Therefore God permits us to suffer these things. For lately too, in condemning a Christian woman rather to the pander than to the lion, you confessed that among us a stain upon chastity is reckoned more dreadful than any penalty and any death. Yet nothing that your ever more ingenious cruelty devises avails anything; it is rather an enticement to the sect. We become more numerous as often as we are mown down by you: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you exhort men to the endurance of pain and death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in his Fortuitous Chances, as Diogenes, as Pyrrho, as Callinicus; and yet their words do not find so many disciples as the Christians find by teaching through their deeds. That very obstinacy which you reproach us with is our schoolmistress.
For who is not stirred by the contemplation of it to inquire what really lies within the matter? Who, once he has inquired, does not draw near; and once he has drawn near, does not long to suffer, that he may purchase the whole grace of God, that he may procure from Him full pardon by the price of his own blood? For to this work all offences are forgiven. Hence it is that in the very same place we give thanks for your sentences. Such is the rivalry between the things of God and of men, that when we are condemned by you, we are absolved by God.