Since I see, most excellent Diognetus, that you are exceedingly eager to learn about the religion of the Christians, and are inquiring very clearly and carefully concerning them—what God they trust in and how they worship him, so that they all look down upon the world and despise death, and neither reckon as gods those held to be such by the Greeks nor keep the superstition of the Jews; and what affection they have toward one another; and why this new race or practice has entered into life now and not before—
I welcome this eagerness of yours, and I ask of God—who supplies to us both the power to speak and to hear—that it may be granted to me so to speak that you, by hearing, may become better, and to you so to hear that the speaker may not be grieved.