. But if it
itself contest the point, it shall be convicted from its
own documents of antiquity, from whence it learnt
about them, which testify to this day both to the
cities where they were born, and to the localities where
they left marks of their work, and even where they
are shewn to be buried. Nor shall I go through all
one by one, many and important as they are,-
new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive,
adopted, peculiar, common, male, female, rural, urban,
nautical, military,-it is tedious enough even to re•
count their titles; but I will deal with them con-

cisely; and this, not that you may learn, but that
you may be reminded, for you certainly act the part
of those who have forgotten.
Previous to Saturn there is with you no god : from
him is the beginning of all, even of more powerful
and better known divinity. Consequently, whatever
shall be established of the source will also hold good
of the succession. Saturn, then, as far as literature
teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor
Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any other
writer on this particular kind of antiquities, has pro-
claimed to be anything but a man : and so far as the
evidence of facts goes, nowhere do I find any more
trustworthy than in Italy itself, where Saturn, after
many expeditions, and after partaking of Attic hos-
pitality, settled, being received by Janus, or Janes,
as the Salians prefer it. The mountain which he
inhabited was called Saturnius ; the state which he
founded is even to this day Saturnia; in fact the
whole of Italy, after being CEnotria, was named
Satumia. By him writing-tablets were first intro-
duced, an<l a stamped coinage, and for that reason
he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was
a man, surely he sprang from a man ; and since he
came into being by a man, he certainly cannot be
from Heaven and Earth. But it easily came about
that he, whose parents were unknown, was called the
son of those whose children we may all of us also be
deemed to be. For who may not call Heaven and
Earth father and mother, for the sake of respect and
xi.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 37
honour, or in deference to that general custom by
which persons unknown or unexpectedly appearing
are said to have dropped from the sky. Just so
it happened to Saturn, unexpectedly appearing every-
where, to be called celestial. For those whose birth
is uncertain are commonly termed sons of earth.
I do not make a point of the fact that men in those
ages were so ignorant as to be moved by the appear-
ance, as though divine, of any strange man; since,
cultured as they are at the present day, they con-
secrate as gods those whom a few days before they
have admitted by a public mourning to be dead •.
We have dealt quite sufficiently, although briefly,
with Saturn. We will shew that even Jupiter himself
was both a man and sprung . from a man ; and that
thereafter the whole swarm of his progeny were
both mortal and like their source.
CHAPTER XI.
And no reasons exist for their subsequent deification,
since their aid in Nature is, and always has been,
unnecessary ; while their gross immoralities would
rather condemn them to Tartarus than exalt them to
Heaven.
AND since, as you dare not deny that these deities
were men, you have decided to assert that they were
made gods after their death, let us examine the
causes which may have urged this.
• The allusion is to the deification of the deceased emperors.
In the first place, indeed, you must allow that

there is some superior God, and absolute proprietor
of divinity, who made them gods out of men. For
neither could they assume to themselves a divinity
which they uid not possess, nor could any other but
he whose peculiar possession it was, give it to them
that had it not. If, however, there is no one who
made them gods, it is absurd for you to represent
them as having been made gods, and at the same time
to deny them a maker. Certainly if they could have
made themselves gods, they would never have been
men; since they would in that case have possessed
in themselves the power of enjoying a nobler state of
being. If, then, there is any one who makes gods, I
turn back to examine the reasons for making gods
out of men; nor do I find any, except it be that that
great God felt the want of their services and aid in
the discharge of his divine duties.
But in the first place it is unworthy of him that he
should need the help of any· one, and especially of a
dead man; since he, who was fated to feel the want
of a dead man, might more worthily have created
some god from the beginning. Nor do I see any
room for such aid. For the whole body of this
universe (whether spontaneously generated, as Pytha-
goras held, or formed and created, as Plato believed)
was surely found to have been once for all in its very
·construction arranged and furnished and ordered
under the guidance of an all-embracing plan. That
could not be imperfect which perfectly discharged all
its functions. Nothing waited for the intervention of
XI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 39
Saturn and his race. Men would be fools if they
were not quite convinced that from the very begin-
ning the rain has fallen from the sky and the stars
have gleamed, and the sun and moon have been
bright, and the thunder has muttered, and Jupiter
himself has feared those lightnings which you place
in his hand. Likewise every kind of fruit sprang
forth abundantly from the earth before Bacchus and
Ceres and Minerva, nay, even before the time of the
very first man ; for nothing that was devised for the
preservation and support of man could be introduced
after man himself.
Lastly, the gods are said to have discovered those
necessaries of life, not to have made them. But that
which is discovered must already be in existence ;
and therefore will not be accounted his who dis-
covered it, but his who made it. For it was in
existence before it could be discovered. If, however,
Bacchus be a god because he first pointed out the
use of the vine, Lucullus, who first introduced the
cherry into Italy from Pontus, has been unfairly
treated, in that he has not been on that account
deified, as the author of a new fruit, because its
discoverer and notifier.
Wherefore, if the universe has been established
from the beginning both furnished and ordered on
fixed plans for the discharge of its proper functions,
no reason exists from this point of view for electing
men into the rank of gods; because the positions
and powers which you assign to them have existed
just as much from the beginning as they would have
done even had you not created those gods of
yours.
:But you tum to another reason, and reply that
divinity .was conferred upon them as the reward of
their merits. And with this statement you will of
course grant that that god-making Deity is conspi-
cuous for justice, and would not rashly nor unworthily
nor prodigally dispense so great a reward.
I want therefore to review their merits, and to see
if they are of such a kind as should exalt them to
Heaven, and not rather plunge them down to the
lowest Tartarus, which you, with many", affirm to be
the prison house of infernal punishments. For thither
the impious are accustomed to be thrust, and such
as have committed incest with parents or sisters, and
adulterers, and ravishers of virgins, and corruptors of
boys, and the passionate, and murderers, and thieves,
and deceivers, and whosoever resemble some god
of yours, not one of whom could you prove free from
crime or vice, unless you deny that he was a man.
And yet, though you cannot deny them to have been
men, there are those infamous marks in addition
which forbid our believing them to have been deified
afterwards. For if you judicially preside for the
punishment of such men,-if such as are upright
amongst you decline the society, conversation, and
intimacy of the wicked and base, but yet that great
a Cum multis. A better attested reading gives, cum vultis,
'when you like to admit the fact of future rewards and punish-
ments.' Tertullian glances at the fickleness which sometimes
derided, and sometimes dreaded the idea {Oehler).
xr.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 41
God has admitted such beings to a partnership in his
own majesty,-why do you condemn those whose
fellows in sin you worship? Your administration of
justice is an affront upon heaven. To please your
gods you must deify all your greatest criminals ; for
the deification of their fellows is an honour to
them.
But not to dwell upon the question of their un-
worthiness, let us suppose that they were upright and
pure and good. How many better men, nevertheless,
have you left in the lower world? some Socrates in
wisdom, some Aristides in justice, some Themistocles
in military skill, some Alexander in magnanimity,
some Polycrates in happiness, some Crresus in wealth,
some Demosthe~es in eloquence ! Which of those
gods of yours was graver and wiser than Cato, juster
and more strict than Scipio? which was more
magnanimous than Pompey, more successful than
Sulla, wealthier than Crassus, more eloquent than
Cicero ? How much more worthily would that great
God have waited for such men as these to be called
up into the rank of gods, especially as he must have
had foreknowledge of these nobler characters l He
was hasty, I suppose, and closed the entrance to
heaven once for all; and now doubtless blushes to
see better men murmuring with indignation in the
realm below.
CHAPTER XII.
Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, images

made ef the commonest materials, which you treat
with the same indignities that you inflict upon us.
BuT I now pass from these points, well aware that

I shall by the very force of truth indicate what your
gods are not by shewing what they are.
With regard to your gods, then, I see merely names
of certain dead men of old time, and I hear stories,
and I recognize religious rites founded upon the
stories. And with regard to the images themselves,
I find that they are nothing else but twin substances
with vessels and utensils in common use; or even
made out of these very vessels and utensils, as if they
changed their destination by consecration, and were
transformed by the capricious freak of skilled handi-
craft, the very process of transformation being carried
out both most insultingly and sacrilegiously; so that
in very truth, to us especially who are punished on
account of these very gods, it may be some solace in
our punishments to reflect that they themselves under-
go the same things also in the process of their manufac-
ture. You place the Christians on crosses and stakes:
what image does not take its first shape in plastic clay
fixed on a cross and stake? It is on the gibbet that
the body of your god is first originated. You tear
the sides of the Christians with claws : but to your
gods axes and planes and files are more vigorously
XII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 43
applied over every limb. We surrender our necks:
your gods are headless before the application of
solder and glue and nails. We are cast to the
beasts ; those surely which you attach to Bacchus
and Cybele and Crelestis b. We are burned in the
fire : so, too, are the gods in their original mass.
We are condemned to the mines: it is from thence
that your gods derive their origin. We are banished
to the islands: it is in islands that some god of yours
is generally born or dies. If by these means a
divinity is constituted, then those who are so punished
are deified, and tortures must be hailed as tokens of
divinity. True, your gods do not feel the injuries
and insults attendant upon their manufacture, any
more than they perceive the devotion you render
them. ' 0 impious words ! 0 sacrilegious abuse ! '
Yes, gnash your teeth and foam with rage ! You are
the same persons who approve of a Seneca inveigh.
ing against your superstition at greater length and
more bitterly. If therefore we do not worship statues
and cold images, the very facsimiles of their dead
originals, which the kites and mice and spiders have
an accurate knowledge of, do we not deserve praise
rather than punishment for our repudiation of a
recognized error? For can we appear to injure those
who we are convinced have no existence at all?
that which is non-existent suffers nothing from any
one, simply because it is non-existent.
h Lions and tigers. Crelestis, the national divinity of Africa,

is represented on coins and gems seated on a lion.
CHAPTER XIII.
In fad, you act most sacrilegiously towards your deities,

both private and public.
'BuT to us they are gods,' you say. How is it,

then, that you on the contrary are convicted of acting
impiously and sacrilegiously and irreverently towards
your gods; seeing that you neglect those whose ex-
istence you assume, destroy those whom you fear,
and ridicule those whom you even avenge? Consider
if I am not speaking the truth. In the first place,
when some of you worship one god and some another,
of course you offend those whom you do not worship.
Your preference for one cannot but issue in the
slight of another, since choice implies rejection.
Therefore you undoubtedly insult those whom you
reject, and to whom you are not afraid of giving
offence by your rejection. For the case of each god,
as, we touched upon before 0 , depended upon the
judgement of the senate. He was no god at all
whom a man, when consulted upon the point, had
refused to deify, and by his refusal had condemned.
Over your household gods, whom you call Lares,
you exercise a household authority, pawning them,
selling them, changing them,-sometimes from a
Saturn into a cooking-pot, sometimes from a Minerva
into a fire-pan,-as each god has become worn out
or battered from being long worshipped, or as each
' Chap. V.
XIII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 45
master of the house has found his domestic necessity
more sacred.
Equally you profane your public gods by public
right, by putting them in an auction-catalogued as
sources of revenue. The Capitol and the vegetable-
market are bid for in identically the same way;
under the same voice of the crier, under the same
hammer, under the same booking of the bids by the
qurestor, divinity is taken on lease, knocked down to
the highest bidder. Yet lands burdened with a tax
are less valuable, and persons who are subject to
assessment for a poll-tax are less noble; for these are
the marks of serfdom. But gods are the more holy
the more they are subject to tribute ; nay, they are
holier in proportion to the amount of tribute they
pay. Their very majesty is prostituted into a source
of gain. Religion goes the round of the taverns
begging. You demand payment for s_tanding on
temple ground, for access to the sacred rites; one is
not allowed to get acquainted with the gods for
nothing : they are on sale. What do you do at all
to honour them that you do not also confer on your
deceased friends? The temples and the altars serve
for both alike. Their dress is the same, and the
ornaments on their statues. Just as the dead man
has his age, his craft, his occupation, so has the god.
Wherein lies the difference between a funeral feast
for an old man and a feast of Jupiter? between the
d Hastarium, perhaps 'auction-mart.' 'Hastarium est locus,
ubi venditiones et locationes publicre instituebantur, proprie, ubi

proscriptorum bona vendebantur.' (Oehler.)
sacrificial and the funeral chalice? between the augur

and the embalmer? for an augur, too, is in attend.
ance on the dead. But worthily do you assign the
honour of divinity to your deceased emperors, since
you ascribe it to them even while living. Your gods
will give you credit for it; nay, they will be grateful
that their masters have been made their equals. But
when you worship Larentina, a common prostitute
(I wish it had at least been Lais or Phryne) amongst
your Junos and Ceres and Dianas; when you invest
Simon Magus with sanctity by a statue and an in-
scription of a 'holy god";' when you make some
vicious court-page or other a god of the sacred
synod ;-although your ancient gods were no nobler
in character, yet they will account themselves insulted
by you, in that you have allowed to others also what
antiquity conferred on them alone.
CHAPTER XIV.
For you cheat them in your sacrifices, and mock them
in your poetic and philosophic literature.
I AM unwilling to review your sacred rites; I do
not mention your conduct in sacrificing which leads
• Justin Martyr (Apo!. i. 26, 56, pp. 19, 43, Lib. Fatli., where
see note) also mentions this statue ; as also do Irenreus (adv.
liar. i. 20), Eusebius (H. E. ii. 13), Theodoret (liar.fab. i. 13),
and Augustine (de liar. i. 6). On the possibility of Justin
having confused Semo Sancus, a Sabine deity, (an inscription to
whom was discovered on the Tiberine island in 1574), with
Simon Magus, see Smith's Di,t. C/ir, Biogr., iv. 682, and
Burton's Bampt11n Le,turer, note 42.
XIV,] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 47
you to slay all your worn-out and diseased and scurfy
animals; to cut off all the superfluous parts from the
fat and sound beasts,-the heads and hoofs, which
at home you would have set apart for your slaves or
the dogs; to lay not a third part of the tithe of
Hercules on his altar. I rather praise your wisdom
which leads you to save something at all events from
being lost
But I turn to your literature, whence you derive
instruction in prudence and the honourable duties of
life ; and what travesties do I find ! gods, engaged
like pairs of gladiators, fighting one another on ac-
count of Trojans and Greeks : Venus wounded by
an arrow shot by human hands, because she wished
to rescue her own son .h:neas, who was nearly
killed by the same Diomede : Mars in chains for
thirteen months, well-nigh wasted away: Jupiter,
lest he should experience the same violence from
the rest of the celestials, freed by the aid of
some monster ; and at one time weeping for the
death of Sarpedon, and at another foully lusting
after his sister, with an enumeration of his mistresses
not for long since loved so much as she. Thence-
forward what poet is there who is not found to be
a culumniator of the gods on the authority of his
master f? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus to
feed his cattle : another hires out the architectural
services of Neptune to Laomedon ; and there is the
celebrated lyric poet (I mean Pindar) who sings that
r Homer.
h:sculapius was deservedly punished by a thunder-

bolt for his covetousness, which induced him to prac-
tise medicine wrongfully. Wicked Jupiter, if the bolt
was his, acting unnaturally towards his grandson, and
jealously towards the skilful physician. These things,
amongst such very religious people, ought neither to
be revealed if true, nor invented if false. Nor, again,
do the tragic or comic writers spare them, so as to
refrain from relating in their prologues the troubles or
the failings of the family of some god.
I say nothing about the philosophers, content with
the evidence of Socrates, who, in contempt of the
gods, used to swear by an oak, a goat, and a dog.
' But for that very reason Socrates was condemned,'
you may say,' because he overthrew the gods.' True,
because then, as always, truth met with hatred. Yet,
when the Athenians, regretting their decision, after-
wards punished Socrates' accusers, and placed a golden
statue of him in a temple, the reversion of the con-
demnation restored the validity of Socrates' testimony
to my contention. Moreover Diogenes, too, some-
where or other scoffs at Hercules, and Varro, the
Roman Cynic, introduces three hundred headless
Joves, or, as one should say, Jupiters.
CHAPTER XV.
You insult them in your burlesques and at ;•our
theatres.
THE rest of your ingenious amusements, too, min-
ister to your pleasures through the dishonour of the
xv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 49
gods. Examine the choice farces of your Lentuli
and Hostilii, and see whether in the jokes and tricks
it is the actors or your gods that you laugh at:-' the
adulterer Anubis;' 'the male Luna;' 'the scourged
Diana;' the recital of 'the will of the deceased
Jupiter; ' and 'the three starve<l Hercules' held up
to derision. Moreover, the literature of the stage
depicts all their foulness. The Sun mourns for his
son cast out of heaven, and you are delighted :
Cybele sighs for her scornful shepherd g' and you
blush not for shame. You allow the criminal record
of Jupiter to be sung ; and Juno, Venus, and Minerva
to be judged by a shepherd h, Why, actually the
mask of your god clothes an ignominious and
infamous head : a body impure and rendered fit for
the part by emasculation represents a Minerva or
a Hercules! Is not their majesty outraged and their
divinity prostituted, whilst you applaud?
You are, I presume, more religious in the theatre,
where your gods in the same way dance over human
blood, the stains resulting from penalties undergone,
and supply the arguments and stories for the criminals
-except that the criminals themselves often imper-
sonate your very gods. We have sometimes seen
Atys, that god from Pessinus, mutilated i; and one
burnt alive who had assumed the part of Hercules.
We have smiled, too, amidst the sportive cruelties of
the noon-day combats, at Mercury examining the
dead with a branding iron. We have seen the brother
s Atys. Theocritus, x. 40; Arnob., iv. 35; v. 6. h Paris.
1 Catullus, Carm. lxiii.
E
50 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
of Jupiter dragging off the corpses of the gladiators

with his hammer in his hand.
But who can go through all your farces up to date
one by one? If they destroy the honour of the
divinity of the gods, if they obliterate the traces of
their majesty, such burlesques find their origin surely
in the contempt in which the gods are held both
by those who perform them, and by those for whose
amusement they are performed.
' But these are stage plays,' you say. If, however,
I shall add, what the consciences of all will no less
admit,-that adulteries are committed in the temples,
that the pander's trade is carried on amidst the altars,
that lust is consummated generally in the very abodes
of the sacristans and priests, under the self-same
fillets and sacred caps and purple vestm·ents, while
the incense is burning,-! know not whether your
gods have not more reason to complain of you than
of the Christians. Certainly those guilty of sacrilege
are ever detected from among yourselves. For Chris-
tians never enter your temples even in the daytime.
They, too, might perchance despoil them, if they,
too, reverenced them. What then do they worship
who worship not such things? It may indeed already
be easily understood that they who are not devotees
of falsehood are worshippers of the truth ; for they no
longer err in a matter wherein they ceased to err on
the recognition of their previous error. Receive this
first, and then from it, after certain false notions
about it have been rebutted, deduce the whole system
of our religion.
XVI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. SI
CHAPTER XVI.
You hold grotesque vie-ms respecting our Deity. We

neither worship an ass's head, nor the Cross, nor the
sun, nor a biformed monstrosity, resembling some ef
your gods.
FoR you, as certain others have done, have dreamed
that our God is an ass's head. Cornelius Tacitus k
introduced this suspicion. For in the fifth book of
his "Histories," having begun his account of the
Jewish war with the origin of the nation itself, having
also drawn what conclusions he wished respecting
both the origin and the name and the religion of the
Jewish nation, he relates that, when the Jews had
been liberated, or as he thought banished, from
JEgypt, and were tortured by thirst in the deserts
of Arabia, where water is exceedingly scarce, they
availed "themselves of wild asses to guide them to
a spring, thinking that the animals would most likely
be seeking water after feeding, and he states that for
this service they consecrated as a deity the head of
a similar animal. And thence, I take it, it was pre-
sumed that we, too, being nearly allied to the Jewish
religion, were devotees of the same effigy. But yet
this same Cornelius Tacitus, really a most loquacious
man in falsehoods, relates in the same history that
Cnreus Pompeius, after his capture of Jerusalem and
consequent entrance into the Temple for the purpose
of investigating the secret mysteries of the Jewish
k Tacit., Hist, v. 3, 4- See Merivale, Hist, Rom. vii. 216.
religion, found there no image. Yet surely if the

object of their worship was ever represented under
any effigy, it would be exhibited nowhere more ap-
propriately than in its own shrine; and the more so,
as there would be no fear of outsiders as witnesses,
however foolish the cult. For it was only lawful for
the priests to enter there, and the gaze of all others
was cut off by a veil spread between. Yet you will
not deny that all kinds of beasts and whole mules,
along with their own protecting gocldess Epona, are
worshipped by you. It is perchance on this ground
that we are denounced, because amongst worshippers
of cattle and beasts of all kinds, we are worshippers
of the ass alone.
Again, he who believes us to be devotees of the
Cross will also be our fellow-worshipper. As long
as 1t 1s some piece of wood that is propitiated, the
fashion of it matters nothing, provided that the
quality of the substance is the same ; the shape
matters nothing, provided that it is the very body of
the gocl. And yet how far is the Athenian Pallas
to be distinguished from the stock of a cross ; or the
Pharian Ceres, who stands forth publicly without
an effigy as a rude stake and shapeless piece of wood.
Every wooden post which is fixed in an upright
position is part of a cross; we, if at all, worship the
god whole and entire 1. We have mentioned that
1 The irony of this passage will not be overlooked. A sar-
castic tu quoque was quite sufficient to brush aside this notion of
the worship of the Cross. The frequent use of the sign of the
Cross by Christians in their daily occupations, and the reverence
XVI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 53
the earliest form of your gods is moulded by potters
on a cross. But you also worship Victories, and
crosses form the interiors of the memorial trophies of
these. The whole camp-religion of the Romans
consists in venerating the standards, swearing by the
standards, and setting the standards above all the
gods m, Yet all those crests of images on the
standards are necklaces of crosses, and those flags
on your ensigns and banners are the robes of crosses.
I praise your scrupulousness : you would not deify
crosses bare and undraped.
Others, certainly more naturally and with greater
likelihood, believe the Sun to be our god. If this
be the case, we must be accounted as Persians,
although we do not adore it painted on linen, since
we everywhere have the Sun itself in its own vault of
heaven. This notion is in fact derived from our well-
known habit of praying towards the east n. But very
felt for it as the great symbol of man's redemption, finds
a fitting mention in a treatise addressed to believers : see
de Corona, 3.
m 'In every Roman camp there was a small chapel near the
head-quarters, in which the statues of the tutelar deities were
preserved and adored: and we may remark that the eagles and
other military ensigns were in the first rank of these deities ; an
excellent institution, which confirmed discipline by the sanction
of religion.'-Gibbon, i. 269.
n This custom was common to nearly all religions. Its
natural symbolism, the east being the quarter of light, was
adopted by Christians as expressive of the coming of the Sun of
Righteousness, the Light of the World. Tertullian speaks of the
East as a 'figure of Christ,' adv. Valent. 3. See Diet. Chr.
Ant., i. 586.
many of yourselves, too, moved sometimes by an

affectation of adoring the celestial bodies as well,
move your lips towards the sun-rise. Similarly, if we
devote the day of the Sun to rejoicing, for a reason
very far removed from any religious reverence for the
Sun, we are only second to those who set apart
Saturn's day for idleness and feasting, and who them-
selves deviate from the Jewish custom which they
misunderstand 0 •
But now a new representation of our God has been
published in the very next city P, since a certain
wretch, who hired himself out to trick the wild beasts
in the arena, exhibited a picture with an inscription
of this sort: "The god of the Christians conceived
of an ass q." It had ass's ears, was hoofed in one foot,
carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed both
at its name and shape. But they ought to have forth-
with adored such a biformed deity; since they have
received as gods creatures compounded of a dog's
and a lion's head; others having the horns of a goat
and a ram ; others formed like goats from the loins
0
Saturn's day, which corresponded with the Jewish Sabbath,
was considered by the superstitious Romans an unlucky day on
which to commence any work. This idea arose from a miscon-
ception of the peculiar habits of the Jews on that day. Comp.
Tibullus, i. 3. 18; Ovid, Ars Amator. i. 415; Hor., Sat. j, g.
69; Pers., Sat. v. 184; Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 96.
P Read, in ista proxime civitate.
4 ONOKOITH::!l, Oehler prefers ONOKOIHTH::!, asinarius sa-
cerdos. But see Diet. Chr. Ant., i. 149; Lanciani, Ancient
Rome, p. 121; Merivale, Hist. Rom., vii. 217,
XVII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 55
and like serpents from the legs ; others winged on the
heel or the back.
We have treated of these matters at length, lest we
should have omitted any unrefuted rumour, as though
privy to its truth. And having disposed of all these
false notions, I now turn to the clear declaration of
what our religion is.
CHAPTER XVII.
We worship One God, the omnipotent and invisible
Creator, to whom Nature and the human Soul bear
witness.
THE object of our worship is One God, who,
through the Word by which He commanded, through
the Reason by which He ordered, through the Power
by which He was able, framed out of nothing the
whole mass of this universe with all its equipment of
elements, bodies, and spirits, for the enhancing of
His own majesty: and hence the Greeks have ap-
plied the word 1<.oup.os r to the world. He is invisible,
although He may be seen: He is incomprehensible
to touch, yet may be made present through grace• :
He is inestimable, yet may be estimated by the
human senses: He is therefore the True and the
'i.e. 'order' or 'embellishment.'
' In His gracious revelation of Himself through nature and
the human conscience, and in His more intimate self-revelation
in the kingdom of grace, especially in the Sacraments. 'Per
s-ratiam • • . eucharisfoe, ubi corpus Dei contrectamus.' La
Cerda.
Great God. That, however, which can be commonly

seen, that which can be comprehended by touch,
that which can be estimated, is less than the eyes by
which it is discerned, than the hands by which it is
defiled, and than the senses by which its properties
are discovered. But that which is immeasurable is
known to itself alone. This it is which leads us to
form an idea of God, although He does not admit of
being estimated. Thus the force of His greatness
presents Hirn to men at once as known and un-
known. And this is the chief point of offence in those
who refuse to recognize Him of whom they cannot be
ignorant. Will you have this proved from His many
and great works whereby we are preserved, sus-
tained, delighted, and even terrified? will you have it
proved from the testimony of the soul itself? For the
soul, although limited by the prison-house of the body,
although hindered by evil customs, although weakened
by lusts and desires, although enslaved to false gods,
yet, when it recovers its senses, as if from intoxica-
tion or sleep or any infirmity, and enjoys its own
proper sanity, names God by this name alone, as
being the proper name of the True God: 'Great God/
' Good God,' and ' Which God grant' are common
expressions. It also testifies to Him as Judge: 'God
sees,' ' I leave it to God,' and ' God will repay me.'
0 testimony of the soul naturally Christian t ! Lastly,
' This appeal to the instinct of humanity, evidenced by the
innate voice of every man's conscience, is characteristic of
Tertullian. See his special treatise, 'De Testimonio Animre,'
on this subject,
xvm.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 57
when uttering these expressions, it looks not to the
Capitol but to Heaven. For it knows the abode of
the living God; from Him and from thence it came
down.
CHAPTER XVIII.
And He hath given us a revelation of Himself through
the Scriptures and the Prophets, whose writings are
open to all.
BuT that we might approach more fully and im-
pressively both to Himself and His ordinances and
will, He gave in addition the documenP of Scripture,
in case any one should wish to enquire about God,
and having enquired, to find Him, and having found,
to believe in Him, and having believed, to serve Him.
For from the beginning He sent into the world men
overflowing with the Divine Spirit, and worthy by
reason of their justice and blamelessness to know
God and to reveal Him, in order that they might
preach Him as the Only God, Who founded the
universe, and formed man from the ground (for He
is the true Prometheus); Who ordered the course of
the world according to the fixed arrangements and
issues of the seasons ; Who afterward proclaimed the
signs of His majesty in judgement by water and fire;
Who laid down those ordinances, by keeping of which
His favour might be obtained, which you either
know not or forsake; Who hath appointed rewards
u Instrumentum : see Westcott, Canon of N. T., p. 253
(5th edit.),
for those that keep them, in order that, when the

allotted time of this world has come to an end, He
may adjudge to His own worshippers the recompense
of eternal life, and sentence the profane to fire equally
perpetual and lasting ;-all who have died from the
beginning of time having been raised up and re-
formed and called to account for the balancing of
each one's deserts. These things we also once
laughed at: we were one of yourselves; Christians
are made Christians and not born so.
Those preachers whom we have spoken of are
called prophets from their office of foretelling. Their
words and the miracles, too, which they performed to
establish the trustworthiness of their divine mission,
remain in the storehouses of literature; nor are they
concealed at this day. For the most erudite of the
Ptolemies, whom they name Philadelphus x, a man
deeply read in all literature, when he was endeavour-
ing, I suppose, to excel PisistratusY, in his eagerness
to collect books, amongst other records which either
their antiquity or curiousness rendered famous, de-
manded books from the Jews also, at the suggestion
of Demetrius Phalereus •, at that time the most emi-
nent of philologists, to whom he had entrusted the
superintendence of the collection. They were writ-
ings which the Jews alone possessed, peculiar to
themselves, and in their own original tongue. For
x Ptolemy II., B.c. 285-247.
r The founder of the first public library at Athens. He
flourished in the sixth century B.C. Aul. Gell., vL 17.
• Josephus, Ant. Jud. xii. 2.
XVIII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 59
the prophets were themselves of their nation, and
had ever pleaded with the Jews, as being the house-
hold and family of God in consequence of the favour
shewn towards the patriarchs. Those who are now
Jews were formerly Hebrews : consequently their
literature and language is Hebrew. Moreover, to
guard against any misapprehension, Ptolemy was
also allowed by the Jews to employ seventy-two
interpreters 8 whom Menedemus also, the philosopher
and the maintainer of a Providence, regarded with
esteem on account of their agreement in opinion h,
These matters Aristeas O also has declared to you.
Thus Ptolemy left the records open to the public,
translated into the Greek language. And the libraries
of Ptolemy are to be seen at this day in the Serapeum
with the identical Hebrew writings. But the Jews
also constantly read them publiciy,-a taxed liberty d;
and there is common access to them every sabbath.
He who hears them will find God ; and he who is at
pains to understand them will also be compelled to
believe.
• Six from each tribe. On this commencement of the LXX.
version, which refers to the Law only, see Josephus, I.e. The
rest of the Old Testament was probably translated at different
times, and completed about B,C, 130.
b i.e. with himself on the fundamental question of a Provi-
dence. Menedemus flourished in B,C, 350-276.
0
An officer of Philadelphus. The extant letter of his printed
by Hody (Oxon. 1705) i~ not genuine.
d Josephus, Bell. '.Jud. vii. 6. See Merivale, vii. 251.
CHAPTER XIX.
The antiquity of these writings ensures their trust-
worthiness,for they are more ancient than ;•our oldest
records.
THEIR very high antiquity, then, claims the first

authority for these documents. Amongst yourselves,
too, it is almost a part of your religion to base the
trustworthiness of a statement upon its antiquity.
[° For Moses, the first prophet, who began by setting
forth from bygone ages the creation of the world and
the birth of the human race, and the subsequent
violence of the deluge which avenged the iniquity
of that time, related also by the spirit of prophecy
events down to his own days, and thence, through
contemporary occurrences, the figures of future events.
Antl in his writings the order of events arranged from
the beginning exhibits the computation of the world's
time. He is found to precede by about three hun-
dred years the oldest hero you have, Danaus, who
came into Argos; and he is upwards of one thousand
years earlier than the Trojan war, and therefore also
earlier than Saturn himself. For according to the
history of Thallus, in which is related the war of
the Assyrians, and how Saturn, the king of the
Titans, fought with Jupiter, it is plain that that war
• This fragment has either been interpolated from the first
draft or from a second edition of the Apology; it may possibly,
however, have formed part either of the treatise" Ad Nationes,"
or some cognate work. It is found in only one MS.
XIX.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, 61
preceded the fall of Troy by three hundred and
twenty-two years. By the hand of this Moses, more-
over, their own special law was sent to the Jews by
God. Thereafter the other prophets, too, all older
than your literature, foretold many things. For even
he who prophesied last, either preceded by a short
time, or was at least contemporaneous with, your
sages and lawgivers. For Zacharias lived in the
reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales,
the first of natural philosophers, stirred no doubt by
the words of the prophets, could give no definite
answer about the Deity to the enquiring Crcesus.
Solon proclaimed to the same king that the end
of a long life must be contemplated, in no very
different language to that of the prophets r_ Yet one
can look back and see that he was the originator
alike of your laws and of your studies in law and
divinity. That which precedes must necessarily be
the source. Hence it is that you hold certain tenets
in common with us, or closely resembling ours. As
regards wisdom, the love of it has been wont to be
called philosophy; as regards prophecy, the pretence
to it has counted as poetic foresight. Men lusting
for fame, having found something that they could
appropriate, have corrupted it: it also happens to
fruits to degenerate from the seed.
I might in many ways take up a position in defence
of the antiquity of the sacred writings, if they did not
possess a greater authority for their trustworthiness
r Ps. xxxix. 5 f. Solon's interview with Crcesus is narrated
in Plutarch, Solon, 27; Herod., i 32.
in the very force of their intrinsic truth than would be

at hand in the mere records of their age. For what
could furnish a more powerful defence of their testi-
mony than the daily checking off and fulfilment of
some prophecy by the events of history, when the
disposal of kingdoms, the fall of cities, the destruc-
tion of nations, and the state of the times corres-
pond in every particular with what was foretold a
thousand years before? And hence also our hope,
which you deride, takes its life; and our confidence,
which you call presumption, is strengthened. For it
is natural that an examination of the past should lead
us to place confidence in future fulfilments : the same
voices have predicted both, the same writings have
noted them. Time is but one with them, which to
us seems to be broken up into parts. Thus every-
thing which yet remains unproved is to us proved g'
because predicted along with those events which then
were future but now have been proved. You also
have, as I know, a Sibyl, inasmuch as a true pro-
phetess of the True God has been called by that
term everywhere, before all the rest who seemed
to prophesy, so that your Sibyls counterfeited their
name from the truth, just as your gods in their case
did likewise h.]
g Read, ornnia qme supersunt improbata, probata sunt nobis.
h The text is very corrupt in this passage. Tertullian's
meaning seems to be that the existence of the Sibyl, whose
character as a true prophetess he also recognizes ad Nat.
ii. 12, led to the rise of false Sibyls ; just as the existence of the
True God led to the dremons passing themselves off as gods.
Comp. ch. 22.
xix.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
Consequently all the subject-matter and historical

materials, antiquities, chronicles, and series of each of
your ancient compositions, most nations likewise,
and distinguished cities, your venerable records and
memorials, and in fact hieroglyphics themselves, the
witnesses and guardians of events, nay (and I am
still within the mark), I say your very gods, temples
and oracles and sacred rites,-all these meanwhile
the roll of a single prophet surpasses in antiquity
by centuries; and it will be found to be a literary
store-house in which are brought together all the par-
ticulars of the Jewish religion, and thence of ours
also.
If you have heard of a certain Moses, he is con-
temporary with the Argive Inachus; he precedes
Danaus, himself also of remotest antiquity amongst
you, by four hundred years nearly, for it is seven
short of that number; he is earlier than the fall of
Troy by about one thousand years, and Homer by,
I might say, five hundred more, following some
authorities. As regards also the rest of the prophets,
although they lived after the time of Moses, yet the
very latest of them will be found to be earlier than
the first of your sages and law-givers and historians.
For us to explain on what lines these points might
be proved is not so much a difficult as it would be
a vast task; not so laborious as lengthy. We must
betake ourselves to many documents with intricate
calculations. We must lay open, too, the archives of
the most ancient nations, the }Egyptians, the Chal-
dreans, the Phrenicians ; we must likewise summon to
THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN · [CHAP.
our aid the fellow-countrymen of those from whom

our knowledge is gained, some lEgyptian Manetho,
some Chaldrean Berosus, some Phcenician Iromus,
king of Tyre ; their disciples too, Ptolemy of
Mendes, and Menander of Ephesus, and Demetrius
of Phalerum; and king Juba, and Appian, and
Thallus; and their critic, Josephus the Jew, the native
defender of Jewish antiquities, who either confirms
their accounts or convicts them of error. The Greek
censors' lists, too, must be compared, and the dates
of occurrences, that the sequences of events may
be shewn, by which the reckonings of the annals may
be evident We must thoroughly explore the his-
tories and literature of the world. And yet we have
already produced as it were a part of our proof by
indicating the sources whence proof is possible. But
it is better to postpone doing this, lest we should
either in our haste not follow it out far enough, or in
following it out digress too far.
CHAPTER XX.
Their majesty and divinity an proved by the daily
fulfilment of their predidions.
IN the place of this adjourned proof, we now
present rather to your notice the majesty of the
Scriptures instead of their age; we prove them to be
divine, even if the question of their antiquity be
undecided. Nor does this have to be learnt by slow
processes and distant proofs; your instructors,-the
world, the age, and its events,- are before you.
,xx.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
Whatever is taking place was foretold ; whatever is

seen was heard of before. That the earth swallows
up cities, that the sea engulphs islands, that foreign
and civil wars rend states, that kingdoms press vio-
lently against kingdoms, that famine and pestilence
and local calamities and wild beasts lay waste many
places, that the humble are exalted and the lofty
abased, that equity is diminishing and iniquity in-
creasing, that zeal for all wholesome discipline grows
lax, that even the functions of the seasons and the
duties of the elements are out of course, that the
natural shape of animals is distorted by monstrosities
and prodigies,-all these things have been foreknown
and written of. Whilst we suffer them we read of
them, whilst we are examining them they are proved.
The verification of a prophecy is, I take it, the proper
proof of its divine origin. Hence, therefore, we have
also a sure confidence in future events, regarding
them as in fact already proved, because they were
predicted at the same time with those which are
being verified daily. The same voices pronounce
them, the same writings note them, the same Spirit
impels them. To prophecy foretelling the future,
time is all one ; with men it is naturally broken
up into parts while it is being fulfilled, while the
present is being assigned out of the future, and then
the past out of the present. How do we err, I ask
you, in believing in future fulfilments, when we have
already learnt to believe in them through the verifica-
tions in the two other. stages of time?
F
66 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN. [CHAP.
CHAPTER XXI.
We worship the same God as the Jews, but, unlike

them, we acknowledge Christ the Son of God to be
God. He is the true Word, Who, begotten eternally
by His Father, and being co-essential with Him, was
made Flesh. The Jews misunderstood Hi's Advent,
His work, and His doctrine. They put Him to
death, but He rose from the dead, as was predicted,
and after forty days ascended into Heaven. Mean-
i's
while His Gospel spread throughout the world by
His disciples.
BuT since we have proclaimed that this our sect is

supported by the very ancient documents of the
Jews, although most people know, and we ourselves
declare, that it is a somewhat recent one, being of
the Tiberian age, perhaps a further point may be
raised concerning its nature on this ground,-as if it
hid something of its own presumption under the
shelter of a very distinguished, or at any rate a legal-
ized, religion ; or because, besides the difference in
antiquity, we observe neither the distinctions of meats,
nor the solemnities of days, nor the seal itself of the
body i, nor any association in name with the Jews, as
we surely ought to do if we were worshippers of the
same God. But even the common people now know
something about Christ, regarding Him indeed as
a man, such as the Jews judged Him to be ; so
i i.e. circumcision.
xx1.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS,
that from this we might more naturally be regarded

as the worshippers of a man. But neither are we
ashamed of Christ k, since we rejoice to be convicted
and condemned under His Name, nor yet is our
conception of God different from that. of the Jews 1.
We must therefore say a few words concerning
Christ as God. So highly were the Jews favoured by
God because of the conspicuous righteousness and
faith of their early progenitors, from which cause
also their numerous race and their glorious kingdom
flourished, and so great was their blessedness, that
they were forewarned by oracles of God which
taught them how to obtain His favour and how to
avoid offending Him. How greatly, notwithstanding,
they transgressed, puffed up even to madness by
reliance on the privileges of their forefathers, turning
aside from their special ordinances to a profane mode
of life, their latter end at this day proves, even if they
themselves confess it not. Scattered abroad, wan-
derers, exiles from their own sky and soil, they roam
over the world without either man or God for their
king, nor is it permitted to them so much as to set
foot upon their native land, not even in the character
k Luke ix. 26; Rom. i. 16; 2 Tim. i. 8.
1 Tertullian states the difficulty as it would strike the heathen,
' You are not Jews,' a heathen might say, 'yet you claim to
worship the God of the Jews : you pay no respect to the Jewish
religion, yet you assert your right to their sacred literature.'
'This is quite true,' Tertullian would reply, 'but Christianity is
a developement of that theanthropism which was ever latent in
Judaism, and when Christ, the Son of God, became flesh,
Judaism, as a preparatory religion, had done its work.'
of strangers m. And the same holy oracles, which

used to threaten them beforehand with these dis-
asters, were all ever urging the fact that in the last
courses of the world God would, out of every nation
and people and clime, choose for Himself other more
faithful worshippers, to whom He would transfer His
favour, and that, indeed, in richer abundance on
account of the capacity of a more enlarged ceconomy.
[He came therefore, the very Christ, the Son of God,
Who it was foretold should come from God to estab-
lish and illuminate it.] The Son of God, therefore,
was announced as the Ruler and Master of this grace
and dispensation, the Illuminator and Guide of the
human race; not born in any wise so as to be
ashamed of the name of 'Son,' or of His descent
from His Father; not born, for example, from a
sister's incest or a daughter's violation, or from adul-
tery with another's wife; nor had He, for His
Father, a god in the form of a scaled or horned or
feathered lover, or one transformed into gold _:-for
such are the divine appearances of your Jupiter•
But the Son of God has no mother from any impure
connexion; nay, even she whom He seems to have,
had not married.
But first I will declare His essence, and in this
way the nature of His nativity will be understood.
We have already said that God constructed this uni-
verse of the world by His Word, Reason, and Power. -
Amongst your wise men also it is agreed that Aoyor,
m Meri vale, Hist. Rom., viii. 176 f; Just. Mart., Apo!. i. 47
(Lib. Fath., p. 36).
xxi.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 69
that is, Word and Reason, should be regarded ·as the
artificer of the universe. For Zeno decides that he is
the maker who formed everything in its regular order,
and that he be called Fate and God and Mind of
Jupiter and Universal Necessity. These titles Cle-
an th es accumulates on the Spirit which, he affirms,
pervades the universe. And we, too, ascribe Spirit as
the proper essence of the Word and Reason and
Power_ by Which we have said God constructed all
things; in which Divine Nature, when authoritatively
speaking, the Word is contained; with which, when
ordering, the Reason is present; and in virtue of
which, when perfecting, the Power presides. ·we
have learnt that He came forth from God and was
generated by that procession, and therefore is called
Son of God, and Gon, from unity of essence with
Him. For God also is Spirit n. Thus when a ray is
put forth from the sun, it is a portion from the whole ;
yet the sun will be in the ray, because the ray is
a part of the sun, and the substance is not divided
but extended. So Spirit comes forth from Spirit, and
God from God, as light is kindled from light. The
original parent matter remains whole and unimpaired,
although you derive from it many off-shoots trans-
mitting its qualities : so also That Which has come
forth from God is God, and Son of God, and Both
are One. So also Spirit from Spirit and God from
God makes another, not in number but in mode, not
in condition but in order, and has not separated from
the Original but come forth of it. That Ray of
n John iv. 24.
of strangers m. And the same holy oracles, which

used to threaten them beforehand with these dis-
asters, were all ever urging the fact that in the last
courses of the world God would, out of every nation
and people and clime, choose for Himself other more
faithful worshippers, to whom He would transfer His
favour, and that, indeed, in richer abundance on
account of the capacity of a more enlarged ceconomy.
[He came therefore, the very Christ, the Son of God,
Who it was foretold should come from God to estab-
lish and illuminate it.] The Son of God, therefore,
was announced as the Ruler and Master of this grace
and dispensation, the Illuminator and Guide of the
human race; not born in any wise so as to be
ashamed of the name of 'Son,' or of His descent
from His Father; not born, for example, from a
sister's incest or a daughter's violation, or from adul-
tery with another's wife; nor had He, for His
Father, a god in the form of a scaled or horned or
feathered lover, or one transformed into gold _:-for
such are the divine appearances of your Jupiter•
But the Son of God has no mother from any impure
connexion; nay, even she whom He seems to have,
had not married.
But first I will declare His essence, and in this
way the nature of His nativity will be understood.
We have already said that God constructed this uni-
verse of the world by His Word, Reason, and Power. -
Amongst your wise men also it is agreed that Aoyor,
m Meri vale, Hist. Rom., viii. 176 f; Just. Mart., Apo!. i. 47
(Lib. Fath., p. 36).
xxi.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 69
that is, Word and Reason, should be regarded ·as the
artificer of the universe. For Zeno decides that he is
the maker who formed everything in its regular order,
and that he be called Fate and God and Mind of
Jupiter and Universal Necessity. These titles Cle-
an th es accumulates on the Spirit which, he affirms,
pervades the universe. And we, too, ascribe Spirit as
the proper essence of the Word and Reason and
Power_ by Which we have said God constructed all
things; in which Divine Nature, when authoritatively
speaking, the Word is contained; with which, when
ordering, the Reason is present; and in virtue of
which, when perfecting, the Power presides. ·we
have learnt that He came forth from God and was
generated by that procession, and therefore is called
Son of God, and Gon, from unity of essence with
Him. For God also is Spirit n. Thus when a ray is
put forth from the sun, it is a portion from the whole ;
yet the sun will be in the ray, because the ray is
a part of the sun, and the substance is not divided
but extended. So Spirit comes forth from Spirit, and
God from God, as light is kindled from light. The
original parent matter remains whole and unimpaired,
although you derive from it many off-shoots trans-
mitting its qualities : so also That Which has come
forth from God is God, and Son of God, and Both
are One. So also Spirit from Spirit and God from
God makes another, not in number but in mode, not
in condition but in order, and has not separated from
the Original but come forth of it. That Ray of
n John iv. 24.
THE. APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
God, therefore, as was ever foretold in times past 0,

descending into a certain Virgin, and becoming
Flesh in her womb, is born Man united with God.
His Flesh informed with the Divine Nature is
nourished, groweth up, speaketh, teacheth, worketh,
and is CHRIST.
Receive this story for the time being (it resembles
your own), whilst we shew how Christ is approved.
Those who supplied you beforehand with rival stories
resembling the truth in order to destroy it, were
aware of what was to come to pass. The Jews also
knew that Christ was to come, because the prophets
used to speak of it to them. And even now they
look for His Advent; nor is there any other conten-
tion between them and us greater than this, because
they do not believe that He has already come. For
while two Advents of Him are indicated,-the first,
which has already been accomplished, in the humility
of a human lot ; the second, which impends at the
close of this age, in the exaltation of manifested glory,
-they, by misunderstanding the first, have regarded
the second, which has been more clearly predicted,
and for which they hope, as the only one. For it
was the desert of their transgression that they should
not understand the first coming, inasmuch as they
would have believed had they understood, and would
have attained salvation had they believed. They
themselves read that it has been thus written,-that
they have been deprived of their wisdom and under-
standing and the use of their eyes and earsP.
0
Isaiah vii. I 4. P Isaiah vi. 9 f.
XXI,] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
And when they had hastily decided from His

humility that therefore He was merely man, it followed
that they regarded Him from His power as a magL
cian; when He by a word cast out dremons from
men, restored their sight to blind men, cleansed
lepers, reinvigorated paralytics, and even at a word
restored the dead to life, made the very elements His
servants, restraining the winds and walking upon the
sea, shewing that He was the Aoyo~ of God, that is,
the Primordial Word, First-begotten, attended by
Power and Reason and sustained by Spirit, the Self-
same Who b?th was making and had made all things
at a word.
But at His doctrine, by which the masters and
leaders of the Jews were convicted, they were so
exasperated, especially when a vast multitude turned
away after Him, that at last they brought Him up
before Pontius Pilate, at that time the procurator of
Syria under the Roman government, and by the
violence of their votes extorted from him the sentence
that He should be surrendered to them for crucifixion.
He Himself had predicted that they would so act.
This would not, perhaps, be of great weight had not
the prophets of old also foretold the same. And yet
when He was crucified He spontaneously yielded up
His Spirit with a word, and anticipated the duty of
the executioner. At the same moment, while the
sun was pointing to midday, the daylight was with-
drawn. Those who were ignorant that this also was
predicted of Christ thought that it was merely an
eclipse [but no reason being found for it, they then
72 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
denied the fact]; and yet you have this event that be-
fel the world registered in your archives q. After that
the Jews took Him down from the cross and placed
Him in a sepulchre, which they in their great care
even surrounded with a military guard, lest, as He
had predicted His resurrection from the dead on the
third day, His disciples should stealthily remove the
body and deceive the suspicious rulers. But lo, on
the third day there was suddenly an earthquake, and
the stone was rolled away which closed the sepulchre,
and the guard was scattered through fear; yet no
disciples appeared, nor was anything fpund in the
sepulchre but the grave-clothes. Yet none the less
the rulers, to whose interest it was both to circulate
a lie, and to recal the enthralled and servile people to
themselves from the faith, bruited it abroad that He
was stolen by His disciples.
For He did not shew Himself forth to the people,
lest they should be delivered from their wicked error,
and in order that faith, destined to receive no mean
reward, should not stand firm without difficulty. But
He passe.d forty days with certain of His disciples in
Galilee, a region of Jud;.ea, teaching them what they
were to teach. Afterwards having commissioned
them to the duty of preaching throughout the world,
He was taken up into Heaven enveloped in a cloud,
much more truly than your Proculi are wont to assert
4 Tertullian does not claim to have seen the record in the
state papers : but, like Justin Mart., Apo!. i. 35, he assumes that
the official report sent by Pilate could be found amongst
them. Lightfoot, Ignatius, i, 55. Comp. above, ch. 5.
XXI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 73
of Romulus. All these things concerning Christ,
Pilate, himself also already a Christian in his own
conscience, announced to Tiberius the C::esar at that
time. Moreover the C::esars, too, would have be-
lieved on Christ, if either C::esars had not been ne-
cessary for the age or if Cresars could have been
Christians too. His disciples also scattered through-
out the world obeyed the command of God their
Master, and they themselves, too, endured many
things at the hands of the persecuting Jews, suffering
willingly indeed from their reliance on the truth;
and lastly by the cruelty of Nero they sowed the
seed of their Christian blood in Rome. But we will
shew you that those very beings that you adore are
efficient witnesses to Christ. It is a great point if, to
make you believe the Christians, I can employ those
on whose account you now disbelieve them. Mean-
time this is the plan of our system ; we have declared
the origin of our sect and name, and Who was its
Author.
Let no one henceforth cast infamy upon us, let no
one think any otherwise about us than this, since it
is of course impossible to lie about one's religion.
For when one dissimulates the real object of his wor-
ship, he denies his God and transfers his worship and
honour to another, and by so doing ceases to wor-
ship what he has denied. We affirm and affirm
openly, and cry out, torn and bleeding under your
tortures, ' We worship God through Christ.' Regard
Him as a man : through Hirn and in Him God
wishes to be known and worshipped. For, to answer
the Jews,-they themselves also learnt to worship

God through Moses ; to meet the Greeks,-Orpheus
in Pieria, Musreus in Athens, Melampus in Argos,
Trophonius in Bceotia, bound men down under their
rites ; and to look to yourselves, the masters of the
world,-Numa Pompilius was a man, who burdened
the Romans with the most elaborate superstitions.
And so it was allowable for Christ, too, to set forth in
a scheme His own Divinity, not as a means whereby
He might, like Numa, win to humane feelings men
rude and hitherto barbarous, astonished by the great
number of gods to be propitiated, but so as to open to
the recognition of the truth the eyes of men already
cultured, and deluded by their very refinement. Seek,
then, and see if that Divinity of Christ be true. If
it be such that by knowledge of it one may be re-
claimed to good, it follows that any other which is
found contrary to it must be pronounced a false
divinity-and especially on every ground that coun-
terfeit which, skulking under the names and images
of the dead, by certain signs and miracles and oracles
gains a credence for its own divinity.
CHAPTER XXII.
We wi'th yourphilosophers assert the existence ofdtemons,
spiritual beings of malefic power, who falsely claim
to be divine.
AND we thus affirm the existence of certain spi-
ritual substances; nor is the name a new one. The
philosophers are acquainted with dremons; for So-
xxn.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 75
crates himself waited upon the will of a dremon.
And why not? when a dremon is said to have at-
tended him from boyhood as a dissuader,-doubtless
from good. The poets are acquainted with dremons ;
even the untaught vulgar often make use of them in
cursing; for they name also Satan', the chief of this
evil race, in their word of execration, just as if from
an innate consciousness of the soul. Angels•, too,
Plato also does not deny ; and to the names of both
the magicians, for example, are witnesses at hand.
Moreover how from certain angels, corrupted of their
own free will, a still more corrupt race of dremons
has issued, condemned by God, along with the au-
thors of the race and him whom we have spoken of
as their chief, may be learnt in the sacred writings t.
It will be sufficient now to explain the method of
their operation. Their business is the ruin of man ;
thus spiritual wickedness began to act from the very
first for the destruction of man. Consequently they
inflict on the body diseases and many grievous mis-
haps, and violently visit the mind with sudden and
extraordinary aberrations. Their wonderful subtilty
and tenuity gives them access to both parts of man.
Spiritual agencies possess great powers ; so that,
being invisible and unperceived by the senses, they
• Not verbally, but implicitl3', in the vulgar objurgation

'Malum!'
' i.e. evil spirits, the agents of the Devil, as almost invariably
in T ertullian : comp. de sped. 4 ; de coron. I 4 ; de idol. 4, 9.
• Gen. vi. I ff; where the expression ' Sons of God ' was
understood by many of the Fathers of the fallen angels.
can be detected in the effect they produce rather

than in their mode of producing it. If some hidden
blight in the breeze unseasonably hastens forward any
fruit or grain in blossom, nips it in the bud, or blasts
it in maturity, and if the air, infected in some unseen
way, pours forth its poisonous currents; then by the
same obscure contagion the influence of d::emons and
angels brings about the corruption also of the mind
with fury and foul madness, or with fierce lusts bring-
ing various errors in their train; of which that is the
most prevailing by which they commend these gods
of yours to the enthralled and deluded minds of men,
that so they may procure for themselves their own
proper food of fumes and blood offered to effigies
and images, and (what is a more acceptable banquet
to them) turn mankind aside from reflecting upon the
True Divinity by the deceptions of false divination.
And how they effect these very operations I will
shew. Every spirit is winged. This both angels and
d::emons are. In a moment, therefore, they are every-
where. To them the whole world is one place : what
is being done everywhere they know as easily as they
declare it. Their velocity is believed to be divinity,
because their real nature is unknown. So also they
desire sometimes to be thought the originators of
those events of which they merely bring the tidings;
and indeed they are sometimes the causes of evil
events, but of good ones never. Even the counsels of
God, too, they formerly picked up from the addresses
of the prophets ; and now they gather them while
their writings are being read aloud. And so glean-
xxn.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 77
ing by this means the knowledge of certain chance
events, they enviously ape a divinity by stealing the
divination. Moreover, how ingeniously they framed
their equivocations in the oracles to suit either event,
such men as Crcesus and Pyrrhus are well aware.
But it was in the way which I have just mentioned
that the Pythian Apollo brought back word that a
tortoise was being cooked with the flesh of a lamb ;
in a moment he had been in Lydia. They are able,
from inhabiting the air and from their proximity to
the stars and from their intimate knowledge of the
clouds, to know what the heavens are about to pre-
pare, so that they can promise the rain of which
they are already sensible. They are sorcerers also,
truly, in respect of the cures of diseases. For they
:first cause the injury, and then, in order to make it
seem like a miracle, prescribe remedies which are
either new or absolutely opposed to the ordinary
methods of treatment; after which they stop causing
the injury, and are believed to have effected a cure.
There is little need for me to analyze their other
ingenious devices, or even their powers of spiritual
deception,-such as the apparitions of Castor, the
water carried in a sieve, the ship drawn forward with
a girdle, and the beard turned red at a touch,-so
that stones should be believed to be divinities, and
the True God not be sought after.
CHAPTER XXIII.
These d,emons and your gods are identical, as their
own confession when confronted by a Christian will
prove. You may further learn from them Who is
the True God. Our dominion over the d,emons ts
derived from the power of Christ.
FURTHER, if the magicians also call forth appari-

tions and dishonour the souls of those already dead ;
if they throw children into trances for the purposes of
oracular response; if they palm off a number of mir-
acles through fraudulent delusions ; if they also send
dreams, possessing, when once invited, the assistant
power of angels and dremons, through whom both
goats and tables are wont to be made instruments
of divination ;-how much more would that power be
eager of its own accord and for its own purposes to
devote itself with all its might to that same work
which it performs to serve the business of another !
Or if angels and daemons devote themselves to the
same work as your gods, where in that case is the ex-
cellence of divinity, which surely ought to be be-
lieved to be superior to every other power? Will it
not then be more becoming to assume that it is they
themselves who make themselves gods, since they ex_
hibit the same credentials as the gods, rather than to
set down the gods as merely the equals of angels and
dremons? The difference of places points the dis-
tinction, I suppose; so that you regard those as gods
from their temples whom in another place you do not
xxm.] 79
call gods ; and it seems one sort of madness to leap
from the sacred towers, and quite another kind to
jump from a neighbouring roof; and it is pronounced
one kind of violence to mutilate oneself or to gash
one's arms, and quite another to cut one's throat.
The issue of the phrenzy is the same in both cases,
and so is the manner of the instigation.
So far we have dealt in words; now we come to
an actual demonstration of fact, and by it we shall
shew that the nature of gods and dremons is one,
though passing under different names. Let any one
be brought before your tribunals, who it is agreed is
possessed by a dremon. That spirit, when com-
manded to speak by any Christian you like to select,
will as truly confess that he is a dremon, as elsewhere
he will falsely claim to be a god. In exactly the
same way let any one of those be produced who are
deemed to be under the influence of a god,-who, by
inhaling over the altars, become the recipients of
the divine influence from the fumes, who are bent
double with choking, and prophesy panting. That
very virgin Crelestis u, the promiser of rains ; that very
JEsculapius U, the inventor of medicine, who supplied
life to Socordius, Thanatius, and Asclepiodotus, men
doomed to die again the next day,-if these deities
of yours do not confess themselves dremons, not
daring to lie to a Christian, you may there and
then shed the blood of that most insolent Christian.
What could be plainer than a fact like this? What
could be more trustworthy than a proof of this
u Deities specially worshipped at Carthage. Comp. ch. xii, xxiv,
nature? The simplicity of truth is before your eyes ;

its own virtue attends it there; suspicion is altogether
out of the question.
Will you say that this is done by magic or some
deception of that kind, when you can use your own
eyes and ears? What indeed can be objected against
that which is transparently and openly displayed? If
on the one hand they are truly gods, why do they lie
by saying that they are d:.emons? Is it to gratify us?
If so, then in that case the divinity you acknowledge
is subject to the Christians; and that surely cannot be
accounted divinity which is subject to man and (if it
adds at all to the disgrace) to its own antagonists! If
on the other hand they are dremons or angels, why
do they elsewhere present themselves in the guise of
gods ? For just as they who are regarded as gods
would naturally refuse to call themselves dremons, if
they were truly gods, lest they should depose them-
selves from their own high dignity, so also those
whom you know with direct knowledge to be dremons
would not dare to elsewhere pose as gods, if those
whose names they usurp were any sort of gods at all,
since they would fear to abuse the high dignity of
beings undoubtedly superior to them and deserving
of dread. Thus, then, that divinity which you ac-
knowledge is naught, because if it really existed it
would neither be assumed by the d:emons, nor denied
by the gods. Since then each side competes in
making the same confession, and denying its claim to
godship, you must draw the conclusion that but one
kind of beings exists, namely dremons. Indeed on
XX.III.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 81
either hypothesis you must now look out for fresh
gods, for those whom you assumed to be such you
learn to be only dremons.
Moreover, with this same aid of ours, from tliese
very gods of yours, whose disclosures are not confined
to the mere confession that neither they themselves
nor any others are gods, you gain this additional
piece of information by the same proof,-namely,
Who is truly God, and whether it be He and He
Alone Whom we Christians confess, and whether He
ought to be so believed and worshipped as the faith
and doctrine of the Christians have laid down.
Here some will say, 'And Who is that Christ with
this story of His ? Is He a man of ordinary lot ? is
He a magician? was He after His death stolen from
the tomb by His disciples? is He in fact now in
Hades?' Is He not rather in Heaven, thence about
to come, amid the agitation of the whole universe,
and the quaking of the world, and the lamentation of
all except the Christians, as the Power of God, and
Spirit of God, and Word, and Wisdom, and Reason,
and Son of God? Whatever point you deride in this
statement, see .whether the dremons will join in your
ridicule ; see whether they will deny that Christ will
judge every soul from the beginning of the world, re-
stored to its own body. Let them assert before
your tribunal that Minos and Rhadamanthus, if it be
so, have been appointed to this office, as Plato and
the poets agree in saying; let them at least refute.·
the stigma of their own disgrace and condemnation ;.,
let · them deny that they are .unclean spirits, - a'
G
fact which cannot fail to be understood from their

very food of blood and smoke and stinking burnt-
offerings of animals, and from the most foul lips of
their very prophets; let them deny that they are fore-
doomed on account of their wickedness to the same
day of judgement along with all their worshippers
and devotees.
And all this dominion of ours and power over them
derives its force from the Naming of Christ, and from
the enumeration of those judgements which they ap-
prehend are threatening them from God through
Christ the Judge. Dreading Christ in God and God
in Christ, they render obedience to the servants of
God and Christ. So at our touch and at our breath,
seized with the idea and representation of that fire,
they depart unwillingly and reluctantly at our com-
mand out of the bodies of men, and blush with
shame in your presence. Believe them when they
speak the truth about themselves, - you who believe
them when they lie. No one lies to disgrace, but
rather to honour himself. Credit is more readily
given to those who to their own loss confess than
to those who to their own gain deny. These testi-
monies of your own gods, moreover, are wont to
make men Christians, because by believing them
most fully we believe in Christ our Lord. They
themselves kindle faith in our Scriptures ; they them-
selves build up the assurance of our hope. But you
worship them, as I well know, even with the blood
of Christians. Consequently they would be unwil-
ling to lose you who are so profitable and dutiful to
xxiv.J FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
them lest, for instance, they might perhaps· be put

to flight by you, if you happened some day or other to
become Christians ; even if it were possible for them
to lie in the presence of a Christian desirous of prov.:.
ing to you the truth.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Your charge of Sacrilege thus falls to the ground, for
there can be no religious duties towards gods that have
no existence. In any case, we claim the civil right of
religious liberty, which you grant to every one but us.
Now all this confession of theirs, by which they
deny their own divinity and assert that there is no
other God but the One Whom we serve, is quite suf-
ficient to repel the charge brought against us of in-
jury to religion, and especially to the Roman re-
ligion. For if it be certain that there are no gods, it
is equally certain that there can be no religion be-
longing to them; and if there is no religion, in con-
sequence of there certainly being no gods, then
certainly neither can we be guilty of injury to that
religion. But on the contrary, the reproach will re-
coil upon yourselves who, as the worshippers of a lie,
commit the crime of true irreligion against the Truth,
not merely by your neglect of the true worship of the
True God, but also by your attack upon it.
Now even if the existence of these gods were
granted, do you not yet admit in common belief that
there is One still higher and more powerful, _as it
were the Ruler of the world, perfect in power and
S4 THE. APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
majesty? For indeed most persons theorize about

the distribution of divinity in such a way as to wish
the sway of highest rule to belong to One, and its
various duties to be discharged by many ; like Plato
describes the great Jupiter in heaven attended by a
host of gods and of dremons alike. Consequently pro-
curators and prrefects and provincial governors ought
also to be looked up to alike•. And yet what crime
does he commit who transfers his toil and expecta-
tion from these to win the_ favour rather of Cresar
himself, and who will not allow the title of god,
any more than that of emperor, to any one other
than the chief; especially as it is adjudged a capital
crime to call any one, or hear any one called Cresar,
except Cresar himself? Let one worship God, an-
other Jupiter; let one stretch forth his suppliant
hands to Heaven, another to the altar of Fides; let
one (if you so regard the action) count the clouds as
he prays, another the panels of the ceiling; let one
dedicate his own soul to his own god, another to
a goat. For beware lest this action also of yours
do not better accord with the criminal charge of
irreligion, since you take away liberty of religion and
forbid a choice of deity, and do not allow me to
worship whom I wish, but compel me to worship
whom I wish not. No one, not even a man, de-
sires to be worshipped by an unwilling worshipper;
• There is some abruptness in the introduction of this simile,
by which the relation of gods and dremons to the One
Supreme Deity is compared to that of state-officials to the
Cresar.
xxrv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 85
and so even to the LEgyptians the right has been
allowed to indulge so vain a superstition as the
consecration of birds and beasts, and to inflict capital
punishment on any one who should kill a god of this
kind. Every province also and state has its own
god ; as Syria has Atargatis, Arabia Dusares, the
Norici have Belenus, Africa has C.elestis, Mauritania
its own Princes. I have named, I believe, Roman
provinces, and yet I have not mentioned Roman
gods as being worshipped in them ; for at Rome
these gods are no more worshipped than those
which throughout Italy itself also are created gods by
municipal consecration ; such as Delventinus, the god
of the Casinienses, Visidianus of the Narnienses, An-
charia of the LEsculani, N ortia of the V olsinienses,
Valentia of the Ocriculani, Hostia of the Sutrini,
Juno of the Falisci, in honour of her father Curis,
whence she received her cognomen x. It is only
we who are excluded from a right of possession
in a religion of our own. We offend the Romans,
and are not regarded as Romans, because we do not
worship a god of the Romans. Well is it that He is
the God of all, Whose we all are, whether we wish it
or no. But with you a right exists to worship
whatever you wish except the True God, as if He
were not especially the God of all, Whose we all
are.
x Curitis,
CHAPTER XXV.
You claim that Roman prosperity is due to Roman
piety. Yet your chief deities are foreigners, who
once reigned on earth, and therefore must some time
have worshipped your earliest deities. Besides, your
elaborate piety is of tater growth than your prosperity,
which has in reality been advanced by your impieties.
I FEEL satisfied that I have offered proof enough
upon the question of false and true divinity, since
I have shewn how the proof holds good, not only
from reasonings and arguments, but also from the
testimony of those very beings whom you believe
to be gods ; so that nothing now remains under this
head to be considered.
Yet since a particular reference was made to the
Roman name, I will not evade an engagement with
you upon the point, since it is provoked by the
presumption involved in the assertion that it is as
a reward for their extreme diligence in religious
matters that the Romans have been exalted to such
a high degree of dignity as to govern the world ; a.nd
that their gods really exist to such good purpose that
those prosper above all others who above all others
pay homage to them. So we are to understand that
this reward was paid forsooth out of gratitude to the
Romans by the gods-: Sterculius and Mutinus and
Larentina advanced the empire ! For I cannot think
that foreign gods would have wished a foreign nation
to be favoured more than their own, and would have
xxv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
surrendered to peoples who came from over the seas

their native soil where they were born, grew up, were
honoured, and buried. No matter that Cybele, a
foreign deity, has loved the Roman city as the
memorial of the Trojan race, her own native race
indeed, which she protected against the arms of the
Greeks ; and had sufficient foresight to pass over to
the avengers who she knew would subdue Greece,
the vanquisher of Phrygia. And it is quite in keep-
ing with this that she has proffered even in our
own day a splendid proof of the majesty she con-
ferred upon the city, when, on the death of Marcus
Aurelius at Sirmium on the 17th of March, her most
reverend chief priest, seven days later, made a liba-
tion of impure blood by gashing his arms, and issued
just as before the accustomed directions on behalf of
the health of the emperor Marcus, who was already
dead. How lazy were the messengers, how sleepy
the despatches, through whose fault Cybele did not
know earlier of the emperor's decease, and then the
Christians would not have ridiculed a goddess of
such a kind as this 1
But Jupiter, too, would never have at once allowed
his own Crete to be shaken by the Roman fasces,
forgetful of that lda;an cave, and the Corybantian
cymbals, and the delicious odour of his own nurse
there. Would he not have preferred his own tomb
far before the Capitol, so that the land which covered
the ashes of Jupiter should hold the pre-eminence in
the world? Would Juno be willing for the Cartha-
ginian city, which she loved to the neglect of Samos,
88 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN
to be aestroyed, and by the Trojan race, too, of all

people? Whereas Y
• Here were her arms,
Her chariot here, this kingdom even now, for universal sway,
Would but the Fates permit, the goddess hopes and strives
indeed to found.'
This wretched wife and sister of Jupiter had no power
against the Fates ! Obviously
'by Fate stands Jupiter himself.'
And yet the Romans have not paid so much
honour to the Fates who gave them Carthage in
opposition to the appointment and vow of Juno,
as to that most abandoned prostitute Larentina.
It is certain that many of your deities once reigned
on earth. If, therefore, they possess the power of
conferring empire, who gave them their empire when
they reigned? Whom did Saturn and Jupiter worship?
Some Sterculius, I suppose, whom they subsequently
honoured at Rome along with their own native gods.
And even if some of your gods did not reign yet
others reigned, who were not yet their worshippers,
since they were not yet accounted gods. Therefore it
belongs to others to confer empire, since royal power
was being exercised long before your gods were
inscribed as such on their statues.
But how vain is it to attribute the grandeur of the
Roman name to the merits of religious zeal, when
your religion was elaborated after the establishment
of the empire, or call it still the kingdom. For
Y Verg., .En. i. 16.
µv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
although superstitious assiduity was inaugurated by

Numa, yet the materials of religion amongst the
Romans did not then consist in images or temples.
Religion was frugal and its rites needy, and there
were no Capitols vying with the sky, but the altars
were built casually of turf, and the vessels were of
Samian ware, and the fumes arose from these, and
the god himself was nowhere to be seen. For at
that time the talent of the Greeks and Tuscans in
moulding images had not yet inundated the city.
The Romans, therefore, were not religious before
they were great ; and consequently they are not
great because they were religious.
Indeed how can they be great on account of their
religion, when their greatness has proceeded from
their irreligious conduct? For unless I am mistaken,
every kingdom or empire is acquired by wars and
extended by victories. Now wars and victories con-
sist in the capture and overthrow of very many cities ;
and such operations are not effected without injury of
the gods. The destruction of fortifications and the
ruin of temples go together: the slaughter of citizens
and the murder of priests proceed simultaneously :
nor is there any difference between the robbery of
sacred and profane treasures. The sacrileges of the
Romans are as numerous as their victories; they can
count as many triumphs over gods as over nations ;
their spoils in war are to be enumerated by the
images of captive gods which remain to-day. These
captive gods, then, tolerate the worship even of their
el)emies, and allot a boundless empire to those whose
injuries rather than adorations z, they ought to

recompense. But those who feel nothing are as
much insulted with impunity as worshipped vainly.
It is certainly beyond the bounds of belief that a
people should be supposed to have increased on
account of their religious merits who, as we have
reminded you, have either grown in power by insult-
ing religion, or have insulted religion in the very
process of their growth. Besides, those nations
whose kingdoms have united to make up the sum of
the Roman empire were not without religions at the
time when they lost their kingdoms.
CHAPTER XXVI.
All rule and sovereignty are in the hands of the One
God Who is above all.
SEE, therefore, whether it is not He Who dispenses

kingdoms, Whose is both the world which is ruled
and man himself who rules; whether it is not He
Who has ordained the changes of empires with the
periods of their duration in the world, Who existed
before all time and created the course of this world,
the embodiment of times and seasons and events;
whether it is not He Who causes the rise and decline
of states, under Whom the human race once existed
' Adolationes, probably a corruption of adorationes: adu-

lationes, • fawnings,' is the reading of some MSS. The MSS.
vary between adolatione and adulatione similarly in ch. xxxiv.
XXVII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 91
without states. Why do you make such a mistake ?
Rome in her state of natural wildness is older than
some of her own gods; she held sway before she
constructed so large an enclosure of Capitol. The
Babylonians, too, reigned before your Pontiffs, and
the Medes before your Fifteen, the }Egyptians before
the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, and the
Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. Finally, if the
religious rites of the Romans are responsible for their
- kingdoms, J udrea, a despiser of those common divini-
ties of yours, would never have reigned in time past,
whose God with sacrifices, whose temple with gifts,
whose nation with treaties you Romans have hon-
oured at various times; and never would you have
become its lords, had it not in the end sinned
against Christ.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Your animosity against us is incited by dcemoniiual

agency.
Tms is a sufficient reply to the accusation of injury
to your religion and divinity, since we cannot be
supposed to injure that which we have shewn has
no existence. Wherefore we meet the summons to
sacrifice with opposition, relying on our knowledge,
whereby we are certain who those beings are to whom
those services are paid under the profanation of
images and the deification of mere names of men.
But some think this madness, because, when we
might both sacrifice at the time and get off unhurt,

while retaining our own private opinions, we prefer
obstinacy to safety. You actually advise us how to
cheat you; but we know the quarter from whence
such suggestions come, and who stirs up all this
animosity against us, and how by the alternate em-
ployment of cunning persuasions and harsh threats
he labours to dislodge our constancy from its ·posi-
tion. It is indeed that spirit of dremoniacal and
angelic nature, who opposes us because of our separa-
tion from him, and is envious of us because of God's
favour, who makes attacks upon us from the position
of your minds, which, by his secret instigation, are
played upon and incited to all that perversion of
judgement and unjust hatred which we began with
at the commencement of this treatise. For although
the whole force of dremons and spirits of that kind is
subject to us, yet, like worthless slaves, they some-
times unite contumacy with their dread, and eagerly
desire to injure those whom at other times they fear:
for dread itself inspires hatred ; besides, their hope-
less condition, arising from their being foredoomed,
finds meantime some solace in the enjoyment of their
malignity during the delay of their punishment. And
yet when they are seized they are subdued and
succumb to their fate, and they supplicate those,
when close at hand, whom they assail, when at a
distance. Consequently when, after the manner of
rebellious convicts in the prisons or mines or that
kind of penal servitude, they break forth against us
in whose power they are, being rendered the more
xxvm.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 93
desperate by their certainty of being no match for
us, we unwillingly resist them as though they were
our equals, and we return their attack steadily holding
the very position which they assail; and never do we
more utterly triumph over them than when we are
condemned for the immoveableness of our faith.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
, 2. The same evil injluence drives you to force us to
sacrifice for the emperors welfare. This we refuse
to do, and therefore we are charged, secondly, with
. Disloyalty to Casar.
Now as it would at once appear unjust for free
men to be compelled against their will to offer
sacrifice (for a willing mind is enjoined at other
times too in the performance of religious duties), it
would certainly also be thought ridiculous for any one
to be forced by another to do honour to those gods
whom he ought for his own sake voluntarily to pro-
pitiate, lest there should be a ready opening for the
retort, 'I do not want Jupiter to be propitious to.
me ; you, who are you? Let Janus meet me angrily
with whichever front he likes: what business is it
of yours?' It is surely the same spirits who influence
you to compel us to sacrifice for ·the safety of the
emperor; and the necessity of coercing us is just as
much laid upon you, as the duty of incurring danger
by our refusal is imposed upon us. ·
We come, then, to the second charge~ that, of inc
sult to a more august majesty, since indeed you

regard Cresar with a greater dread and a more calcu-
lating fear than even Jupiter ruling from Olympus,-
and rightly so, if you only knew it•. For who is he
among the living who is not more powerful than any
one you please among the dead? But not even this
do you do on principle, so much as from respect to
a power of immediate operation ; so that herein you
are convicted of impiety towards your gods, since you
render more reverence to a human lordship. With
you, in fact, one swears falsely by all the gods sooner
than by the single genius of Cresar.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Yet the gods are Ca:sars creatures, and cannot have
!tis welfare in their keeping.
LET it first then be shewn whether those to whom

sacrifice is offered are able to bestow health upon the
emperor or any man at all, and then by this proof
adjudge us guilty. If angels or dremons, spirits of
a most depraved nature act at all beneficently, if the
lost save, if the condemned liberate, if finally, the
dead (as they are in your own knowledge) guard the
living, then let them first at all events guard their
own statues and images and temples, which I believe
the Cresars' soldiers preserve in safety with their
guards. But I think that their very materials come
• See Merivale, Hist. Rom., vii. 375; Westcott, Epistles ef
S. 7ohn, 'The Two Empires.'
xxx.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 95
from the Cresars' mines, and the whole temples, as
such, depend on Cresar's nod. Moreover many gods
have had Cresar unpropitious to them. And it
makes for my argument if some have found him
propitious, when he confers upon them some bounty
or privilege. How then shall those who are in
Cresar's power, and are wholly dependent on him,
have Cresar's welfare in their power, so as to appear
able to grant what they themselves may more easily
,0btain from Cresar?
In this way, therefore, we sin against the majesty
of the emperors, because we do not subject them to
their own creatures, and because we do not play at
the performances of a ceremony for their welfare, not
believing it to be in hands soldered with lead. But
you are the religious people b who seek it where it is
not, ask for it from those who cannot give it, passing
over Him in Whose power it is ! Moreover you
persecute those who know how to ask for it, and who,
in virtue of this knowledge, can obtain it.
CHAPTER XXX.
We offer for Ca:sars welfare prayers to the True God
i'n Whose power alone it is.
FoR we invoke on behalf of the emperor's welfare
the Eternal God, the True God, the Living God,
b Religiosi, ironically. In these chapters which deal with the
charge of Disloyalty, religiosus bears the meaning of ' loyal,' i.e.
dutiful in the religion (not of God but) of the emperor.
96 THE. APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
Whom the emperors themselves also would rather

have propitious to them than all the others. They
know as emperors Who gave them their empire, and
as men Who gave them life; they feel that He Alone
is God, in Whose power alone they are; to Whom
they are second, after Whom they are first, before all
and above all gods. Why not? since they are above
all men, who surely are alive and take precedence of
the dead. They consider how far the strength of
their own empire prevails, and so they have a correct
conception of God; they acknowledge that they
prevail through Him against Whom they cannot pre-
vail. As a last argument let the emperor vanquish
Heaven, let him lead it captive in his triumph, let
him send garrisons there, and lay taxes on it. He
cannot. His greatness then is consequent on his
being less than Heaven. For he himself belongs to
Him, Whose is both Heaven and every created thing.
Thence is he an emperor whence he is also a man
before being emperor : thence comes his power
whence also is his spirit.
Thither we Christians look up with hands out-
stretched because guiltless, with head bare because
we are not ashame<'I, and without a prompter because
our prayers are from the heart: we all pray always
for all emperors, for their long life, untroubled reign,
safe house, strong armies, faithful senate, loyal people,
quiet world, and whatever his wishes would be both
as man and as Cesar. These things I can ask from
no other than Him from Whom I know that I shall
obtain them, since He Himself is the One Who
xxx.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 97
Alone grants them, and I am one to whom it is due
that I should obtain what I ask,-1, His servant,
who honour Him Alone, who for His religion am
put to death, who offer to Him that rich and noble
sacrifice which He commanded, prayer proceeding
from a pure body, from an innocent mind, and from
a pious spirit. I offer not a few grains of incense of
trifling value, the tears of an Arabian tree, nor two
drops of wine, nor the blood of a bull rejected and
longing for death, and, after all these foul things, an
impure conscience also, so that I wonder, when the
sacrifices are inspected in your presence by your most
polluted priests, why the hearts of the sacrificers
themselves are not examined instead of those of the
v1ct1ms. So then, as we are stretching forth our
hands to God, let your claws dig into us, your crosses
suspend us, your fires bum us, your swords decapitate
us, your wild beasts spring upon us : the very posture
of a praying Christian is ready prepared for every
kind of punishment. Pursue your course, excellent
governors, and crush out the soul praying to God on
the emperor's behalf. The prayer will only be criminal
in the case where it is addressed to the True God, and
is coupled with devotion to Him.
H
THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN LCHAP,
CHAPTER XXXI.
And our prayers for him are no pretence, but part of
our religious duty.
SUPPOSE that this is mere cringing to the emperor,
and that the prayers of which we speak are a pretence,
in order forsooth to escape your violence. Much
that deceit would profit us ! for you permit us to bring
proofs of that which we maintain. Look, therefore,
you who think we care nothing about the welfare of
the Cresars, into the oracles of God, our scriptures,
which we ourselves by no means suppress, and which
many chances bring into the hands of outsiders.
Know from these that we are exhorted " to an over-
flowing kindness, even to the extent of beseeching
God for our enemies, and praying for blessings upon
our persecutors. Now who are greater enemies and
persecutors of the Christians than those towards whom
we are charged with disloyalty? But prayer for em-
perors is even expressly and plainly enjoined upon
us d : 'Pray,' says the Apostle e, ' for kings, and for
princes and powers, that all things may be tranquil
with you.' For when the empire is disturbed, in the
disturbance of its other parts, surely we, too, though
strangers to commotions, are to be found in some
place which is affected by the calamity.
0
Matt. v. 44; 1 Cor. iv. 12; I Pet. iii. 9.
d I Tim. ii. 2. Tertullian here, as often, cites loosely.
• inquit : the ellipse may be Apostolus, as in de idol. 14 ;
de coron. 13; or Dei vox (in litteris sacris nostris) from the
sentence above,
xxxn.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS,
CHAPTER XXXII.
And rendered necessary by our belief that the con-

tt"nuance of the Roman Empire delays the end of
the world.
THERE is also another and a greater reason why

we should pray for the emperors, as for the whole
state of the empire and Roman interests ; because
we know that the stupendous shock which impends
over the whole world, and the close itself of this
age which threatens terrible woes, is delayed by the
respite granted to the Roman Empire r. And so
whilst we pray for the postponement of those things
which we are unwilling to experience, we favour the
duration of the Roman government. Moreover also
we swear, not by the genii of the Cresars, but by their
safety g' which is more august than all genii. Are
you not aware that genii are called ' dremones,' and
thence, by a diminutive, 'dremonia?' In the emperors
we look up to the judgement of God, Who sets
them over the nations. We recognize in them this
f S. Paul, in one of his earliest epistles (2 Thess. ii. 6 ),

regarded the Roman Empire as the restraining power which
hindered the revelation of the 'Man of Sin' and 'lawlessness; '
and 'many of the Fathers, though without altogether under-
standing its bearing,' so interpreted the passage. Lightfoot in
Diet. Bib!. iii. 1483 f.
g Christians did not scruple to swear by Cresar's safety on
necessary occasions, because that safety was the subject of their
prayers,
CHAPTER XXXI.
And ottr prayers for him are no pretence, but part of
our religious duly.
SUPPOSE that this is mere cringing to the emperor,
and that the prayers of which we speak are a pretence,
in order forsooth to escape your violence. Much
that deceit would profit us! for you permit us to bring
proofs of that which we maintain. Look, therefore,
you who think we care nothing about the welfare of
the C:esars, into the oracles of God, our scriptures,
which we ourselves by no means suppress, and which
many chances bring into the hands of outsiders.
Know from these that we are exhorted c to an over-
flowing kindness, even to the extent of beseeching
God for our enemies, and praying for blessings upon
our persecutors. Now who are greater enemies and
persecutors of the Christians than those towards whom
we are charged with disloyalty? But prayer for em-
perors is even expressly and plainly enjoined upon
us d: 'Pray,' says the Apostle e, 'for kings, and for
princes and powers, that all things may be tranquil
with you.' For when the empire is disturbed, in the
disturbance of its other parts, surely we, too, though
strangers to commotions, are to be found in some
place which is affected by the calamity.
c Matt. v. 44; J Cor. iv. 12; I Pet. iii. 9.
d I Tim. ii. 2. Tertullfan here, as often, cites loosely.
• inquit: the ellipse may be Apostolus, as in de idol. 14;
de coron. 13; or Dei vox (in litteris sacris nostris) from the
sentence above.
xxxn.] FOR THE .CHRISTIANS,
CHAPTER XXXII.
And rendered necessary by our belief that the con-

tinuance of the Roman Empire delays the end of
the world.
THERE is also another and a greater reason why

we should pray for the emperors, as for the whole
state of the empire and Roman interests ; because
we know that the stupendous shock which impends
over the whole world, and the close itself of this
age which threatens terrible woes, is delayed by the
respite granted to the Roman Empire r. And so
whilst we pray for the postponement of those things
which we are unwilling to experience, we favour the
duration of the Roman government. Moreover also
we swear, not by the genii of the Cresars, but by their
safety g' which is more august than all genii. Are
you not aware that genii are called 'dremones,' and
thence, by a diminutive, ' dremonia?' In the emperors
we look up to the judgement of God, Who sets
them over the nations. We recognize in them this
f S. Paul, in one of his earliest epistles (2 Thess. ii. 6),

regarded the Roman Empire as the restraining power which
hindered the revelation of the 'Man of Sin' and 'lawlessness;'
and 'many of the Fathers, though without altogether under-
standing its bearing,' so interpreted the passage. Lightfoot in
Dut. Bibi. iii. 1483 f.
s Christians did not scruple to swear by C:esar's safety on
necessary occasions, because that safety was the subject of their
prayers,
.JOO THE /,.POLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
fact only, what God wills; and therefore we wish

that to be safe which He wills, and we regard their
safety as a great oath. But dremons, that is, genii,
we are wont to adjure, that we may drive them out
of men, not to swear by, so as to confer on them the
honour of divinity.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
We are much more truly loyal than you are; for we
recognize the .Divine will in the appointment of the
C1Zsars, although we refuse to acknowledge the divinity
of the C1Zsars themselves.
BuT why should I enlarge upon the scrupulous
regard and loyalty of the Christians towards the
'emperor? for we are bound to look up to him as
one whom our God has chosen. And I might with
justice· claim him as especially our Cresar, since he
is appointed by our God. So also I do more for
his welfare, not merely in that I ask for it from Him
Who can grant it, or that I who ask it am such an
one as to deserve to obtain it, but also that I, by
reducing the majesty of Cresar below God, do 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
a god, both because I cannot lie, and also because
I dare not mock him, and because not even he him-
self would wish to be called a god. If he is a man,
it is man's interest to yield to God; let it be suf-
xxxrv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. IOI
ficient for him to be called emperor. And a noble

title indeed is this w,p.ich is given him by God. He
who calls him a god denies that he is an emperor.
Unless he be a man he is not an emperor. That
he is a man, he is admonished even when triumph-
ing in his most lofty chariot. He is reminded from
behind : 'Look behind thee; remember that thou
art a man h.' And surely he rejoices the more at
his glittering with such great glory that the reminder
of his real lot is necessary. [He would really be
less, if he were then called a god, because he would
nof be truly called so.] He is greater who is re-
called to himself, lest he should think himself a god.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
'Lord' is no proper title of Ca;sar, but belongs

to God.
AUGUSTUS, the founder of the empire, was un-
willing to be even called ' lord ; ' for this also is an
epithet of God. I will indeed call the emperor
'lord,' but only in the conventional acceptation of
the word, and when I am not compelled to style
him ' lord ' in the sense of God. Yet as regards
h Comp. Isidor. Ong. xviii. 3. 6; Plin. H. N. xxviii. 4-
39; xxxiii. I. II; Jerom., Ep. ad Paulam (iv. p. 55, Bened.),
'Monitor quidam humanre imbecillitatis apponetur in simili.
tndinem trinmphantium, quibus in cnrru retro comes adhaere-
bat per singulas acclamationes civium dicens : Hominem te
esse memento ! '
IOZ THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP
him, I am a free man i; for One is my Lord, the

omnipotent and eternal God, the Same Who is also
his God. How can he, who is the father of his
country, be its 'lord ? ' Besides, the title which
implies affectionate care is more pleasing than that
which denotes authority ; even of a family men are
called the fathers rather than the lords. So far is
it from being the emperor's due to be called a god
(which cannot be believed) by a flattery k which
is not only most disgraceful but also dangerous: just
as if, when you have an emperor, you were to call
another by the title, would not such conduct give
occasion for very great and implacable offence to
him whom you had,-offence which might also prove
dangerous to him whom you called emperor ? Be
loyal 1 towards God, you who wish Him to be pro-
pitious to the emperor. Cease to worship or believe
in another god, and so to speak of him as a god
who has need of God. If your flattery is of such
a kind that it blushes not at the falsehood of calling
a man a god, let it at least fear the ill-luck attached
to so doing. It is equivalent to an imprecation to
call Cresar a god before his apotheosis.
1 Comp. ad Scap. 5; deid1Jl, 18; decoron. 13. Personal free-
dom seemed to the Christian a natural corollary of his spiritual
liberty in the service of God. The idea is characteristically
Pauline : see I Cor. vii. 22, note in Speaker's Commentary.
k adula.tione : see ch. xxv. 1 religiosus : see ch. xxix.
xxxv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 103
CHAPTER XXXV.
We are called 'public enemies ' because we refuse to join
in your useless acts of worskip and lewd festivities.
Tke real traitors are always found amongst your-
selves, wketker of lower or higher rank.
ON these grounds the Christians, then, are public
enemies, because they render to the emperors neither
empty, nor false, nor ill-advised honours, and be-
cause as men of true religion they celebrate their
solemn festivals rather with mental rejoicing than
with wanton gaiety. A noble ceremony it is for-
sooth to drag out hearths and couches in public, to
feast throughout the streets, to efface the city under
the disguise of a tavern, to thicken the mud with
wine, and to roam about in groups for the committal
of outrages, insults, and illicit lusts m. Is the public
rejoicing to be thus expressed by the public dis-
honour? Do those acts become the solemn festival
days of your princes which befit not other days ?
Shall they who observe orderly quietness out of
respect for Cresar desert it on Cresar's account, and
shall loyalty grant a licence for immorality, shall
religion be regarded as the occasion for indulgence ?
0 how greatly do we deserve to be condemned !
For do we not perform our- prayers and rejoicings
for the Cresars in purity and soberness and modesty ?
Do we not on a festal day refuse to either over-
"' Comp. Augustine, Cunf. iii. 3 ; Inge, Sucial Life in Rome,
p. 46.
J04 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
shadow our doors with laurels, or to violate the light

of day with lamps? It is a note of respectability
when a public festival demands it, to dress up your
house in the guise of some new brothel l
But with respect to this religion of a second ma-
jesty, concerning which we Christians are judicially
accused of a second sacrilege, in that we do not join
in your celebrations of the Cresars' festivals, in a
manner which neither propriety nor modesty nor
shamefastness would allow, but which the oppor-
tunity of pleasure rather than any worthy reason
has counselled, I wish to demonstrate your fidelity
and truth; lest perchance in this particular also those
who will not have us regarded as Romans, but only
as enemies of the Roman princes, should be found
to be worse than the Christians. You yourselves,
0 Quirites, the native populace of the seven hills,
I judicially charge to say whether that Roman tongue
of yours spares its own Cresar. There is the witness
of the Tiber n, and of the school of the wild beasts 0 ,
If nature had only covered human breasts with some
mirror-like substance that would shew through, whose
heart would not be found to be engraven with the
picture of a constant succession of Cresars presiding
" The common people lived in the low-lying portion of the

city, on the river banks.
0
i.e. the amphitheatre, For the expression comp. Min.
Felix, 38, 'in gladiatoriis homicidii disciplinam,' a school of
murder; and for the popular dicacity at the emperor's expense
in the circus, comp. de spect. 16; Capitolin. Verus, 6.
xxxv.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, 105
over the distribution ·of largesses at their acces-

sion? aye, even at the very hour in which they
shout
'May Jupiter increase thy years from ours P ! '
These words a Christian knows no more how to utter

than how to wish for a new Cresar.
'But these are the vulgar,' you say. Even so, they
are yet Romans; nor are there any greater clamourers
for the punishment of the Christians than the vulgar.
Of course the other orders in proportion to their rank
are most truly loyal: nothing hostile is ever breathed
from the senate itself, from the knighthood, from the
camp, from the very palace l whence come your
Cassii 4 and Nigri and Albini'? Whence come those·
who attack a Cresar between two laurels• ? whence
those who practice the athletic art by throttling a
Cresar t? Whence come those who burst into a palace
P Comp. de spect. 25; Dion Cass. lxiii. 20; lxxii. 20; Aelian.
Var. Hist. i. 32.
4 Avidius Cassius, a usurper in the reign of Marcus Aurelius,
A.D. 175. l\Jerivale, Hist. Rom. viii. 340.
' Niger and Albinus, rivals of Severus, A.D, 193. Gibbon, i.
253 ff.
• Popular sedition was excited against Commodus, A,D, 189,
in consequence of the tyranny of Cleander, aml an attack was
made upon the palace amongst the laurel groves in the suburbs
of Rome, whither the emperor had retired for the benefit of his
health.-Gibbon, i. 228.
• The strangulation of Commodus by the wrestler Narcissus.
Gibbon, i, 234-
armed u, bolder than all Sigerii or Parthenii v? From

amongst Romans, unless I am mistaken ; that is, not
from the Christians. And yet indeed all these trai-
tors, up to the very moment of their disloyalty burst-
ing forth, were both performing sacred rites for the
emperor's welfare, and were swearing by his genius,-
one thing out of doors, another within,-and were
certainly giving the name of public enemies to the
Christians ! Take the case, too, of those who are now
daily being detected as having lent their aid or
sanction to criminal factions, the gleaning that
remains after the vintage of traitors x,-how they
decked out their doors with freshest and leafiest
laurels ! how they lighted up their porches with
tallest and brightest lamps ! how they apportioned
the forum amongst themselves with most elegant and
most splendid couches !-and all this, not in order to
celebrate the public festivities, but to utter even at
such a time their private wishes, and to inaugurate
the model and image of their own hope at the
festival of another, by mentally substituting the name
of a different prince ! The same acts of homage those
also perform who consult the astrologers and sooth-
sayers and augurs and magicians about the life of
Cresar,-arts which, since they were communicated
u The assassination of Pertinax, A.D. 193, by the prretorian

guards.-Gibbon, i. 239.
• Parthenius and Sigerius were participators in the murder of
Domitian, A.D, 69.-Merivale, vii. 413 f.
x Partizans of Albinus in the West, A,D. 197; or of Niger in
the East, a few years later.
xxxvr.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, 101
by fallen angels and are forbidden by God, the

Christians do not resort to even about their own
business. For who has need of .investigating the
welfare of the emperor but he who is meditating or
wishing something adverse to it, or is hoping for and
expecting something after his death? For consulta-
tions are not made with the same intent about one's
loved ones as about one's rulers. The solicitude
inspired by kinship is an anxiety of quite a different
nature to that which servitude calls forth.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
We are necessarily well-disposed to every one, whether
Cmsar or neighbour.
SINCE then the case stands thus,-that those who
are called Romans are found to be enemies, why are
we who are thought to be enemies refused the title
of Romans? Cannot we be Romans and yet not
enemies, when some are found out to be enemies
who were regarded as Romans ? Devotion and
loyalty and fidelity rendered to the emperors do not
consist in duties of such a kind as a hostile disposi-
tion is likewise able to discharge even more rigor-
ously as a cloak for its own designs, but in those
practices which necessarily compel us to shew a
kindly disposition towards the emperor as truly as
towards all men. For these acts which spring from
the possession of a good heart are not demanded
from us towards the emperor only. In the perform-.
108 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLTAN [CHAP,
ance of our good deeds we do not make any excep-

tion· of persons ; for we do them for our· own sakes,·
and seek to obtain the meed of praise or reward, not
from man, but from God Who requires and· recom-
penses an impartial beneficence. We are the same
towards the emperors as towards our neighbours.
For we are alike forbidden to wish, or do, or speak,
or think, evil of any one. Whatever is unlawful in
the case of the emperor, is also unlawful in the case
of any man ; and what is unlawful in the case of any
man, is of course still more so in the case of him,
who, by God's appointment, is so great a man.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
1¥e are forbidden to retaliate, else we might ·easily take
our revenge, either by secret means, or as open ene-
mies, or even by merely withdrawing from your
midst, and leaving you defenceless against the attacks
of the dcemons.
IF, as we said above, we are bidden to love our
enemies, whom have we to hate? If likewise we are
forbidden to retaliate when injured, lest we should
resemble them in so acting, whom can we injure?
For look at the matter yourselves. How often do
you rage against the Christians, partly in gratification
of your own private feelings, and partly in obedience
to the laws? How often, again, does the hostile
mob, taking the law into its own hands, assail us with
stones and fires, without waiting for your permission
xxxvn.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 109
or instigation? Nay, with the very phrenzy of Bac-

chanals, they spare not even the dead bodies of
Christians, but drag them out from the repose of
their sepulture, from the sanctuary as it were of death,
and tear them asunder, and cut them up, though they
:;i.re no longer the same beings (as those who offended
you) nor are they now whole. Yet what instance
did you ever note of our retaliation upon you for
injuries inflicted on us who are so united and so
courageous even to death, when even one night with
a few torches might amply work our revenge, if we
were allowed to wipe out wrong with wrong? But
perish the thought that our divine sect r should be
avenged by human fire•, or should grieve at the very
sufferings by which it is approved For if we wished
to act the part of open enemies not of secret avengers,
would the strength of multitudes and forces be want-
ing to us? The Moors, the Marcomanni, the Par-
thians themselves, or any nations indeed, which in-
habit one region and their own boundaries, are more
numerous, I suppose, than one which fills the whole
world t We are of yesterday, and yet we have filled
all your places ; your cities, islands, villages, town-
ships, assemblies, your very camp, tribes, companies,
palace, senate, forum; we leave you only your tem-
ples. We can count your armies; the Christians of
one province are more numerous. For what war
r Read, divina secta.
z The Vindex of Christians is God, and their ultio is from
Him; comp. ad Scap. 2; Lactant., de mort. pers. I. On the

ignis divinus, see ch. xlviii.
IIO THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
should not we, who are so willingly slaughtered, be

ready and prepared, although unequal ih forces, if it
were not more in accordance with our religion to be
slain than to slay? We might have fought against
you, not in arms nor in rebellion, but merely in dis-
union, by the ill-will of separation only. For had so
great a force of men torn themselves away from you
to some corner of the remote earth, the loss of so
many citizens and of such a kind would surely have
brought shame upon your rule; nay, the punishment
would have lain in the very desertion itself. You
would undoubtedly have quaked with fear at your
desolation, at the silence of things, and at the death-
like stupefaction of the world; you would have had
to seek for subjects to govern. More enemies than
citizens would have remained with you. For now
you have fewer enemies by reason of the multitude
of Christians, since nearly all the citizens a in nearly
all the states are Christians. Yet you prefer to call
them the enemies of the human race.
Now who else would deliver you from those secret
enemies who are ruining both your mental and
physical powers in every way? I refer to the attacks
of the dremons whom we expel from you without
price or reward. This alone would be sufficient
revenge for us, that you should henceforth lie exposed
to them, an empty tenement for unclean spirits.
And without even so much as thinking of giving
• i.e. citizens who are really such, loyal subjects, contrasted

with citizens who were really hostes.
XXXVIII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. Ill
us any compensation in return for so great a protec-

tion, you have preferred to adjudge as enemies, a
class of men who are not only harmless, but everi
necessary to you : enemies indeed we are, but of
error, not of the human race.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
The Christian society ought to be recognized by the
law, since it is a harmless and unambitious asso-
ciation.
FURTHERMORE, and not less leniently, this sect
ought to be enrolled amongst the legalized gilds \
since it is not guilty of any such thing as is wont
to be feared from unlawful associations. For unless
I mistake, the reason for the prohibition of gilds lies
fo the care for the public order, lest the state should
be split up into factions, which would naturally cause
disturbance at your elections, councils, courts, meet-
ings, and even shows, by the rival conflicts of parti-
zanship ; especially at a time when men have begun
in pursuit of gain to regard the help they render
in deeds of violence as a matter for sale or hire. :But
we, who are dead to all desire for fame and honour,
have no need of coalitions, nor is anything more
foreign to our tastes than public life. We recognize
one universal republic, the world.
We renounce, too, in like manner as much your
public shows as their origins, which we know to have
b See Gore, Christian Ministry, pp. 31 f£.
tt2 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
been begotten of superstition; since we have nothing

to do with the matters of which these treat. Neither
in our speech, sight, nor hearing, have we anything
in common with the madness of the circus, the im-
modesty of the theatre, the atrocity of the arena,
or the vain-glory of the xystus. You allowed the
Epicurreans to decide one view of the true nature
of pleasure. How then do we offend you, ifwe take
our pleasures at other times than you. If we refuse
to know how to be delighted, ours is the loss, if at
all, not yours. We however reject what pleases you,
nor do our pleasures give you any delight.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
III. 1. The purposes of our assembly• are pious, pure,

and charitable. Our welt-known love for each other
is blamed, and our simple 'love-feast' denounced as
extravagant.
I WILL now set forth the real facts concerning the

Christian society in such a way as, having already
refuted the evil, to shew the good. We are a body
united in the knowledge of religion, the divine char-
acter of our doctrine, and in the bond of hope. We
meet together in an assembly and congregation that
we may besiege God like a marshalled corps with
our prayers. This violence is pleasing to Him. We
pray for emperors, for their ministers, and those in
authority, for the state of the· world, for general
XXXIX.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 113
quietude, and for the delay of the end. We assemble
together e to call to remembrance the divine writings,
if the aspect of affairs requires us to be forewarned or
reminded of anything. In any case we feed our faith
on these holy words, we encourage our hope, we con-
firm our confidence, and we enforce the teaching of
their precepts none the less during attacks of persecu-
tion d : at the same time we pronounce exhortations,
chastisements, and the divine censures of excommuni-
cation. For our judgement is delivered with great
weight, as by men who are assured that they are
acting in the sight of God ; and it is the gravest
anticipation of future judgement, if any one has so
sinned as to be banished from the communion of
prayer, and assembly, and all holy intercourse e.
Certain approved elders presider, who have ob-
tained this honour not by purchase but by testimony ;
for no divine privilege is obtainable by money. Even
the kind of treasury which we have is not filled up
with sums paid under a sense of obligation, as if they
were the price of religion ; but each one places there
a small contribution on a certain day of the month,
or when he wishes, provided only he is both willing
c Comp. Justin Mart., Apo!. i. 65-67.

4 in compulsationibus : inculcationibus is a 'Preferable read-
ing.
• See Diet. Chr. Ant., ii 1586 ff.: Lib. Fath., Tert., pp.
377 ff.
r In a treatise addressed to heathen, Tertullian naturally for-
bears to use the technical terms of the Christian ministry. The
expression in the text would include both Bishops and Priest •.
I
it4 THE APOLOGY OE TERTULLIAN (CHAP.
and able,-for the offerings are not compulsory but

voluntary. These are as it were the deposits of piety.
For afterwards they are not spent in feasting or
drinking or in repulsive eating-houses, but in support•
ing and burying the needy, and in relieving destitute
orphan boys and girls, and infirm old men, or shi~
wrecked sufferers, and any who may be in the mines,
or islands, or prisons, i:rovided it is for the cause of
God's religion, who thus become pensioners of their
own confession.
But even the putting into practice of so great a
love as this brands us with a mark of censure in the
opinion of some. 'See,' say they, 'how they love
each other ! '-for they themselves hate each other ;
and, 'how ready they are to die for each other! '-for
they are more ready to kill each other. And they
defame us also, because we call each other by the title
of' brethren; '-for no other reason, I imagine, than
that amongst themselves every title of kinship is
counterfeited from affectation. Yet brethren we are,
even of yourselves, in right of our one common
mother, Nature; although you are scarcely men,
because such bad brethren. Yet how much more
worthily are those called and regarded as brethren,
who acknowledge one Father, God ; who have drunk
of the One Spirit of holiness g; who from the one
womb of common ignorance have awakened with awe·
at the one light of truth. But perhaps it is on this
account that we are the less thought to be legitimate
brethren, because no tragedy noisily proclaims our
g I Cor. xii. 13.
xxx1x.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS,
brotherhood, or because we are brethren in family

possessions, which with you generally dissolve brother,
hood. In this way we, who are united heart and
soul, never hesitate to communicate our substance to
one another. All things are common amongst us,
except our wives : in that particular alone we dissolve
partnership, in which other· men practise it; who not
only take the wives of their friends, but even most
patiently let their own wives subserve their friends,
according to the teaching, I believe, of those ancient
sages, Socrates the Greek and Cato the Roman : who
shared with their friends the wives whom they had
married for the sake of begetting children, even if by
another ;-I know not indeed whether the wives were
unwilling or not; yet why should they care for a
chastity, which their husbands so· readily gave away?
A fine example of Attic wisdom and Roman gravity !
-the philosopher and censor acting the part of
pimps!
What marvel, then, if love so great as ours should
lead us to feast together h? For besides branding our
modest suppers as criminal, you also denounce them
as extravagant. It was of us, of course, that Diogenes
said, ' the Megarians eat as though they were to die
the next day, and build as though they were never to
die at all.' But each sees the straw in another's eye
more readily than the beam in his own i. The very
h convivatur : conviolatur is a better attested reading. ' If
such was the action of your sages, what wonder, if Christian
love be desecrated ? '
i Matthew vii. 3.
IJ6 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
atmosphere is turned sour with the belchings of so

many tribes and courts and companies. The Salii
have to pay for their banquets with borrowed money :
it requires accountants to calculate the cost of the
tithes and sacrificial banquets of Hercules: for the
Apaturian, Dionysian, and Attic mysteries a levy of
cooks must be proclaimed • At the smoke caused by
Seraprean feast the firemen will be aroused. The
feast of the Christians alone is made a subject of
comment. Our feast shews its principle in its name :
it is called that which in the Greek signifies 'love i,'
However much it may cost, expense incurred in the
name of piety is a gain ; since we help by this conso-
lation those in need : not in the same way as parasites
amongst you eagerly strive for the glory of enslaving
their liberty for their belly's wage, amidst insults
begotten of gluttony; but amongst us, as with God
Himself, greater consideration is shewn for the poor.
If the reason for our feast is an honourable one, you
can estimate what the rest of our disciplinary regula-
tions are with respect to religious duties: nothing
disgraceful, nothing immodest is admissible ; no one
reclines at the feast without first tasting beforehand
of prayer to God : sufficient is eaten to satisfy hunger;
so much only is drunk as becomes the chaste.
Satisfaction of appetite is so far indulged in, as is
consistent with the remembrance of the duty of
worshipping God during the night : conversation is
regulated by the knowledge that the Lord is listening.
J 'A-yar~.
xxxrx.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. II7
After hand-washing, the lights are brought ink, and
a general invitation is given to sing to God as each
one is able, either from the Holy Scriptures or from his
own natural capability ; it may be gathered from this
how little one has drunk. Prayer in like manner
closes the feast. The meeting then breaks up, not
into bands for the perpetration of acts of violence,
nor into groups for running hither and thither, nor
into outbursts of wantonness, but with the same
regard for propriety and modesty as becomes those
who have feasted not so much off a supper as off
a godly instruction.
This assembly of the Christians would, indeed, have
been deservedly made illegal, if it resembled illegal
meetings ; and it ought deservedly to be condemned,
if it were not unlike assemblies that merit condemna-
tion,-if any complaint could be brought against it
on the same ground as against factions. Who has
ever been the loser by our meeting? We are the
same when gathered together as when separated;
the same unitedly as individually, causing neither
injury nor sorrow to any one. When the honest and
good assemble, when the pious and pure are gathered
together, it ought not to be called a 'faction,' but
a solemn court.
k The agape, then, was held in the evening; see note, p. 150.
u8 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULUAN [CHAP.
CHAPTER XL.
2. Our existence i's supposed t{J provoke the anger of the
gods and to be the cause of disaster to the empire.
Yet such occurretUes happened before the rise of Chris-
tianity. Your own gods, too, suffer in disasters which
are supposed to come from them. The presence qf the
Christians in the world has tempered the violence if
G<Jd's judgements,
FoR the name of 'faction' ought to be applied

quite otherwise to those who unite in hatred of the
good and honest, who join in outcries against the life
· of innocent men, alleging as an excuse, forsooth, in
defence of their hatred this additional falsehood, that
·they believe the Christians are the cause of every
public disaster and every popular calamity. If the
Tiber rises up to the walls, if the Nile does not over-
flow the fields, if the heaven stands still 1, if the earth
moves, if famine or pestilence arises, the first cry is,
'The Christians to the lion ! • So many to one? I pray
you, before Tiberius, that is, before Christ's Advent,
how many disasters laid low the world and the city?
We read that the islands Hiera, Anaphe, Delos,
Rhodes, and Cos went to the bottom with many
thousands of human beings. Plato also mentions
that a region larger than Asia and Africa was en-
gulphed by the Atlantic sea. An earthquake likewise
drained the Corinthian sea, and the violence of-the
waves severed Lucania from Italy, and sent it off
1 Stetit: i.e. gives no rain.
XL.] . FOR THE CHRISTIAN'S, 1 I-9
under the name of Sicily. These convulsions at all

events could not happen without harm to the inhabit-
ants. But where were, I will not say the Christian
despisers of your gods, but your gods themselves,
at the time when the Deluge effaced the whole world,
or, as Plato thought, the plains only? For that your
gods are later than the destruction of the Flood is
proved by the cities themselves in which they were
born and died, or which they even founded; for
these cities have only remained to this day by being
themselves later than that calamity. Not yet had
Palestine received the Jewish swarm from ...£gypt, not
yet had the first members of the Christian religion
taken up their abode there, when the fiery shower
burnt up the neighbouring regions of Sodom and Go-
morrha. The land smells of the conflagration to this
day; and if any trees there attempt to bear fruit, it is
for the eye only, since it crumbles to ashes on being
touched. Moreover neither Tuscany nor Campania
lodged any complaint about the Christians in that day
when fire poured over Volsinii from heaven and over
Tarpeii from its own mountain. No one yet wor-
shipped the True God at Rome, when Hannibal at
Cannre measured out by the bushel the rings of Ro-
mans who had fallen in the slaughter he had caused.
All your gods were universally worshipped when the
Senones seized the Capitol itselt:
And it is a point too in our favour if, on the occa-
sion of any calamity befalling cities, the same destruc-
tion included the temples with the fortifications; so
that I might now turn the argument to prove that the
disasters do not come from your gods, because they

come upon themselves. The human race has ever
deserved ill of the Deity : in the first place, indeed,
because they were undutiful to Him ; for when they
knew Him in part, they not only failed to seek Him
out and approach Him as an object of fear, but
even very quickly counterfeited other gods to wor-
ship : and in the next place because they, in their
neglect of the Teacher of innocence and Judge and
Avenger of guilt, became rooted in vices and crimes
of every kind. If, however, they had sought after
Him, it would have followed that they would have
known Him Whom they sought; and having known,
would have honoured Him ; and having honoured,
would have found Him rathet propitious than angry.
They ought therefore to know that the same God
is angry with them now, Who was ever so in time
past, before the name of Christian had arisen. Why
do they not understand that evils also come from
Him, Whose blessings, showered upon them, they
experienced before they fashioned gods for them-
selves, and Whose they did not perceive that the
blessings were ? They are guilty towards Him to
Whom they are also ungrateful.
And yet if we compare earlier disasters with the
present ones, the latter are lighter, from the time
when the world received the Christians from God.
For from that time their innocence has modified the
guilt of the world; and they have begun to be inter-
cessors with God.
Lastly, when the dry season of summer delays the
XLI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS, J2I
winter rains, and the year is an anxious one, you

indeed, daily fed and forthwith about to feed, having
indulged in your baths and taverns and brothels,
offer sacrifices for rain to Jupiter, proclaim to the
people bare-foot religious processions, seek Heaven
on the Capitol, and look for clouds on your ceilings;
turned away alike from God Himself and from
Heaven. But we, shrunken with fastings and worn
out with every kind of abstinence, holding our-
selves aloof from all enjoyment of life, rolling in
sackcloth and ashes, put Heaven to shame with our
importunity, we touch God, and when we have
elicited His mercy, then Jupiter is honoured by
you, and God neglected.
CHAPTER XLI.
These judgements are attributable to your misdeeds.
CONSEQUENTLY it is you, by whom God is con-
temned and statues worshipped, who are the troublers
of mankind, it is you who are the provokers of public
calamities and evils. For surely one is bound to
hold it more likely that He Who is neglected, rather
than those who are worshipped, should be angry ; or
else the gods are most unjust i~ on account of the
Christians, they injure their own worshippers also,
whom they ought to separate from the deserts of the
Christians. ' This argument,' you say, 'recoils upon
your own God also, Who Himself, too, allows His own
worshippers to be injured on account of the wicked.'
First, however, learn some knowledge of His counsels,
and you will not use this retort. For He Who has
1:22 THE. APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.
appointed an eternal judgement once for all after the

end of the world, does not prematurely, before the
end, hasten that separation which is an essential
feature of that judgement"'. In the meantime He
is impartial towards the whole of mankind, both
in favouring and in chastising them: He has willed
that good and evil shall be shared alike by His own
servants and by the wicked, so that all should ex~
perience in an equal measure both His mercy and
His severity. And because we have thus learnt from
Him, we love His mercy and fear His severity, while
you on the other hand despise both : and it follows
that all the plagues of this world come from God upon
us, if at all, for our admonition, upon you for your
punishment. Yet we are not really injured at all:
firstly, because we have no concern in this world
except how to depart from it as quickly as possible n ;
and secondly, because if any affliction does distress
us, it is attributable to your misdeeds. But even if
some afflictions do slightly touch us as well, since we
are closely connected with you, we rejoice rather in
the recognition of the divine prophecies, which confirm
the assurance and trustworthiness of our hope. But
if all these evils come upon you for our sake from
those whom you worship, why do you persist in wor-
shipping such ungrateful and such unjust beings, who
ought rather to help and assist you to the grief of the
Christians?
m Matt. xiii. 28-301 49; xxv. 32.
• Phil. i. 23. Cp. de Spect. 28, 'What other desire have we
than the Apostle's, to depart from the world and to be received
with the Lord?'
XLU,] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 123
CHAPTER XLII.
3. We are accused of being worthless to trade, a charge
sufficiently refuted by our habits of life.
BUT we are called up on another charge of injuries

committed, and are accused of being unprofitable in
ordinary business. Yet how can this be in the case
of men who live amongst you and use the same food,
dress, style of living, and necessaries of life? For we
are not Brachmans or Indian gymnosopbists, dwellers
in the woods, or outlaws from life. We remember
the gratitude that we owe to God our Lord and
Creator; we reject no enjoyment of His works; true,
we are moderate in our enjoyment of them, lest we
should use them intemperately or wrongfully. Con-
sequently we cannot live with you in the world with-
out a market-place, or shambles, nor without baths,
shops, workshops, inns, fairs, and other places of
resort. We sail and fight with you; we till the
ground and engage in trade just as you do ; similarly
we join crafts, and throw our workmanship open
to the public to your profit. How then we can seem
to be unprofitable to your trades, when we live with
you and by you, I am at a loss to understand. More-
over if I do not frequent your religious rites, yet all
the same on that day I am still a man. I do not
bathe on the eve of the Saturnalia, lest I should lose
both night and day; yet I bathe at a proper and
healthy hour, and preserve my warmth and colour;
I shall be pale and stiff enough after my last bath
when dead. I do not recline in public at the feast

of Bacchus, as is the custom of the beast-fighters who
are making their last meal; yet in some place or other
I do sup, and from your resources. I buy no crown
for my head ; but what difference does it make to
you how I use the flowers which I do undoubtedly
purchase ? I think they are more pleasing when
free, and loose, and straying unarranged : but even if
made up into a crown, we prefer to appreciate it with
our noses, no matter that some people smell with
their hair. We do not attend your public shows;
yet if I want what is sold at those places of resort,
I can get it more easily at the proper shops. True,
we buy no incense: if the Arabians complain about
this, the Saba-ans will know that their spices are
consumed in greater quantities and at higher cost for
the burials of Christians, than in fumigating your
gods.
'Exactly;' you say, 'the temple-revenues are daily
diminishing : how few now pay their contributions ! '
Well, we cannot afford to support our own people
and your begging gods too; nor do we think that
we ought to give, except to those who ask. So let
Jupiter stretch out his hand, and he shall receive
something : whilst in the meantime our pity is dis-
pensing more in the streets than your religion is
in the temples. But your other revenues will be
grateful to us Christians, who pay what is due O as
0
The scrupulous honesty of the Christians in this particular,
as in all others, is referred to by Justin Mart., Apo!. i. 17, 'We
everywhere before all things endeavour to pay tribute and taxes
XLUI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
faithfully as we abstain from defrauding another ; so

that if the matter be gone into as to how much is lost
to the public exchequer by the fraud and lying
returns which you declare; the conclusion would soon
be arrived at that the loss complained of from us in
one particular P, is balanced by the gain in all the
others.
CHAPTER XLIII.
We are certaz"nly profitless to the bad, but tht's

is a real gain.
I WILL willingly admit that some persons may

perhaps truly complain of the unprofitableness of the
Christians to them. First amongst these will be the
pimps and panders and attendants of prostitutes;
then come the assassins, professional poisoners, magi-
cians, and also the fortune-tellers, soothsayers, and
astrologers. But to be unprofitable to such as these
is in itself very profitable. And moreover what-
ever loss your interests may suffer from our re-
ligion, it is certainly counterbalanced by some gain.
How many persons have you-I do not now say
who can expel dremons from you ; I do not now say
who present prayers on your behalf to the True God,
because perhaps you do not believe Him to be such;
but-from whom you have nothing to fear?
to those whom you appoint, as we were taught by Him.' Matt.
xxii. 30 ff. Comp. ch. 46.
P i.e. in the temple-revenues.
t:z6 THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
CHAPTER XLIV.
The real loss lo the state t"nvolved in your
injustice to us is overlooked.
YET no one pays attention to that loss to the
commonwealth which is as great as it is real,-no
one pays attention to that injury to the state which
arises from the punishment of so many just persons,
from the slaughter of so many innocent men. For
we appeal now to your own judicial ads, you who
preside daily for the trial of prisoners, who balance
the criminal charge-sheet by the infliction of appro-
priate sentences. So many culprits under various
criminal charges are examined by you; what assassin
or cutpurse or sacrilegious person or procurer or
thief is there amongst them, who is also described as
a Christian? Or when Christians are brought into
court on the charge peculiar to them\ who amongst
them is ever such an one, as are your numerous
culprits? It is with your own people that your
prisons heave ; it is with your own people that the
mines perpetually sigh ; it is on your own people
that the beasts are continually fattened ; it is from
your own people that the givers of gladiatorial shows
provide their flocks of criminals. No Christian is
amongst them, unless it be simply because he is one;
or if it be for any other reason, he is no longer
a Christian '.
q i.e. of being Christians; the very name was criminal: see
ch. 2.
' Cp. ch. 46, 'they cease to be regarded as Christians among
us :' i.e. they fall under the cenJ'Ura divina and excommunica-
tion mentioned in ch. 39.
XLV.] FOR 'fHE·CHRISTIANS.
CHAPTER XLV.
Our ethical standard is far higher and more
awe-inspin·ng than yours.
WE therefore alone are the innocent ones. What
cause for wonder is there, if it is inevitable? For
indeed it is inevitable. We have been taught inno-
cence by God, and we know it perfectly, as revealed
by a perfect Master; and we faithfully keep His com-
mandments, as delivered by an Observer Who cannot
be despised. But with you human sanction alone
has introduced innocence, and merely human regula-
tions enjoin it: therefore your ethical system, as
regards the sincerity of your innocence, is neither
complete nor so awe-inspiring as ours. How far is
man's insight capable of pointing out what is truly
good? What authority has he to enforce it? the
former may be as easily mistaken, as the latter de-
spised. Which therefore is the more exhaustive in-
junction: 'Thou shalt not kill;' or, 'Be not even
angry?' Which is the more perfect, to forbid adul-
tery, or to restrain even the private indulgence of
a sinful glance? Which shews the deeper knowledge,
to forbid evil-doing or evil-speaking? Which is the
more acute prohibition, not to permit an injury, or
not to allow a retaliation? Yet all the time, you
know that those very laws of yours, which seem to
tend towards innocence, have borrowed their form
from our divine law as the more ancient. For we
have already spoken of the age of Moses•.
I Ch~ 19.
But what is the authority of human laws, when

it can happen to a man to evade them, and generally
escape detection in his misdeeds, and sometimes to
set them at naught, transgressing voluntarily or neces-
sarily : especially if one considers the brevity of the
punishment they can inflict; for, be it what it may,
it can in no case be prolonged beyond death? So
Epicurus makes light of all pains and grief, by pro-
nouncing slight ones contemptible, and severe ones
short-lived'. But we, whose deeds are audited by
God, the Scrutinizer of all, foreseeing eternal penal-
ties at His hands, are deservedly the only ones who
attain unto innocence, both with respect to the fulness
of our knowledge of the virtue, and the difficulty of
concealment, and the severity of a torture, which is
not merely long, but eternal; for we fear Him Whom
even the very man, who judges those that fear, will
have to fear,-that is, we fear God, not the pro-
consul.
• Diog. Laert. x. 140, ' Pain does not last continuously in .
the flesh, bnt the severest is present only a very brief time.
That pain which only just exceeds bodily pleasure does not
continue many days.'
XLVI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
CHAPTER XLVI.
4. Our sect is regarded as a school of philosophy, yet
you refuse us the licence you grant to philosophers.
In reality, we differ from the philosophers both zit tlti
extent and definiteness of our knowledge, and in our
moral standard.
WE have, as I think, held our position against that
accusation which charges us with every crime, and·
which demands the blood of the Christtans. We
have presented an account of our whole condition,
and shewn by what means we can be proved to be
such as we have said; namely, by the trustworthiness
and antiquity of our divine writings, and also by the
confession of spiritual powers. Who will dare to
confute us on the point of truth, not by verbal
artifice, but by the same method as that by which we
have established our proof?
But whilst the truth of our cause is manifested to
every one, unbelief meantime, although convicted on
the point of the goodness of our sect, which is now
well-known by experience and intercourse, refuses to
regard it as at all a divine question, and looks upon
it rather as a kind of philosophy. 'The philosophers
also,' it says, ' teach and profess the same things,
-innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, modesty.'
Why, then, when we are compared with them in our
system of ethits, are we not just as much placed on
the same footing with them in respect of the licence
and impunity allowed to their system ? or why are not
K
THE 4POLOGY OF TERTULpAN [CHAP,
they too, if they resemble us, compelled to perform

duties which jeopardize us who refuse to discharge
them? For who compels a philosopher to offer
sacrifice, or to swear, or to publicly expose useless
lamps at midday? Why, they even attack your gods
openly, and blame your superstitions in their writings,
with your approval. Most of them bark against your
princes with your support and countenance. And
they are more ·readily rewarded with statues and
salaries than sentenced to the beasts. And justly so,
for they are termed philosophers, not Christians.
This name of philosophers does not put dremons to
flight. Why should it, when philosophers rank dremons
next to gods? It is the expression of Socrates : 'If
the dremon permit.' The same philosopher, too,
when he had acquired wisdom on some points of the
truth, in that he denied your gods, nevertheless just
before his death bade a cock be sacrificed to .lEscula-
pius; I suppose in honour of his father, because
Apollo oracularly declared that Socrates was the wisest
of all men. How ill-advised of Apollo ! He bore
testimony to the wisdom of the very man who denied
the existence of the gods. In the same proportion
as truth excites hatred, so does that man offend who
truly sets it forth; but he who adulterates and dis-
simulates the truth, by this very action gains favour
with those who assail it, [inasmuch as they are its
scoffers and despisers u]. The philosophers counter-
feit the truth in mimicry, and in their imitation cor-
u qua et illusores et contemptores. Mimice, &c. So most
edd. The MSS. read Quam inlusores et corruptores inimice, &c.
XLVI.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 131
rupt it, being seekers after fame : Christians neces,c

sarily desire the truth eagerly, and maintain it intact,
being anxious about their own salvation.
Thus we resemble the philosophers neither in
knowledge nor in system of ethics, as you suppose x.
For what definite answer did Thales, that first of
natural philosophers, give to Crcesus who enquired of
him concerning the Divinity, although he had re-
peatedly employed to no purpose the extensions of
time allowed him for deliberation ? Yet any Christian
working-man you please both finds and declares
what God is, and thence by that manifestation as-
cribes also to Him all that is sought for in God ;
notwithstanding that Plato Y says the Maker of the
universe is not easily found, and when found is with
difficulty explained to the multitude.
Moreover if we base our appeal on the point of
chastity, I read that one portion of the Athenian
sentence against Socrates adjudged him to be a
corruptor of youths. The Christian does not change
the natural use of the woman. I know also that the
harlot Phryne gratified the lust of Diogenes. I hear,
too, that a certain Speusippus, of the school of Plato,
x i.e. while Christian knowledge is certain, philosophers only

speculate ; and while the Christian system of ethics is perfect
and sanctioned by divine penalties, philosophers only frame
superficial schemes based upon human expediency. Comp. ch.
45·
Plato, Tim. 9, .,-o,, ,u i,, o~" ..-o,'Jl'I"~" rc<Zl ..-...,./p<t .,-oiilSE 'TOv
J
•{,p•w .,.. 'n•o>',

11'<ZP'T0S ""l
•bpdvra. Els 11".Cl''l"AS &Ul'ATOII AE'fHII.
Comp. Cicero, de nat. deor. i. 12. 30.
t3z THE AP0I:.0GY OF T.ERTULLIAN [CHAP;
died in the: act of a-dultery. A Christian is naturally

a husband to his own wife only. Democritus blinded
himself, because he could not look upon women.
without lusting for them, and grieving if he could not
possess them ; and thus he professed his incontinence
by the remedy he a<lopted; But a Christian looks at
a woman with safe glances, for he is blinded against
Just in his heart.
If I ground a defence on the point of humility,
look at Diogenes with muddy feet trampling, with
a pride of his own, on the proud couches of Plato :
a Christian is not proud even towards a poor man.
tf I cont~n<l. on the point of contentment, look at
Pythagoras at Thurii,. and Zeno at Priene, eagerly
striving for the tyranny : a Christian seeks not even
the redileship.
If I argue on the point of equanimity, Lycurgus
chose a death by starvation because the Spartans
altered his laws: a Christian, even when condemned,
returns thanks.
If I draw a- comparison on the point of integrity,
Anaxagoras refused to return the deposit of his
guests: a Christian is called faithful _even to out-
siders.
If I take up a position on the ground of sincerity,
Aristotle disgracefully ousted his own familiar friend
Hermias: a Christian does not injure even his foe.
The same Aristotle as disgracefully fawns upon Alex-
ander, whom he ought rather to have ruled, as Plato
sells himself to Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aris-
tippus lives a profligate life in his purple, under a
FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 1 33
great appearance of gravity ; and Hippias is slain

whilst plotting intrigues against the state. No Chris-
tian ever attempted this on behalf of his friends
scattered abroad with every kind of cruelty.
But some one may say that even certain of our own
members deviate from our rule of discipline : in that
case, however, they cease to be regarded as Christians
by us ; whereas philosophers, in spite of such mis-
deeds, continue amongst you to enjoy the reputation
and honour .of wisdom. Where then is the resem-
blance between the philosopher and the Christian,
between the disciple of Greece and of Heaven,
between the bargainer for fame and for salvation,
between the creator of words and of deeds, between
the builder and destroyer of things•, between the
falsifier of error and the restorer of truth, between
truth's despoiler and its guardian?
CHAPTER XLVII.
Philosophers have derived their wisdom from our Scrip-
tures, which they have distorted, and they have vainly
speculated on subfects ,wt revealed. Heretics sim:'larly
have corrupted the New Testament. Many of our
doctrines have been anticipatorz'ly counterfeited by the
agency of evil spirits.
FoR the antiquity of the divine writings already
established bears out this point of my argument, from
which it may easily be believed that they were the
• rerum. Neander suggests deorum, which would preserve
the parallelism (Antignos#cw-, Bohn, ii. 247).
134 THE. APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN _[CHAP.
source of aII later wisdom. And if I were not

anxious to limit the size of this book, I might run on
into a proof of this. What poet, what sophist can
you name who did not drink at the fountain of the
prophets? It was at that spring that the philosophers
watered the dryness of their own inteIIect ; for it is on
this very ground of their resemblance to us in certain
tenets that people liken us to them. And this, of
course, was the reason why philosophy was banished
by certain Iaws,-the Theban, Spartan, and Argive
for instance. And whilst they endeavour to imitate
our doctrines, yet, being men desirous, as we have
said, of fame and eloquence only, they transcribed
according to the bent of their own meddlesome fancy
anything in the Holy Scriptures at which they took
offence, and turned it to their own purposes, neither
sufficiently crediting their divine origin, so as to refrain
from falsifying them, nor sufficiently understanding
their present semi-obscurity; being, as they are, dark
even to the Jews themselves, to whom they seemed
peculiarly to belong. For even where the truth existed
in its simplicity, there the more did the restlessness of
human perversity, despising faith, waver, and thereby
confuse into obscurity even what was at first clear.
For they disputed about God, Whose existence simply
they found revealed, not as they found Him revealed,
but proceeded rather to discuss His quality, His na-
ture, and His abode. Some assert that He is in-
corporeal, others corporeal, as the Platonists and the
Stoics respectively; some that He is derived from
atoms, others from numbers, as Epicurus and Pytha-
XLVII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
goras respectively ; while others thought that He is

derived from fire, as was the opinion of Heraclitus :
.the Platonists, too, regard Him as being interested in
the affairs of the world; the Epicurreans on the other
hand represent Him as inactive and inert, and, if I
may so speak, a nonentity as regards human affairs.
The Stoics indeed a thought that He was placed out-
side the world, and directed the motion of the uni-
verse from an external position, like a potter that of
his wheel; but the Platonists, that He was placed
within it, and remained in that which He governs,
like a pilot in the ship which he steers.
And also concerning the world itself they differed
as to whether it was created or uncreated; whether it
would have an end or last for ever : so, too, concern-
ing the state of the soul, some contend that it is
divine and eternal, others that it can be dissolved : as
each one thought, so he either brought forth a fresh
opinion, or remodelled an old one.
Nor can one wonder if the ingenuity of the philos-
ophers has perverted the Old Testament, for certain
men of their stock have, by their own opinions, adulter-
ated even our New Testament also, in order to bring
it into accord with their philosophic doctrines; and
have cut many oblique and intricate paths away from
the one way. I have added this remark lest the well-
known differences in our sect should seem to any one
to furnish another point of similarity between the
philosophers and ourselves, and lest any one should
• This was the belief of the Epicurreans, not of the Stoics,
whose tenets were pantheistic.
THE APqL9GY OF T.E~Tt{LLIAN (CHAP.
condenm the trutp. on account of the vilri(,ty .of its

defe~ces. But .w:e at once lodge this preliminary
· objecti~n again;t, those adulterators. of our doctrines,
-that the Rule of Truth is that which comes from
Christ, handed down through those who accompanied
Him, long after Whom, all these different inventors of
novelties will be pr~ved to have lived h. ·
Every attack upon the truth has been constructed
from the truth itself, the spirits of error working out
that antagonism. By them the corruptions of this
kind of wholesome ·doctrine have been brought in :
by them certain stories have been promulgated in
order, from their similarity to it, to weaken the credi-
bility of the truth, or rather to entirely monopolize
the claim to it; and so to lead one to think that cre-
dence ought not to be given to the Christians, be-
cause it cannot be given to poets and philosophers;
or else that more credence ought to be given to poets
and philosophers, because none can be given to the
Christians. Consequently we are ridiculed when we
preach that God will come to judgement. For in like
manner both poets and philosophers place a tribunal
in the lower world. If we threaten gehenna, which
is a subterranean store of secret fire for purposes of
b Tertullian parenthetically indicates here the true method of

defence against the attacks of heresy. Heretics have only to
be confronted with the one unalterable Rule of Faith delivered
by Christ and handed down in the Church. The presentation
of primitive truth at once convicts heresy both of novelty and
falsehood. This method Tertullian himself pursued in his tract,
written soon after the Apology, IJe .Aascriptione Hareticorum.
_XLVIII.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS,
punishment, we ar.e laughed at in the same way.

For so, too, is there the river Pyriphlegethon for the
dead. If, again, we mention Paradise, a place of ce-
lestial delight, appointed for the reception of the
spirits -0f the saints, and separated from the know-
ledge of the world in general by a kind of partition
formed by that fiery zone, the Elysian fields have
already anticipated the belief. Whence, I pray you,
have the .philosophers derived these doctrines so
ijimilar to ours, except from' our mysteries? and if
from our mysteries, then ours, as the earlier, are the
more tru!}tworthy, and. ought the rather to be believed,
since even their counterfeits find credit : but if from
their own inventions, then our doctrines must be held
to be.the counterfeits of something later than them-
selves, which is contrary to the nature of things ; for
never does shadow precede substance, or the copy its
origi~al.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
The phz1osophical speculation on the transmigration of
souls is admitted, but our doctn'ne of the resurrection
of the body scouted,.and the mystery of our present ex-
istence forbids a hasty re.fee/ion of our belief respectz'ng
the future, though Nature t1lustrates it. On this
subject revelation must suffice.
COME now, if any philosopher should affirm, as
Laberius says was the opinion of Pythagoras, that
a man is made out of a mule, or a snake out of a
woman, and by the force of eloquence should twist
all arguments to establish such a theory, would he not

gain assent and bring about a belief in the opinion,
even to the point of abstinence from animal food ?
And any one who held this view would be persuaded
to abstain on the ground that he might in eating beef
be feasting on one of his ancestors. But if a Chris-
tian holds out the assurance that a man will be
re-formed out of a man, and Caius himself from
Caius, will he not be assailed by the people rather in-
deed with stones, than with gauntlets O ? As if any
argument that holds good for the re-entrance of
human souls into bodies did not also demand their
recal into the same bodies; since restitution consists
in being what one was. before. For if they are not
the same as they were before, namely, human, and
clothed with the same body, then they are not in that
case the same as they were. Further, how shall they
be said to have returned, when they will not in that
case be themselves? Either, having become some-
thing else, they will not be themselves; or, remaining
identical, they will not be derived from any other
source. If we wished to disport ourselves on this
point there would be opportunity for many jests and
much waste of time, as to what kind of beast any one
might seem to be turned into. But keeping rather to
the lines of our own pleading, we lay down, and it is
surely more worthy of belief, that a man will be re-
stored from a man, any given person from any given
< crestibus : So Rig. and Haverc. Oehler prefers ccetibus,
and explains, • they will not even give him a hearing : ' and so
three MSS. Two MSS. read credibus.
XLVIII.] FOR THE CHRISTIASS.
person, but still a man ; so that the same kind of soul

may be reinstated in the same mode of existence,
even if not into the same outward form d. Yet, as
the very reason for the restoration is to be found
in the appointed judgement, it is certainly necessary
likewise that the same person, who once existed,
should be presented, that he may receive from God
the judgement whether of good or of evil desert. And
hence the bodies also must be present, because
the soul alone cannot suffer at all without a material
substance, that is, the flesh; and because souls gener-
ally have incurred whatever it is their due to suffer
from God's judgement not without the flesh, within
which all their actions were performed.
'But how,' you say, 'can matter be again presented
after its dissolution?' Consider thyself, 0 man: and
thou will find that this fact is credible. Reflect what
thou wast, before thy life began: surely nothing; for
thou wouldst remember it hadst thou been anything.
Since therefore thou wast nothing before thy life be-
gan, and likewise wilt become nothing after thy exist-
ence ceases ; why canst thou not again be brought
into existence from nothing by the will of the same
Originator Who willed thy first existence out of no-
thing? Nothing new will happen to thee! Thou, who
wast not, wast made; when again thou shalt not be,
thou shalt again be made. Shew first, if thou canst,
d Tertullian first shews that a human soul must return into
a human (not an animal) body; and then, that the soul must
return into its own body, because the purpose of the resur-
rection is the judgement.
:1.4:9 THE .APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP,
._tq_e Jllethod by which thou wast made, and then seelt

.~o ]mow how thou wilt be re-made. And ret surely
tho"1, shalt more easily be made that which thou hast
once been, since without difficulty thou hast been
made what thou wast never before.
There will be a doubt, perchance, about the power
_of God, Who formed the great body of this world
frolll ~hat which was not, no less than from a death-
:like vacuity and emptiness, and animated it with
_a spirit that gives breath to all souls, and stamped
it throughout with types of man's resurrection as
~ witne~s to us. The light which dies daily shines
~gain ; and the darkness comes and goes in a like
variation : the stars which die out live again : the
seasons constantly succeed each other: fruits perish
and again return : the very seeds, unless they decay
and dissolve, do not spring up in greater fruitfulness :
~JI things are preserved by perishing, all things are
restored from death. Shalt thou, a man-a name so
noble, didst thou but understand thyself, learning
.eve.n from the Pythian inscription •,-who art the
lord of all things that are continually dying and
rising again,-shalt thou so die as to utterly perish?
Into whatever substance thou shalt have been re-
solved, whatever material means shall have destroyed
~bee, absorbed thee, effaced thee, or reduced thee to
nothing, it shall restore thee again. To Him belongs
that very 'nothing,' Whose is also 'the whole.'
' Then we must be constantly dying and rising
• Tile Pelpl)ic inscription, ' Know Thyself.' Plin. N. H. vii.
32. 119.
FOR THE CHRiSTIANS.
again,' thou sayest: If the Lord of all had so ap-

pointed, thou wouldst experience, however unwil-
lingly, that law of thy being. :But as it is, He has
appointed it to be no otherwise than as He has
declared. That same Reason Which constructed the•
universe out of diversity, so that the whole consists
of antithetical substances brought under unity,--of
vacuity and solidity, animate and inanimate, compre-
hensible and incomprehensible, light and darkness,
even life and death,-has also so disposed the whole·
course of existence according to an appointed and
divided plan ; according to which the first part of it,
in which we are living, reckoned from the Creation,
flows on to its end in the age of Time ; and the
following part, which we look for, extends into infinite
Eternity. When therefore the end and mid-boundary
which yawns between shall have cotne, so that even
the fashion of this world, itself equally a thing of Time,
may be transformed, which is spread like a curtain
before the system of Eternity ; then shall be restored
the whole human race for the adjusting of the account
of its deserts, whether of good or of evil, incurred
during that temporal period of its life, and thereafter
for the payment of its debt throughout the measure-
less perpetuity of Eternity.
There is therefore neither death absolute nor re-
curring resurrections ; but we shall be the same as
we are now, and thereafter no other : the worshippers
of God ever with God, clothed upon with the proper
substance of Eternity; but the wicked, and those not
perfect towards God, in the punishment of fire -equally
THE ;U'OLOGY OF TERTULLIAN [CHAP.·
lasting, and possessing in its very nature, which is,_

divine, the supply of incorruptibility. The philoso- -
phers know the difference between hidden and ordi-
nary fire. Thus that in common use is far different
from that which ministers God's judgement, whether
it strikes as lightnings from heaven, or belches forth
from the earth through mountain-tops ; for it con-
sumes not what it burns, but renews even whilst it
destroys. So the mountains remain though always
burning; and he who is struck from heaven is pre-
served, since he is not now reduced to ashes by any
fire. And this will be a proof of eternal fire, an
example of a judgement continually feeding its own
punishment. Mountains burn and endure : what of
the guilty and of the enemies of God?
CHAPTER XLIX.
IV. Wlty do you censure us for holding tenets which are
at least harmless, if not positively beneficial l
THESE are tenets which in our case alone are
called presumptions, but in the case of philosophers
and poets sublime flights of knowledge and important
conjectures. They are the wise, we the foolish: they
are deserving of honour, we of ridicule ; nay, and of
more, even of punishment. Let it be granted now
that our theories are false, and properly termed
presumptions, yet they are necessary; if foolish,
they are yet useful ; since those who believe them
are compelled to become better men, through fear of
eternal punishment and in hope of eternal consola-
FOR THE CHRISTIANS. 1 43
tion. It is therefore inexpedient that those things

should be called false, or regarded as foolish, which
it is expedient should be presumed to be true. On
no charge whatever ought that to be altogether con-
demned which is beneficial. In yourselves, conse-
quently, exists this presumption, which condemns
what is useful. Likewise neither can our beliefs be
foolish ; or at any rate, even if false and foolish, they
can in no way be harmful ; for they resemble many
other tenets to which you mete out no punishments,
and which, though vain and fabulous, go unaccused
and unpunished, because harmless.
:But judgement ought to be pronounced against
errors of this kind, if at all, by derision, not by
swords and fires and crosses and wild beasts ; in
which unjust cruelty not only the blind populace
exults and insults, but some of your own selves also,
who aim at popularity through injustice, make your
boast; as if all your power over us were not derived
from our own will. Assuredly I am a Christian, only
if I wish to be one : you then will only condemn me,
if I wish to be condemned ; but since whatever power
over me you possess, you only possess at my will,
it follows that your power over me is derived from
my will, and not from your authority.
Likewise the vulgar also vainly rejoice at our suffer-
ings; for in the same way, the joy, which they claim
for themselves, is ours, since we prefer to be con-
demned rather than to fall away from God : on the
other hand, they who hate us ought to grieve instead of
rejoicing at our attainment of the object of our choice.
THE APoiocv OF TEaTULLIAN [CHAP.
CHAPTER L.
Our sufferings are our triumph. Our endurance in
your view redounds to our discredit; the fortitude of
others to their honour. You may gain popularity by
your injustice, but our sujfen'ngs and practi'cal ex-
ample continually attract new converts.
'WHY then,' you say, 'do you complain that we at-
tack you, if you are willing to suffer ; when you ought
to love those at whose hands you suffer what you
desire?' We are, certainly, willing to suffer; but
it is in the same way as a soldier desires war. No
one endures war willingly, since alarm and risk are
involved in it : the battle nevertheless is carried on
with every nerve ; and he who complains of it, yet
rejoices in it when victorious, because he is acquiring
glory and spoil. It is our battle to be summoned
to your tribunals, there to contend for the truth at
the risk of our lives. It is our victory, too, in that
we obtain that for which we contend. This victory
gains for us both the glory of pleasing God, and the
spoil of eternal life. But we are overwhelmed ; yet
only when we have won our cause ; therefore we
conquer, when we are slain; and in fact we escape,
even when we are overwhelmed. You can call us
then, if you like, 'faggot-men,' and 'half-axle-men,'
because we are bound to the stock of a half-axle, and
surrounded with faggots when we are burned. This
is the robe of our victory, this is our triumphal vest-
ment, in such a chariot do we celebrate our triumph.
L.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
Naturally, therefore, we displease those whom we

vanquish ; for on those grounds we are deemed
desperate and reckless men. But this very despera-
tion and recklessness, with you, in the cause of glory
or fame, uplifts the banner of valour. Mucius cheer-
fully left his right hand upon the altar: what a noble-
spirited deed ! Empedocles gave his whole person to
the lEtnean fires of Catina : what strength of mind 1
Some virgin foundress of Carthage wedded the funeral
pile for her second nuptials : what a commendation of
chastity 1 Regulus suffered tortures in his whole body,
lest his own single life should be spared in exchange
for many enemies: what a brave man, and a victor
even in captivity ! Anaxarchus, when brayed with
a pestle like barley, kept saying, ' Pound, pound away
at the bag of Anaxarchus, for you pound not Anax-
archus himself: ' what a great-souled philosopher, to
even jest upon his own, and such a death! I pass
over those who bargained for fame with their own
swords, or some other milder kind of death ; for lo,
even rivalries of tortures are crowned by you. An
Athenian harlot, when the executioner was weary, at
last spit out her own tongue, which she had bitten off,
in the face of the cruel tyrant, that she might also
spit out her own voice, and with it the possibility of
confessing her accomplices, in case she should suc-
cumb and wish to do so. Zeno Eleates, when con-
sulted by Dionysius as to the advantage gained from
philosophy, replied ' A contempt of death ; ' and when
subjected by the tyrant to scourgings, continued to
express his opinion up to the point of death. Cer-
L
tainly, the scourgings of the Spartans r, embittered by

the presence of relatives who encouraged them, con-
ferred a reputation on the family for endurance, in
proportion to the quantity of blood which they ex-
tracted. Here is a glory, licensed, because of human
origin; which is attributed neither to the presumption
of recklessness, nor to the persuasion of despair, in its
contempt of death and every kind of cruelty; which is
as much allowed to be endured for country, territory,
empire, or friendship, as it is forbidden to be suffered
for God! And yet you cast statues, and write inscrip-
tions, and engrave titles, for all those men to last
into eternity: and as far as you can, by means of
monuments, you yourselves afford them a kind of
resurrection from the dead. If he who hopes for this
fact from God, suffers for God, he is deemed insane.
But pursue your course, excellent governors, and
you will be more popular with the multitude if you
sacrifice the Christians to their wishes. Crucify, tor-
ture, condemn, crush us. For the proof of our inno-
cence is found in your injustice. It is on this ac-
count that God suffers us to suffer this. For quite
recently, when you condemned a Christian woman to
the beastly lust of ·men instead of to an actual wild
beast g' you confessed that a stain upon chastity is
accounted more heinous with us than any torture or
f On these flagellations (a,aµ.a,1T(-rr.o,11s), see Plutarcl1, de Lac.

Inst. 4. They were connected with the worship of the Brau•
ronian Artemis (Diana Orthia), before whose altar they were
inflicted. Comp. ad mart. 4.
g ad. lenonem potius quam ad Ieonem.
L.] FOR THE CHRISTIANS.
any death. Yet no cruelty of yours, though each

were to exceed the last in its exquisite refinement,
profits you in the least; but forms rather an attrac-
tion to our sect. We spring up in greater numbers
as often as we are mown down by yot1: the blood of
the Christians is a source of new life h,
Many amongst yourselves have exhorted to the
endurance of pain and death, as for example Cicero
in the ' Tusculan Disp~tations,' Seneca in his book
'On Chances,' Diogenes, Pyrrho, and Callinicus. Yet
they by their words secured not so many disciples as
the Christians have gained by their practical example.
That very obstinacy which you assail is the teacher.
For who is not aroused by the sight of it to enquire
what the inward motive can be? who, when he has
enquired, does not adopt it? and who, when he has
adopted it, does not choose to suffer, in order that he
may acquire the whole grace of God, and also obtain
all pardon from Him by the yielding up of his blood ?
For all sins are pardoned by this act. Hence it is
that, at the moment of your sentencing us, we give
thanks: and since there· is an antagonism between
divine and human things, when we are condemned by
you, we stand acquitted by God.
h Semen est sanguis Christianorum. Comp. ch. 21.
APPENDIX.
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF PLINY AND TRAJAN

RESPECTING THE CHRISTIANS.
(Plin. Epist. x, 96, 97.)
THIS celebrated correspondence belongs to the year

A.D. 112. The province of Bithynia, of which the younger
Pliny (a namesake of his uncle, the famous writer on
'Natural History') had been made propr.:etor in the
previous year, was a district of the empire in which the
Christians were particularly numerous. It will be ob-
served that Pliny writes of them as belonging to a well-
known society whose name did not need explanation ;
though it is probable that both he and Trajan regarded
the Christian body more in the light of a political gild
or club than as a new religious sect•.
I.
EPISTLE OF CAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS TO THE
EMPEROR TRAJAN.
IT is my constant practice, my lord, to refer to you all

matters about which I feel any uncertainty. For who
is better able either to guide my hesitation, or to inform
my ignorance? I have never taken part in the judicial
trials of the Christians, and I am therefore ignorant how
• See a full discussion of this correspondence in Lightfoot,
Ignatius, i. 50 ff. Comp. Meri vale, Hist. Rom. viii. 148.
Appendt.x. 1 49
and to what extent it is usual for them to be punished or

sought out. And I am in considerable doubt whether
any distinction of ages is recognized, or whether no
difference is made between any one of tender years and
adults : whether pardon may be granted to penitence, or
whether it is no advantage to any one, who has been
a Christian at all, that he has ceased to be one : whether
the name itself apart from any actual criminality, or the
criminality attached to the name, is to be punished.
In the meantime, this is the method I have adopted in
the case of those who were accused to me of being
Christians. I asked them whether they were Christians:
if they confessed it, l put the question a second and
a third time, threatening punishment ; and if they still
persevered, I ordered them to he led away to execution.
For I had no doubt, whatever their confession might
imply, that stubbornness and immoveable obstinacy cer-
tainly ought to be punished. •
Others there were of a similar madness, whom, as
they were Roman citizens, I set aside for removal to
Rome. But soon, under this very treatment, the crime,
as often happens, spread, and several instances occurred.
An anonymous accusation was presented to me, contain-
ing the names of many persons who denied that they
either were, or had been, Christians. When at my dic-
tation they invoked the gods, and offered incense and
wine before your statue, which I had ordered to be
brought for this purpose along with the images of the
gods, and in addition reviled Christ,-none of which
acts, according to report, can they who are in real verity
Christians be forced to perform,-! thought that they
ought to be discharged. Others, named by an informer,
said that they were Christians, but presently denied it ;
others said they had been Christians, but had ceased
JlOW to be so, some for three, others for several, and
Appendix.
a few for so long as twenty years b.. AU worshipped your
statue, and the images of .the gods : they also reviled
Christ. They affirmed that this was the sum of their
guilt or error :-that 'they had been accustomed on an
appointed day• to assemble before dawn to sing anti-
phonallyd to Christ as to a god; and to bind themselves
by an oath", not for a criminal purpose, but never to
commit theft, or robbery, or adultery, nor to break their
word, nor to refuse a deposit, when called upon to restore
it ; and, this accomplished, that it had been their habit
to separate and meet together again, to partake in com-
mon of a harmless meal, but that they had ceased to
do this after my edict by which, in accordance with your
mandate r, I had prohibited clubs. And from this I
judged it to be the more necessary to enquire what truth
there was in this account from two female slaves, who
were called deaconesses', and whom I even put to the
b Dating their apostasy, perhaps, from DomWan's persecution

in A.D. 95•
c Sunrlay. Comp. Justin Mart., Ap~l. i. 67, 'On the day
c_alled Sunday, there is an assembly in the same place of all
who live in cities or in country districts•.. Sunday is the day
on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the
first day on which, when He changed the darkness and matter,
God made the world; and Jesus Christ, our Saviour, on the
same day, rose from the dead.'
d secum invicem. • Sacramento: see Lighfoot's note.
f See Plin. Epin. x. 35, 36. Lightfoot, Ignatius, i. 19 f. It
appears that the agape was already at this time separated from
the Holy Eucharist, the fonner being held in the evening, and
the latter celebrated at the early morning assemblies (de
c!n'on. 3). If Pliny was correctly informed, the :agape (not being,
like the Eucharist, an essential) had been discontinued in
Bithyni:a in obedience to his edict.
i Ministrae : see Lightfoot's note.
Appendi'.x.
rack for the purpose. But l discovered nothing more
than a perverse and excessive superstition, and therefore
I postponed a legal investigation of it, and hastened
to consult you h,
For the matter seems to me worthy of consideration,
especially on account of the number of those involved in
the risk. For many of all ages, of every rank, and even
of both sexes, are being drawn into danger and are likely
to be drawn. Nor has the contagion of this superstition
overrun the towns only, but even the villages and rural
districts ; although it still seems possible to check and
correct it. It is certainly a fact that the temples, which
had been nearly deserted, are now beginning to be fre-
quented ; and the sacred festivals, so long disregarded,
to be observed anew; and victims are everywhere on
sale i, for which a purchaser could till lately only very
rarely be found. And from this it may easily be gathered
what a large number of men might be reclaimed if an
opportunity of penitence were given them.
II.
REPLY OF THE EMPEROR TRAJAN TO
CAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS.
You have followed the right course, my dear Secundus,

in investigating the cases of those who have been accused
h This witness to the innocence and purity of the lives of the
early Christians,-borne, be it remembered, by a heathen
governor, whose official position necessitated his regarding with
great suspicion all gilds and secret societies,-has gained for
Pliny's letter the felicitous title of the 'First Apology for
Christianity' (Wallon, Hist. de l'esclav. dans l 'Ant. iii. I 3,
quoted by Merivale, u.s.)
; Passimque venire victimas. See Lightfoot, who reads, pas.
tumque venire victimarum, ' there is a sale for fodder for the
victims.'
Appendix,
to you of being Christians. No universal rule, however,
can be laid down, which shall have an unvarying appli-
cation.. They are not to be sought out ; but if they are
accused and impeached, they must be punished ; pro-
vided, however, that any one, who shall deny that he
is a Christian, and clearly demonstrate the fact by wor~
shipping our gods, may obtain pardon in consequence of
his penitence, although there may be strong ground for
suspicion that he has been a Christian in time past.
But anonymously written accusations brought to your
notice ought not to be received in the case of any crime.
For they form the worst precedents, and are not in keep-
ing with our age.
INDEX.
Abortion, 31. Atys, 49.

Academics, 13. Aurelius, Marcus, 18, 87.
Admetus, 47. ·
..Egyptians, 85 • Babylonians, 91 .
.tEmilius, Marcus, 17. Bacchanals, 109.
.tEneas, 4 7. Bacchus, 21 f., 39, 43, 124•
.tEsculapius, 48, 79, I 30. Beast-fighters, 30, 54, 124.
Agape, 115 f, 117, 150. Beasts, Christians thrown to,
Albinus, 105 f. 43, 97, us.
Alburnus, I 7. Bellona, 31.
Alexander, 41, 132. Berosus, 64-
Almsgiving, 113 f. Blood, prohibition of, 32.
Amazons, 91. Brachmans, 123.
Amphitheatre, 104. Burlesques, 50.
Anaphe, 118.
Anaxagoras, 132. C::elestis, 43, 79, 85.
Anaxarchus, 145. C::esars, Christians, 73 ; safely
Angels, 75. of, 99 ; genii of, 94, 99 ;
Anubis, 21, 49. men, not gods, IOO f.
Apaturian mysteries, u6. Callinicus, 147.
Apicius, 13. Cann::e, 119.
Apollo, 47, 77, 130. Capitol, 45, 91, I 19.
Apology, the, date of, viii; Carthage, vii f., 87 f., 145.
purpose of, ix f. ; analysis Cassius, Avidius, 105.
of, xi ; fragment interpo- Castor, 77.
lated, 60 ff. Catiline, 31.
Appion, 64. Cato, 41.
Arena, 54, 112. Ceres, 39, 46, 52.
Argos, 60. 'Chrestian,' 12.
Arist::eas, 59. Christ, Deity of, 6, 67 f. ;
Aristarchus, 13. Nativity of, 70_; two Ad-
Aristides, 41. vents of, 70 ; Miracles of,
Aristippus, 132. 71 ; Death of, 71 ; Resur-
Aristotle, r 32. rection and Ascension of,
Assyrian war, 6o. 72.
Astrology, ro, 106. Christian, criminality of the
Attic mysteries, 116. name, IO f. 1 126.
154 INDEX.
Christians, assemblies of, r 13 f., Cyclops, 24.

117; charged with disloy- Cynopa,, 27.
alty, ix, 93 ff. ; with sacri- Cyrus, 61.
lege, ix, 34 ff. ; with secret
crimes, ix, 23 ff. ; with mad- Da,mons, nature of, 74 ff. ;
ness, 4, 91 f., 149; with caus- identical with the gods,
ing public disasters, I-I 8 ff. ; 78 f. ; confessions of, 79;
with beingworthlesstotrade, inspire animosity against
123 ff. ; chastity of, 34, Christians, 8, 10, 92 f. ;
131, 146; ethical standard genii, 99; exorcism of, 79 ff.,
of, 12 7 ; formed a ha'rmless 100, 11of.
gild, 111, II 7 ; fraternity Danaus, 60, 63.
of, I 14 f ; fortitude of, Darius, 61.
144 ff. ; integrity of, 124 f., Delos, 118.
132; ignorantly condemned, Deluge, 119.
ix, 2 ff. ; illegal existence Demetrius Phalereus, 58,
of, 14; loyalty of, 100 ff. ; 64.
mutual love of, 114; num- Democritus, 132.
bers of, 3, ro9f. ; not wor- Demosthenes, 41.
shippers of an Ass's head, Diana, 46, 49, 146.
51 ; of the Cross, 52 ; of the Dioclorus, 36.
Sun, 53 f.; of an Ass-born Diogenes, 48, ll 5, 131 f.,
Deity, 54 ; public enemies, 147.
I03 ff.; tests applied to, rn, Diomede, 47.
32 f. ; thrown to beasts, 43, Dionysian mysteries, 116.
97, n8; unity of, ix, II2; Dionysius, 132, 145.
virtues of, 6, 151 ; worship- Disasters, sent from God,
pers of the Truth, 50; of II8 ff, ; tempered by the
One God, 55. Christians, 120.
Christianity, not a school of Disloyalty, Christians charged
philosophy, 129 ff. ; not a with, ix, 93 ff. ; Pagans
faction, I I I f., I I 7. guilty of, 104 ff.
Church, internal life of, x. Domitian, 18, 106.
Cicero, laws of Twelve Tables, IJ,a.µ.a.!TT [-yo,1ns, 146.
17; 'Tusculan Disputa-
tions,' 147. East, prayer towards, 53.
Circus, II 2. Elysian fields, 137.
Cleander, ro5. Empedocles, 145.
Commodus, 105, Emperors, apotheosis of, 37,
Cos, 118. 46, 102; genius of, 94, 99;
Crass us, 41. men, not gods, 1oof.;
Crete, 87. worship of, 94.
Crresus, 41, 61, 77, 131. Epicurreans, 13, I 12, 135.
Cross, sign of the, 52. Epicurus, 128, 134.
Ctesias, 33. Epona, 52.
Curitis, 85. Erasistratus, 13.
Cybele, 43, 49, 87. Eucharist, Holy, 150.
INDEX.· 1 55
Excommunication, I 13, 126, Riera, uS.

133. Hippias, 133.
Exorcism of dremons, 79 ff., Homer, 47, 63.
100, llO f. Homicide, 30.
Hostilii, 49.
Factions, II 1, 117 f.
'Faggot-men,' 144 Idol-making, IO.
Farces, 49 f. Inachus, 63.
Fates, the, 88. Incense, 33, 97, 124,
Fides, 84. Incest, 23 ff., 33.
Fire, eternal, 141 f. Infanticide, 23 ff., 29 f.
Iromus, 64.
Gabinius, 21, Isis, 21.
Galilee, 72,
Gauls, 30. Janus, 36, 93.
Genii, dremons, 99, Jews, differences between
Genius of Cresar, 94, 99• Christians and, 66 f.; privi-
Gilds, I I I f. leges of, 59 ; Roman trea-
Gods, existence of, denied, ties with, 91 ; Tacitus' ac-
34f.; formerly men, 35 f.; count of, 51; state of, 67.
not subsequently deified, Josephus, 64.
37 ff.; not needed in Na- Juba, 64.
ture, 38 f. ; gross immorali- Judrea, 91.
ties of, 40 ; mere names and Julian law, 15.
images, 42 f. ; insulted in Juno, 46, 49, 85, 87 f.
process of manufacture, Jupiter, 33, 37, 45, 47, 87 f.,
42f.; domestically, 44; pub- 93, 121 ; Latiaris, 30; 'the
licly, 45 ;. ritually, 46; in deceased,' 49·
literature, 47; by philoso-
phers, 48, 130; on the KO<T14os, 55.
stage, 48 f. ; identical with Laberius, 137.
dremons, 78 f. ; national and Lais, 46.
provincial, 85 ; creatures of Laomedon, 47•
Cresar, 94 f. Larentina, 46, 86, 88.
Gomorrha, I 19. Lentuli, 49.
Gymnosophists, 123. 'Lion, Christians.to the,' u8.
' Lord,' title of Cicsar, IOI.
Hadrian, 19. Loyalty of Christians, 100 ff.
' Half-axle men,' 144. Lucania, u8.
Hannibal, n9. Lucµllus, 39.
Harpocrates, 21. Luna, 49.
Hebrews, 59. Luperci, 9 I.
Heraclitus, 135. Lycurgus, 15, 132.
Hercules, 47 tl:, u6. Ao')'o,, 68, 71.
Heretics, 135 f,
Hermias, 132. Macedonians, 33.
Herodotus, 31, Manetho, 64.
INDEX.
' Man of Sin,' 99• Paul, St., 98f.

Marcomanni, 109. Penance, II3,
Marcus Aurelius, 18, 87. Persians, 33, 53·
Mars, 47. Pertinax, 106.
Mauritania, 85. Philosophers, indebted to the
Mecenius, 21. Prophets, 134; inconsisten-
MegarianS', l 15. cies of, I 31 f. ; licence of,
Melampus, 74- 46, I 30 ; ethics of, 129 f. ;
Menander, 64. witness to dremons, 74 f.
Menedemus, 59. Phryne, 46, 131.
Mercury, 30, 49. Pilate, 73.
Metempsychosis, 137 f. Pindar, 47.
Minerva, 39, 44, 49. Pisistratus, 58.
Mines, 43, 95, 126. Piso, 21.
Minos, 81. Pius, 19.
Montanus, viii. Plato, 38, 75, 81, 84, u8f.,
Moors, 109. 131.
Moses, 6o f., 63. Platonists, I 3, I 34 f.
Mucius, 145. Pliny, letter to Trajan, 6,
Musreus, 74. 148 f. ; witness to Christian
Mutinus, 86. virtue, 6, 151.
Poets, witr,ess to daemons, 75;
Narcissus, 105. to future punishment, 81 ;
Nature, witness to God, 56. indebted to the prophets,
Nepos, Cornelius, 36. 1 34·
Neptune, 47. Polycrates, 41.
Nero, 17£.• 73. Pompeius, 41, 51.
New Testament, citation from, Prayer, for emperors, 95 f., 98,
x, 98; corrupted by heretics, I 12 ; for Roman Empire,
135 f. 99; for delay of the end,
Niger, 105 f. 99, I 13 ; towards the East,
Nile, 118. 53·
Numa Pompilius, 74, 89. Priests, pagan, impurities of,
50, 97.
CEdipus, 33. Proculus, 72.
ffinotria, 36. Prometheus, 57.
Orpheus, 74. Prophets, 57.
'Ovoxoi.-,;s, 54. Providence, 59.
Ptolemy,- Philadelphus, 58 f. ;
Pagans, fortitude of, 145 f. of M enrles, 64.
Palestine, u9. Pyriphlegethon, 137.
Pallas, 52. Pyrrho, 147.
Papian laws, 15. Pyrrhus, 77.
Paradise, 137. Pythagorreans,. 13.
Paris, 49. Pythagoras, 38, 132, 134,
Parthenius, 1o6. 1 37•
l'arthians, 109. Pythian inscription, 140.
INDEX. 1 57
Quadi, 18. Serapeum, 59.
Quirites, 104. Serapis, 21 f. ; feast of, n6.
Severus, Cassius, 36 ; Septi•
mius, 15.
Regulus, 145. Sibyl, 62.
Resurrection of the body, Sicily, u9.
I 38 ff. ; natural illustrations Sigerius, 106.
of, 140. Simon Magus, 46.
Rhadamanthus, Sr. Sirens, 24.
Rhodes, n8. Socrates, 41, 48, 74f., 130.
Roman archives, 18, 72; camp- Sodom, 119.
religion, 53 ; early religion, Solon, 61.
8g; empire, 99; luxury, Soul, witness to God, 56.
20; prosperity and piety, Spartans, 15, 132, 146.
86 ff. ; satire on emperors, Speusippus, 131.
104. Stage, literature of the, 49 f.
Romans, disloyalty of, 104 ff. Sterculius, 86, 88.
Rome, early, 9 I. Stoics, 13, 134 f.
Romulus, 21, 73• Sulla, 41.
Rule of Faith, 136. Sun, the, 49, 53.
Rumour, 24 ff. Sunday, 54, 150.
Tacitus, Cornelius, 51.

Sacraments, 55. Tarpeii, n9.
Sacrilege, Christians charged Tartarus, 40.
with, ix, 34 ff. ; Pagans Tertullian, life, &c., of, vii f.
guilty of, 50. Tertullianists, viii.
' Safety of Cresar,' oath, 99. Thales, 61, 131.
Salii, 91, n6. Thallus, 36, 60, 64.
Samas, 87. Theatre, 49, I 12.
Sarpedon, 47. Themistocles, 41.
Satan, 75. ' Thundering Legion,' 18,
Saturn, 29, 36 f., 44, 60, 88. Tiber, 104, 118.
Saturn's day, 54- Tiberius Cresar, I 7, 73•
Saturnalia, 123. Tiberius, proconsul, 29.
Satumia, 36. Time, unity oi~ 62, 65.
Sciapodes, 27. Titan war, 6o.
Scipio, 41. Torture, use of, 7.
Scriptures, the, 57; antiquity Trades incompatible with
of, 6o ff. ; divinity of, 64 ; Christianity, w, 125.
prophecies of, 62, 65 ; pub• Trajan, rescript of, 6, 19,
lie reading of, 59 ; septua- 151.
gint version of, 59. Trojan war, 60.
Semo Sancus, 46. Trophonius, 74.
Seneca, 43, 147. Troy, fall of, 61, 63.
Senones, 119. Twelve Tables, law of the,
Septuagint, the, 59. 17.
Varro, 48. Wine, offered in sacrifice,
Venus, 47, 49. 97.
Verus, 19.
Vespasian, 19. X ystus, 112.
Vestal Virgins, 91.
Victories, worship of, 53. Zacharias, 61.
Volsinii, 119. Zeno, 132, 145.
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THE APOLOGY OF TERTULLIAN

FOR THE CHRISTIANS.

Translated with Introduction, Analysis, and Appendix

T. HERBERT BINDLEY, M.A.

farker anb <!to.

THE present volume grew naturally out of my

Page 4, line 5 from bottom,.fo:r of which the criminal is proud,

THE life of Tertullian, so far as we know it, may

a So Pusey and others : see, however, Plummer, Church of

the typical African temperament,-fervid, impatfent,

which Tertullian's exposure of heathenism necessarily

stood on a different base. They were reasonable

whereas your knowledge of our horror of eating blood

force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare.

III. REFUTATION OF MINOR CHARGES.

blamed, and our simple 'love-feast ' denounced as ex-

3. You accuse us of worthlessness to trade,-a charge

is there in this request derogatory to the laws, supreme

its force, but it would actually gain a reason for its

kind; although the information ought just as much

having assumed our guilt from our confession of the

Why, lastly, do you read out from the judicial

WHY, the majority in their blindness are so driven

their pre-Christian days as vagabonds, worthless, and

novel in the fact of any school taking an appellation

a position for the defence of our innocence ; nor

to bring about, by the appointment of a confiscation

by the shower ·obtained through the prayers of Chris-

for their own loyalty and respect and devotion to the

Merivale, v. 85, 289 ff.

protected modesty and sobriety have fallen into dis-

have conferred the highest majesty. Where is your

II. r. We are accused of infamous secret atrodti'es,-

WE are called the most infamous of men on the

extortion; even those of our own households P, from

bearer? or because generally false? for not even

Whereas natural instinct would revolt from such crimes,

ignorant of the meaning of death, who will smile

willing victims, the infants being caressed lest they

bloody ; that stag wallowed in the blood of a

human intercourse meet with members of its own

II. r. We are accused of sacrilege and disloyalty. We

' You do not worship the gods,' you say to us,

count their titles; but I will deal with them con-

In the first place, indeed, you must allow that

Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, images

BuT I now pass from these points, well aware that

h Lions and tigers. Crelestis, the national divinity of Africa,

In fad, you act most sacrilegiously towards your deities,

'BuT to us they are gods,' you say. How is it,

ubi venditiones et locationes publicre instituebantur, proprie, ubi

sacrificial and the funeral chalice? between the augur

h:sculapius was deservedly punished by a thunder-

of Jupiter dragging off the corpses of the gladiators

You hold grotesque vie-ms respecting our Deity. We

religion, found there no image. Yet surely if the

many of yourselves, too, moved sometimes by an

Great God. That, however, which can be commonly

for those that keep them, in order that, when the