文集 第 9 章

If it is not permitted to you, O rulers of the Roman Empire, presiding for judgement in the open and elevated place, at almost the very summit of the city, to examine openly and to inquire in public what may be the plain truth in the cause of the Christians; if in this one matter alone your authority either fears or is ashamed to make inquiry with the diligence of justice in public; if, in short, as has lately happened, a persecution of this sect, over-busy in domestic tribunals, blocks the way to its defence—let the truth at least be permitted to reach your ears by the hidden path of silent letters. It begs nothing on behalf of its own cause, since it does not marvel at its own condition.

It knows that it lives as a stranger upon the earth, that among aliens it readily finds enemies, but that it has its race, its home, its hope, its favour, and its dignity in the heavens. One thing it earnestly desires meanwhile: not to be condemned unknown. What does it here lose for the laws that hold sway in their own realm, if it be heard? Or will their power the rather glory in this, that even when they have heard the truth they will condemn it? But if they condemn it unheard, besides the odium of injustice they will also deserve the suspicion of some guilty conscience, in being unwilling to hear what, once heard, they could not condemn. This, then, we set before you as the first cause of the injustice of hatred against the name of the Christians. That injustice the very title both weighs down and refutes which seems to excuse it—namely, ignorance.

For what is more unjust than that men should hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves hatred? For then it deserves it, when it is known whether it deserves it. But when the knowledge of its desert is lacking, whence is the justice of the hatred defended, which must be proved not by the outcome but by conscience? When, therefore, men hate for this very reason, because they are ignorant of what sort of thing it is that they hate, why may it not be of such a sort that they ought not to hate it? Thus from either alternative we convict them of both: both that they are ignorant while they hate, and that they hate unjustly while they are ignorant. It is a testimony of ignorance which, while it excuses injustice, condemns it; since all who formerly hated, because they were ignorant of what sort of thing it was they hated, at the same time cease to be ignorant and cease also to hate.

From these there come to be Christians, assuredly upon full knowledge, and they begin to hate what they had been and to profess what they had hated; and they are as many as we are branded to be. They cry out that the city is besieged; that in the fields, in the fortresses, on the islands there are Christians; they mourn, as though at a loss, that every sex, age, condition, and even rank is going over to this name. And yet not even by this very thing are their minds moved to the estimation of some latent good. It is not allowed to suspect more rightly; it does not please to make trial more closely. Here alone does human curiosity grow torpid. They love to be ignorant, while others rejoice to have come to knowledge. How much more would Anacharsis have branded these—the imprudent judging of the prudent—than the unmusical of the musical! They prefer not to know, because they already hate.

So far do they prejudge that what they do not know is that which, if they knew it, they could not hate—since, if no debt of hatred be discovered, it were surely best to cease hating unjustly; but if it be established on the score of desert, then not only is nothing of the hatred to be withdrawn, but more is to be acquired towards perseverance, by the very authority of justice itself. 'But not therefore is it good,' says one, 'because it converts many; for how many are formed for evil! How many deserters into perversity!' Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil, not even those whom it seizes dare to defend as good. Every evil nature has steeped in either fear or shame. In short, evildoers are eager to lie hidden, they shun to appear;

when caught they tremble, when accused they deny, not even under torture do they easily or always confess, and certainly when condemned they mourn. They count up within themselves the impulses of an evil mind, they impute their cowardice either to fate or to the stars; for they are unwilling that what they acknowledge to be evil should be their own. But the Christian—what like to this? No one is ashamed, no one repents, save only of not having been such before; if he is branded, he glories; if he is accused, he does not defend himself; when questioned, he even confesses of his own accord; when condemned, he gives thanks. What kind of evil is this, which has none of the natural marks of evil—fear, shame, evasion, repentance, lamentation? What kind of evil is this, of which the accused rejoices, of which the accusation is a thing desired and the penalty a felicity? You cannot call it madness, you who are convicted of ignorance.

If, in short, it is certain that we are the most guilty of all, why are we treated by you yourselves otherwise than our peers, that is, the rest of the guilty, when for the same offence the same treatment ought to intervene? Whatever we are called, when others are so called, they use both their own mouth and the pleading of a hired advocate to commend their innocence; the faculty of answering and of pleading lies open, since it is not even lawful for men to be condemned wholly undefended and unheard. But to Christians alone nothing is permitted to be said that might clear the cause, that might defend the truth, that might keep the judge from being unjust; but this alone is looked for which is necessary to the public hatred: the confession of the name, not the examination of a crime—

whereas, if you take cognizance of any guilty man, you are not content, the moment he has confessed the name of murderer or sacrilegious person or incestuous person or public enemy—to speak of the charges laid against us—to pronounce sentence, unless you also exact the attendant circumstances: the quality of the deed, the number, the place, the time, the accomplices, the associates. But concerning us there is nothing of the kind, though it ought equally to be wrung out—since it is falsely bruited about—how many infanticides each one had already tasted, how many acts of incest he had covered in darkness, what cooks, what dogs had been present. Oh, how great the glory of that governor, if he had dug out someone who had already devoured a hundred infants! But we find that even inquiry into us is forbidden.

For Pliny the Younger, when he was governing a province, having condemned certain Christians and driven others from their rank, being nevertheless disturbed by their very multitude as to what he should do for the rest, consulted the emperor Trajan, alleging that, apart from their obstinacy in not sacrificing, he had discovered nothing else concerning their rites than meetings before dawn to sing to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves together by a discipline forbidding murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the other crimes. Then Trajan wrote back that men of this kind were indeed not to be sought out, but that when brought forward they ought to be punished. O sentence confounded by its own necessity! He denies that they are to be sought out, as though innocent, and commands them to be punished, as though guilty. He spares and he rages, he winks and he takes notice.

Why, O censorship, do you thus entangle yourself? If you condemn, why do you not also inquire? If you do not inquire, why do you not also absolve? For the tracking down of robbers a military post is allotted throughout all the provinces; against those guilty of treason and against public enemies every man is a soldier: inquiry is extended even to the associates, even to the accomplices. The Christian alone it is not lawful to inquire into, but it is lawful to bring him forward—as though inquiry were to accomplish anything other than the bringing forward. You condemn, therefore, one brought forward whom no one wished to be sought out; who, I suppose, has now deserved punishment not because he is guilty, but because, though not to be sought out, he was found.

And so, not even in this do you act towards us according to the form of judging evildoers: that, whereas to the rest who deny you apply torments to make them confess, to Christians alone you apply them to make them deny; whereas, if it were an evil, we indeed should deny it, while you would compel us by torments to confess. For you would not on that account think that crimes need not be sought out by examinations, because you were sure they were committed on the confession of the name—you who today, concerning a confessed murderer, knowing what murder is, nonetheless wring out the order of the deed committed. How much more perversely do you, when you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, compel us by torments to fall away from that confession, so that by denying the name we may equally deny the crimes too which, from the confession of the name, you had presumed.

But, I suppose, you do not wish us to perish, whom you believe to be the worst of men. For thus you are wont to say to a murderer, 'Deny,' and to order the sacrilegious man to be torn if he persists in confessing. If you do not so act towards us as guilty, then you judge us to be the most innocent, since, as though most innocent, you do not wish us to persevere in that confession which you know must be condemned by you of necessity, not of justice. A man cries out, 'I am a Christian.' He says what he is; you wish to hear what he is not. Presidents for the wringing out of truth, concerning us alone you labour to hear a lie. 'I am this,' he says, 'which you ask whether I be. Why do you torture me perversely? I confess, and you torture; what would you do if I denied?' Plainly, when others deny, you do not readily grant them credence:

but us, if we deny, you at once believe. Let this perversity be suspect to you, lest some force lie hidden in secret which supplies you against the form, against the nature of judging, and against the very laws themselves. For, unless I am mistaken, the laws bid evildoers to be dug out, not to be hidden; they prescribe that the confessed be condemned, not absolved. This the decrees of the senate, this the mandates of the emperors define. This empire, whose ministers you are, is a civil, not a tyrannical dominion. For among tyrants torments were applied even as a penalty; among you they are moderated to inquiry alone. Keep for them your own law, which requires them only up to confession; and now, if they are anticipated by confession, they will be idle—there is need of sentence;

the guilty man must be cancelled by paying the debt of his penalty, not exempted from it. In short, no one is eager to absolve him. It is not lawful to wish this; therefore no one is compelled to deny. You reckon the Christian a man guilty of all crimes, an enemy of the gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, of all nature; and you compel him to deny, that you may absolve one whom you could not absolve unless he denied. You prevaricate against the laws: you wish him, then, to deny that he is guilty, that you may make him innocent, and that indeed against his will, and no longer guilty even as to the past. Whence this perversity, that you do not even reflect upon this too, that one who confesses of his own accord is rather to be believed than one who denies under compulsion? Or lest, having been forced to deny, he should not have denied in good faith, and, once absolved on the spot, should there behind the tribunal laugh at your rivalry, a Christian again?

Since, therefore, in all things you dispose of us otherwise than the rest of the guilty, straining after this one end, that we may be excluded from that name—for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do—you can understand that it is not any crime that is in the cause, but the name, which a certain rationale of a rival working pursues, doing this first of all: that men should be unwilling to know for certain what they know for certain that they do not know. Therefore they both believe about us things that are not proved, and are unwilling that inquiry be made, lest it be proved that those things are not which they had preferred to have believed, so that the name of that rival rationale, hostile through crimes presumed, not proved, may be condemned on its own confession alone.

Therefore we are tortured when we confess, and punished when we persevere, and absolved when we deny, because it is the battle of a name. In short, why do you recite from the tablet that man as 'a Christian'? Why not also 'a murderer,' if the Christian is a murderer? Why not also 'incestuous,' or whatever else you believe us to be? In our case alone are you ashamed or grieved to pronounce the very names of the crimes? If 'Christian' is the name of no crime, it is very foolish that the crime should be of the name alone. Why is it that most men so, with closed eyes, dash into hatred of it, that while bearing good testimony to someone they mingle in the reproach of the name? 'Gaius Seius is a good man, only that he is a Christian.' Likewise another:

'I marvel that Lucius Titius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian.' No one reflects whether Gaius is good and Lucius prudent for the reason that he is a Christian, or a Christian for the reason that he is prudent and good. They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and that which they know they invade by that which they do not know—though it were juster to prejudge the hidden by the manifest than to precondemn the manifest by the hidden. Others, whom before this name they had known as vagrant, base, wicked, brand from that very thing which they praise: in the blindness of hatred they dash into a testimony in his favour: 'What a woman! how wanton, how gay! What a youth! how much a rake, how much a lover! They have become Christians.' Thus the name is imputed to their reformation.

Some even strike bargains with this hatred at the cost of their own advantages, content with the injury, so long as they may not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, has cast out a wife now chaste; a father, formerly forbearing, has disowned a son now submissive; a master, once mild, has banished from his sight a slave now faithful: as each one is reformed by this name, he gives offence. The good is not worth so much as the hatred of Christians. Now therefore, if it is a hatred of the name, what guilt is there in names, what accusation of mere words, unless perchance some sound of a name rings barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or unchaste? But 'Christian,' so far as the interpretation goes, is derived from 'anointing.' And even when it is wrongly pronounced by you 'Chrestian'—

for the exact knowledge of the name is not even in your possession—it is compounded of sweetness or kindliness. Thus in harmless men there is hated even a harmless name. But, it is objected, the sect is hated in the name of its very founder. What is new, if some school induces upon its followers a surname derived from its master? Are not the philosophers named after their authors—Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? And also, from the places of their gatherings and stations, Stoics and Academics? Likewise physicians after Erasistratus, and grammarians after Aristarchus, and even cooks after Apicius? And yet the profession of a name transmitted, together with its institution, from the institutor offends no one.

Plainly, if anyone shall prove the sect to be evil, and so its author too to be evil, he will prove the name also to be evil, deserving of hatred on account of the guilt of the sect and its author; and therefore, before the hatred of the name, it was fitting first to recognize the sect from its author, or the author from the sect. But now, the inquiry into and acknowledgement of both being neglected, the name is fastened upon, the name is assailed; and mere sound precondemns a sect unknown and an author unknown, because they are named, not because they are refuted.

And so, having as it were prefaced these things to expose the injustice of the public hatred against us, I will now take my stand upon the cause of our innocence; nor shall I merely refute the charges brought against us, but I shall hurl them back upon the very men who bring them, so that from this too people may know that there is not in Christians what they do not know to be in themselves, and at the same time that the accusers may blush -- I will not say the worst men accusing the best, but, as they would have it, accusing their own equals. We shall reply to each of the charges: to the things we are said to commit in secret -- the very things which we find them committing openly -- the charges on account of which we are reckoned criminal, or foolish, or worthy of condemnation, or fit for mockery.

But since, when our truth meets every charge, the authority of the laws is finally set up as a barrier against it -- so that either it is said that nothing may be reconsidered after laws have been passed, or that necessity of obedience is preferred to truth against our will -- I shall first join issue with you concerning the laws, as with the guardians of the laws. Now first of all, when you harshly lay it down by saying, 'You are not permitted to exist!' and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you profess violence and an unjust tyranny from your citadel of power, if you deny that a thing is permitted merely because you will it so, and not because it ought not to have been permitted. But if you refuse to permit it because it ought not to be permitted, then without doubt that ought not to be permitted which is done wrongly.

If I discover that to be good which your law has forbidden, can it not, on that very presumption, fail to forbid me -- since, if it were evil, it would rightly forbid it? If your law has erred, it was, I think, conceived by a human being; for it did not fall down from heaven. Do you wonder that a man could either err in framing a law, or come to his senses in repealing one? Did not even the laws of Lycurgus himself, when amended by the Lacedaemonians, inflict such grief upon their author that he passed judgment on himself by starvation in solitude? And do you not yourselves daily, as your experience sheds light upon the darkness of antiquity, hew down and cut away that whole old and squalid forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?

Did not Severus, most steadfast of princes, only yesterday abolish, after their old age of so great authority, those utterly worthless Papian laws, which compel men to beget children before the Julian law allows a marriage to be contracted? Moreover, there were laws by which men condemned in debt were cut to pieces by their creditors; yet afterward, by public consent, that cruelty was struck out, and the capital penalty was turned into a mark of disgrace. The introduced proscription of goods chose rather to make a man's blood mantle with shame than to shed it. How many laws still lie hidden that need cleansing away by you! Laws which neither the number of their years nor the dignity of their founders commends, but equity alone; and therefore, when they are recognized as unjust, they are deservedly condemned, though they themselves condemn. In what way do we call them unjust? Nay rather, if they punish a mere name, we call them even foolish;

but if it is deeds they punish, why do they punish on the strength of a name alone deeds which in the case of others they defend as proved from the act committed, not from a name? I am incestuous: why do they not investigate? An infanticide: why do they not extort a confession? I commit some offense against the gods, against the Caesars: why am I not given a hearing, I who have wherewith to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to be committed, since neither does a judge justly avenge unless he learns that what is not permitted has been committed, nor does a citizen faithfully obey the law while ignorant of the nature of that which the law avenges. No law owes the assurance of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect that does not wish to prove itself, and it is wicked if, unproved, it lords it over men.

To reconsider something concerning the origin of laws of this kind: there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by an emperor unless approved by the senate. Marcus Aemilius knew this in the case of his god Alburnus. This too tells in favor of our cause, that among you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god pleases a man, he shall not be a god; a man will now have to be propitious to a god. Tiberius, therefore, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, when it had been reported to him from Syria Palaestina that the truth of that very divinity had there been revealed, laid the matter before the senate, with the prerogative of his own vote. The senate, because it had not itself approved it, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion, threatening danger to the accusers of the Christians.

Consult your own records; there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the Caesarian sword against this sect, especially when it was arising at Rome. But in such a dedicator of our condemnation we even glory. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but some great good could have been condemned by Nero. Domitian too had attempted it, a portion of Nero in cruelty; but, inasmuch as he was also a man, he easily checked what he had begun, even restoring those whom he had banished. Such have our persecutors ever been -- unjust, impious, base -- men whom you yourselves have been accustomed to condemn, and whose condemned victims you have been wont to restore. But out of so many princes since then, down to the present day, men wise in things divine and human, bring forward a single vanquisher of the Christians!

But we, on the contrary, bring forward a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave of emperors, be sought out, in which he attests that the well-known Germanic drought was dispelled by a rain obtained, as it chanced, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. Just as he did not openly remove the penalty from men of this kind, so in another way he openly scattered it abroad, adding indeed a still more hideous condemnation upon the accusers. What sort of laws, then, are these which impious and unjust men alone enforce against us -- base, savage, vain, senseless men -- laws which Trajan in part frustrated by forbidding that Christians be sought out; laws which no Hadrian, though an investigator of all curiosities, no Vespasian, though a subduer of the Jews, no Pius, no Verus, ever imposed?

Surely the worst men would more readily be adjudged fit for uprooting by the best of men, as by their rivals, than by their own comrades. Now let those most religious protectors and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions answer, if you please, concerning their own fidelity and honor and obedience toward the ordinances of their forefathers -- whether they have fallen away from none, whether they have strayed from any, whether they have not blotted out those very things that were most necessary and most fitting to discipline.

For those laws have passed away which curbed extravagance and ambition -- laws which ordered that not more than a hundred asses be entered in the reckoning for a dinner, and that not more than one hen be served, and that not fattened; laws which removed from the senate a patrician who had possessed ten pounds of silver, as one guilty of a great display of ambition; which straightway demolished theaters that were rising for the corruption of morals; which did not allow the insignia of high rank and honorable birth to be usurped rashly or with impunity. For I see dinners now to be called 'hundred-thousand-sesterce' feasts, reckoned at a hundred thousand sesterces apiece; and I see the silver mines drained to make platters -- it is a small thing if they belong to senators and not to freedmen, or even to men whose backs are still torn by the whip. I see theaters too, and neither single ones enough, nor uncovered ones.

For lest even in winter unchaste pleasure should grow cold, the Lacedaemonians were the first to devise the cloak for the games. I see too that among matrons and prostitutes no distinction of dress is left. As regards women, indeed, those ancestral institutions have also fallen which used to safeguard modesty and sobriety, when no woman knew gold except upon a single finger, which her betrothed had pledged with the nuptial ring; when women were kept so far from wine that a matron starved herself to death because she had unsealed the compartments of the wine-cellar; and, indeed, under Romulus, when a woman who had touched wine was slain with impunity by her husband Metennius. For this reason there was even a necessity of offering kisses to kinsmen, that they might be judged by the breath.

Where is that happiness of marriages, prospering surely by good morals, whereby for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the city no household drew up a bill of divorce? But now among women there is no light limb for gold, no free kiss for wine, and divorce indeed has become even a thing to be wished for, as though it were the fruit of marriage. Even concerning your own gods, the provident decrees that your fathers had made, you their most obsequious sons have rescinded. Father Liber, with his mysteries, the consuls, on the authority of the senate, expelled not only from the city but from all Italy.

Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates, with their Cynocephalus, were forbidden to be brought into the Capitol -- that is, driven from the council of the gods -- by the consuls Piso and Gabinius, who were certainly not Christians; and they abolished them, even overthrowing their altars, restraining the vices of base and idle superstitions. But you, having restored these, have conferred the highest majesty upon them. Where is your religion, where the veneration owed to your ancestors? In dress, in food, in furniture, in feeling, in your very speech, in short, you have renounced your forefathers. You are ever praising antiquity, yet you live anew from day to day. By this it is shown that, while you depart from the good institutions of your ancestors, you retain and guard those things which you ought not to have, seeing that you have not guarded those which you ought.

Moreover, as to that which you seem most faithfully to guard as handed down from your fathers -- the matter in which you have chiefly marked out Christians as guilty of transgression -- I mean the zeal for worshiping the gods, concerning which antiquity most greatly erred, although you have rebuilt Roman altars for Serapis, although you now sacrifice your frenzies to Italian Bacchus -- I shall show in its proper place that this too is despised and neglected and destroyed by you, against the authority of your ancestors. For now I shall reply to that notorious charge of secret crimes, that I may clear a way for myself to more manifest matters. We are said to be most wicked, on account of the sacrament of infanticide and the eating thereof, and the incest that follows the banquet, which the dogs who overturn the lamps -- procurers, that is, of the darkness -- procure for the shameless veiling of our impious lusts.

Yet we are always so charged, and you take no pains to unearth what has for so long been charged against us. Therefore either unearth it, if you believe it, or cease to believe it, you who have not unearthed it! From your own dissimulation the presumption is laid down that there is nothing there, seeing that you yourselves do not dare to unearth it. You command the executioner to do a far different service upon the Christians: not that they should tell what they do, but that they should deny what they are. The census of this discipline, as we have already stated, dates from Tiberius. Truth began together with the hatred of itself; as soon as it appeared, it was made an enemy. It has as many foes as there are strangers, and, indeed, most properly out of rivalry the Jews, out of extortion the soldiers, and by their very nature even our own households. Daily we are besieged, daily we are betrayed, and most of all we are set upon in our very gatherings and assemblies.

Who ever came upon an infant wailing in such a manner? Who has kept for the judge the bloody mouths of Cyclopes and Sirens, just as he had found them? Who has detected upon our wives any unclean traces? Who, when he had discovered such crimes, concealed them, or sold his silence, dragging along the very men themselves? If we are always hidden, when was that betrayed which we commit? Nay, by whom could it be betrayed? Not by the guilty parties themselves, surely, since by the very form of all mysteries the pledge of silence is due. The Samothracian and Eleusinian mysteries are kept silent: how much more such things as would, if betrayed meanwhile, provoke even human chastisement, while the divine is kept in reserve! If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that strangers are.

And whence do strangers get their knowledge, since even impious initiations always keep off the profane and guard against onlookers? Unless perhaps the impious are less fearful. The nature of rumor is known to all. It is your own saying: 'Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter.' Why is rumor an evil? Because it is swift? Because it is an informer? Or because it is most often a liar? Rumor which, not even when it brings something true, is without the vice of falsehood, since it detracts from, adds to, and alters the truth. What of this, that its very condition is such that it endures only when it lies, and lives only so long as it does not prove itself? For, once it has proved itself, it ceases to be, and, as if having discharged its office of announcing, hands over the matter; and thenceforth the matter is held fast, the matter is named. Nor does anyone say, for example, 'They say this was done at Rome,' or,

'Rumor has it that he was allotted a province,' but: 'He was allotted a province,' and: 'This was done at Rome.' Rumor, the name of the uncertain, has no place where there is certainty. Or would anyone but a thoughtless man believe rumor? For the wise man does not believe the uncertain. It is for everyone to estimate that, however widely spread by that eager diffusion, however strongly built up by asseveration, it must at some time have arisen from a single author. Thence it creeps through the offshoots of tongues and ears, and thus the flaw of a slender seed so obscures the rest of the report that no one reflects whether that first mouth may have sown a lie -- which often happens either through the disposition of rivalry, or through the will of suspicion, or through a pleasure in lying that is, in some men, not new but inborn.

But it is well that time reveals all things, as even your own proverbs and sayings testify, by the disposition of nature, which has so ordered it that nothing lies hidden for long, even that which rumor has not spread abroad. Deservedly, then, is rumor for so long the sole party privy to the crimes of the Christians; this you produce as an informer against us -- rumor which, though it once boasted of it and over so great a span of time strengthened it into an opinion, has to this very day been unable to prove it. That I may appeal to the good faith of nature itself against those who presume that such things ought to be believed, behold, we set before you the reward of these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it for the moment! For about this I ask: whether you also, having believed, would count it worth so much to attain to it with such a conscience.

Come, plunge the knife into an infant that is nobody's enemy, guilty of nothing, everybody's child; or, if that is another's task, do you only stand by a man as he dies before he has lived; await the fresh soul as it flees, catch the raw blood, sate your bread with it, feed to your heart's content! Meanwhile, as you recline, count up the places, where your mother is, where your sister; mark them carefully, that when the darkness of the dogs has fallen you may not go astray! For you will have committed an expiatory offense unless you have committed incest. Initiated and sealed with such rites, you live forever. I long for you to answer, if eternity is worth so much; or, if not, then neither is it to be believed. Even if you have believed it, I deny that you would be willing; even if you were willing, I deny that you would be able. Why, then, should others be able, if you are not? Why should you not be able, if others are?

We are, I suppose, of another nature, Cynopennae or Sciapodes; we have other ranks of teeth, other sinews for incestuous lust. You who believe such things of a man, can also do them; you too are a man, even as the Christian is. You who cannot do them, ought not to believe them. For the Christian too is a man, and is even what you are. 'But it is foisted and imposed upon those who are ignorant. For they knew nothing of the kind was asserted of the Christians -- a thing surely to be watched for by them and searched out with all vigilance.' And yet it is the custom, I suppose, for those willing to be initiated first to approach that father of the sacred rites, to describe what must be prepared. Then he says: 'You will need an infant, still tender, that does not know death, that will smile beneath your knife; likewise bread, with which to gather up the broth of blood;

besides that, lampstands and lamps and certain dogs and morsels which may draw them on to the overturning of the lamps; before all else you must come with your mother and sister.' But what if they are unwilling, or if there are none? What, in short, of solitary Christians? There will be, I suppose, no lawful Christian unless he is a brother or a son. What now, if all these things are prepared for those who are ignorant? Surely afterward they learn of it, and endure it, and pardon it. 'They fear to be punished, if they should cry out.' Men who will deserve to be defended, who would even rather perish of their own accord than live under such a conscience? Come now, let them fear; why do they even persevere? For it follows that you would no longer wish to be that which, had you known beforehand, you would never have become.

That I may the more refute these charges, I shall show them to be done by you, partly openly, partly in secret -- through which, perhaps, you have come to believe them of us as well. Infants were sacrificed to Saturn openly throughout Africa, down to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests upon the very trees of Saturn's temple that overshadowed their crimes, on votive crosses -- as the soldiery of our own country bears witness, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this sacred crime is persisted in, in secret. It is not you Christians alone whom men despise, nor is any crime ever uprooted forever, nor does any god change his ways. Since Saturn did not spare his own sons, he certainly persevered in not sparing strangers, whom indeed their very own parents used to offer up;

and they answered willingly and fondled their infants, lest they should be sacrificed weeping. And yet parricide differs much from homicide. Among the Gauls a person of riper age is slaughtered for Mercury. I leave the Tauric fables to their own theaters. Behold, in that most religious city of the pious sons of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom at his games they drench with human blood. 'But it is that of a beast-fighter,' you say. This, I suppose, is less than that of a man! Or is it more shameful because it is the blood of a bad man? At any rate it is poured out from a homicide all the same. O Christian Jupiter, and only son of the Father in respect of cruelty! But since, in the matter of infanticide, it makes no difference whether it be perpetrated by sacred rite or by choice -- although parricide differs from homicide -- I shall turn to the populace.

How many of these bystanders, gaping for the blood of Christians -- how many even of you yourselves, our most righteous and most severe magistrates against us -- would you have me strike upon the conscience for putting to death their own children born to them? If indeed there is a difference even in the manner of the killing, surely it is more cruel to wrench out the breath in water, or to expose them to cold and hunger and dogs; for even one of riper age would prefer to die by the sword. But for us, since homicide has been forbidden once for all, it is not even permitted to dissolve what is conceived in the womb, while the blood is still being drawn together into a man. To hinder birth is a hastening of homicide, and it makes no difference whether one snatches away a soul already born or disturbs one coming to birth. He too is a man who is going to be one; indeed, every fruit is already present in the seed.

As for feeding on blood and such tragic dishes, read -- lest it be recorded somewhere; it is in Herodotus, I think -- how certain nations tasted blood drawn from their arms, from one another, to seal a treaty. I know not what was likewise tasted under Catiline. They say too that among certain Scythian tribes each of the dead is eaten by his own people. I run far afield. Today, hereabouts, the blood of one consecrated to Bellona, caught in the palm from a gashed thigh and given him to drink, seals the pledge. Likewise those who, at the games in the arena, quench a raging thirst by draining the fresh blood of malefactors slain by the throat, running down from the cut throat -- those who thereby seek to cure the falling sickness -- where are they? Likewise those who dine on the wild-beast meats from the arena, who go after the boar, who after the stag?

That boar, in the struggle, has wiped upon itself the blood it shed; that stag has lain in the gladiator's blood. The very bellies of bears are sought after, still undigested with human entrails; and so flesh fed upon a man is belched forth by a man. You who eat these things, how far are you from the banquets of the Christians? And do those men do less who with savage lust gape after human limbs, because they devour the living? Are they less consecrated to filthiness by human blood, because they lick up blood that is to be? They do not, to be sure, eat infants, but rather full-grown persons.

Let your error blush before the Christians, who do not have even the blood of animals in our edible feasts, who for that reason abstain also from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be in any way contaminated by blood, even blood buried within the entrails. Finally, among the temptations you set for Christians you even bring forward sausages stuffed with gore, being most certain, of course, that among them the very thing is unlawful by which you wish to make them stray. Furthermore, how is it that those whom you are confident shudder at the blood of a beast, you believe to gape after human blood -- unless perchance you have found it more delightful? Which indeed ought likewise to have been employed as a tester of Christians, like the brazier, like the incense-box. For thus they would be proved by their craving human blood, just as by their spurning the sacrifice;

otherwise they would have to be denied, if they had not tasted, just as if they had not sacrificed. And surely, in the questioning of the prisons and the condemnation, human blood would not be lacking to you. Moreover, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias reports that the Persians couple with their own mothers. But the Macedonians too are under suspicion, because, when they first heard the tragedy Oedipus, laughing at the pain of the incest, they would say: 'He was driving against his mother!' Now, then, reflect upon how great a license errors give for the committing of incest, since the promiscuity of luxury supplies the materials.

In the first place, you expose your children to be taken up by some stranger's passing pity, or to be adopted by better parents after being emancipated. The memory of an alienated stock must of necessity at some time be dissipated; and once error has thrust its way in, thenceforth by the creeping propagation of the race the offshoot of incest advances along with the crime. Then, next, in whatever place -- at home, abroad, across the seas -- lust is a companion, whose leaps can easily anywhere beget children upon those who know it not, or from some portion of seed, so that thus a scattered race, meeting through human dealings, may run together into its own kindred, and the blind man not recognize them as of incestuous blood.

From this outcome a most diligent and most faithful chastity has hedged us in; and just as far as we are safe from fornication and from every excess after marriage, so far are we also safe from the mishap of incest. Some, far more secure, drive off the whole force of this error by virgin continence, old men who are yet boys. If you would but consider that these things are found among you, you would perceive in like manner that they are not found among Christians. The same eyes would have reported both. But two kinds of blindness readily meet together, so that those who do not see the things that are, seem to see the things that are not. Thus in all matters I shall make it plain. Now I shall speak of the more manifest charges.

'You do not worship the gods,' you protest, 'and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.' It follows that on the same principle we do not sacrifice for others, since we do not for ourselves either, by not worshiping the gods once for all. And so we are arraigned as guilty of sacrilege and of treason. This is the chief charge -- nay, it is the whole -- and assuredly worthy to be examined, if it be not presumption or injustice that judges: the one which despairs of the truth, the other which refuses it. We cease to worship your gods from the moment when we recognize that they are not gods. This, then, is what you ought to demand: that we prove they are not gods, and therefore not to be worshiped, since only then ought they to have been worshiped, if they had been gods. And then too the Christians ought to be punished, if it were established that those whom they did not worship, because they thought them not to exist, really were gods.

'But to us,' you say, 'they are gods.' We appeal and call upon you, from yourselves to your own conscience; let that conscience judge us, let it condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were men. But if it too shall go into denial, it will be refuted out of your own records of antiquity, from which it learned about them -- with the cities in which they were born, and the regions in which they left traces of some work they had done, and in which they are even shown to be buried, bearing witness to this very day. Shall I now run through them one by one, so many and so great, new and old, barbarian and Greek, Roman and foreign, captive and adoptive, private and common, male and female, rustic and urban, seafaring and military? It would be idle even to pursue their titles.

To sum it up in brief -- and this not that you may learn it, but recognize it anew, for surely you are behaving as though you had forgotten -- before Saturn there is among you no god; from him is the reckoning of all divinity, or at least of the more important and better-known. Therefore what shall have been established concerning the origin will hold good also concerning the posterity. As for Saturn, then, so far as letters teach, neither Diodorus the Greek nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any chronicler of such antiquities, has proclaimed him anything other than a man; so far as the evidence of facts goes, nowhere do I find more trustworthy proofs than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many wanderings and after his Attic hospitality, received by Janus, or Jane, as the Salii would have it.

The mountain which he had inhabited was called Saturnian; the city which he had marked out is Saturnia to this very day; in short, all Italy, after having been Oenotria, was surnamed Saturnia. By him first were tablets stamped, and the coin marked with an image, and hence he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, he was certainly of human origin, and, because from a man, certainly not from Heaven and Earth. But since his parents were unknown, it was easy for him to be called the son of those of whom we can all seem to be. For who would not call heaven and earth mother and father, for the sake of veneration and honor, or from human custom, whereby those who are unknown or who appear unexpectedly are said to have come from heaven? Accordingly it fell to Saturn, appearing suddenly everywhere, to be called heaven-born;

for the common people also call those whose lineage is uncertain 'sons of earth.' I say nothing of the fact that men, still so rude, behaved in such a way that they were moved as by something divine at the sight of any new man -- whereas today, now that they are polished, they consecrate as gods those whom, a few days before, they had confessed to have died amid public mourning. Enough now of Saturn, though in few words. We shall show that Jupiter too was as much a man as one born of a man, and thereafter that the whole swarm of the race was as mortal as it was of a like seed with him. And since, just as you do not dare to deny that they were men, so you have taken to asserting that they were made gods after death, let us reconsider the reasons that demanded this.

In the first place, indeed, you must grant that there is some more exalted god and a certain sovereign owner of divinity, who has made gods out of men. For neither could they have assumed for themselves a divinity which they did not possess, nor could another bestow it upon those who did not possess it, save one who properly possessed it. But if there were no one to make the gods, you vainly presume that gods were made, by doing away with a maker. Certainly, indeed, if they could have made themselves, they would never have been men, possessing, that is, the power of a better condition. Therefore, if there is one who makes gods, I return to examining the reasons for making gods out of men, and I find none -- unless that great god desired ministries and aids for his divine offices.

In the first place, it is unworthy that he should stand in need of anyone's labor, and that of a dead man at that -- since it would have been more worthy for him from the beginning to have made some god who was going to require the labor of a dead man. But neither do I see a place for such labor. For this whole body of the world, whether unborn and unmade according to Pythagoras, or born and made according to Plato, was assuredly once for all, in this construction of it, found to be arranged and equipped and ordered with the whole governance of reason. That could not have been imperfect which perfected all things. Nothing was awaiting Saturn and the Saturnian race.

Men will be foolish, unless they are certain that from the very beginning both rains poured down from heaven, and stars shone, and lights flourished, and thunders rumbled, and Jupiter himself dreaded the thunderbolts which you place in his hand -- likewise that every fruit sprang up abundantly from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, nay, before that first man, whoever he was; because nothing could have been brought in after man for the sustaining and supporting of man, when nothing had been provided for him. Finally, they are said to have discovered these necessaries of life, not to have instituted them. But what is discovered, existed; and what existed shall be reckoned not to him who discovered it, but to him who instituted it; for it was, before it was discovered.

But if Liber is a god on the ground that he demonstrated the vine, then Lucullus was ill treated, who first made known cherries from Pontus to Italy, in that he was not on that account consecrated as the author of a new fruit, being but its exhibitor. Wherefore, if from the beginning the universe stood both equipped and dispensed by fixed principles for the discharge of its own offices, there is on this side no room for the plea of admitting humanity into divinity; because the stations and powers which you have distributed to those gods existed from the beginning just as much as they would have existed even if you had not created those gods. But you turn to another plea, answering that the conferring of divinity was a scheme for rewarding their merits.

And hence you concede, I suppose, that this god who makes gods must surpass them in justice, seeing that he would not have dispensed so great a reward rashly, or unworthily, or wastefully. I wish, then, to review their merits, to see whether they are of such a kind as to have raised them to heaven and not rather to have plunged them into the lowest Tartarus, which you affirm, when it pleases you, to be the prison of the infernal punishments. For thither are commonly thrust down all who are impious toward their parents, and incestuous toward their sisters, and adulterers of married women, and ravishers of virgins, and defilers of boys, and those who rage, and those who murder, and those who steal, and those who deceive, and all who are like some one of your gods, not one of whom you will be able to prove free from crime or vice, unless you deny that he was a man.

But since you cannot deny that those beings were men, these further marks also come into play, which do not permit them to be believed to have afterwards been made gods. For if you preside over the punishment of such persons, if all upright men reject fellowship, conversation, and intimacy with the wicked and the base, yet that god of yours has taken their peers into the partnership of his majesty—why then do you condemn those whose colleagues you adore? Your justice is an affront in heaven. Make the most criminal into gods, so as to please your gods! Their honour is the deification of their equals. But, to omit the review of this indignity, grant that they were upright and blameless and good! How many worthier men, nonetheless, have you left behind among the shades below!

Some for wisdom—Socrates; for justice—Aristides; for generalship—Themistocles; for grandeur—Alexander; for good fortune—Polycrates; for wealth—Croesus; for eloquence—Demosthenes. Which of those gods of yours is graver and wiser than Cato, more just and more warlike than Scipio? Who loftier than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero? How much more worthily would that god have waited to take up these men, being surely foreknowing of the better! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and shut heaven once for all, and now surely blushes while his betters murmur in the world below. XII. I now leave off from this matter, since I know that from truth itself I shall demonstrate what they are not, once I have shown what they are.

As for your gods, then, I see only the names of certain men long dead, and I hear fables, and I recognize the rites drawn from the fables. As for the images themselves, I find nothing to censure except that their materials are sisters to those of common vessels and utensils—or rather, being made from those very same vessels and utensils, they change their destiny, as it were, by consecration, the licence of art transforming them, and that most insultingly and, in the very making, sacrilegiously; so that in truth it may be a solace for our punishments—we who are tormented on account of these very gods—that they too suffer the same things in order to be made gods. You set Christians upon crosses and stakes: what image is not first shaped in clay by the potter and set upon a cross and a stake?

It is upon a gibbet that the body of your god is first dedicated. You tear the sides of Christians with iron claws: but upon your gods, through all their limbs, axes and planes and rasps press yet more heavily. We bow our necks: before the lead and the glue and the bolts, your gods are without a head. We are driven to the beasts: certainly the very ones you attach to Liber and Cybele and Caelestis. We are burned with fire: so are they, from their very first lump. We are condemned to the mines: from there your gods are appraised. We are banished to islands: on some island one of your gods is wont either to be born or to die. If any divinity is established through these things, then those who are punished are consecrated, and torments must be called deities.

But of course your gods do not feel these injuries and insults of their fabrication, just as they feel no acts of homage. O impious voices, O sacrilegious revilings! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the very ones who did not censure a certain Seneca when he inveighed at greater length and more bitterly against your superstition. Therefore, if we do not adore the cold statues and images, most like to their dead prototypes, which kites and mice and spiders comprehend—did not the repudiation of an acknowledged error deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we seem to injure those whom we are certain do not exist at all? What is not, suffers nothing from anyone, because it is not. XIII. "But to us they are gods," you say.

And how, on the contrary, are you found to be impious and sacrilegious and irreligious toward your gods, you who neglect those you presume to exist, destroy those you fear, and mock even those you avenge? Recall, if I lie. First: since you severally worship different gods, you assuredly offend those you do not worship. The preferment of one cannot proceed without insult to another, since there is no choosing without rejecting. Already, then, you despise those you reject, whom you do not fear to offend by rejecting them. For, as we touched on above, the standing of each god used to hang on the estimation of the Senate. That was no god whom a man, when consulted, refused, and by refusing condemned.

The household gods, whom you call Lares, you handle with domestic authority—pledging, selling, exchanging them, sometimes turning a Saturn into a little cooking-pot, sometimes a Minerva into a ladle, as each is worn down and battered by long worship, as each master has felt some more urgent domestic necessity. The public gods you likewise befoul by public law, holding them as taxable at the auction-spear. Thus the Capitol, thus the vegetable market is resorted to; under the same voice of the crier, under the same spear, under the same registration of the quaestor, the divinity is put up and knocked down to the bidder. But indeed, fields burdened with tax are cheaper, the persons of men assessed for tribute more ignoble (for these are the marks of captivity), while the gods, the more taxable they are, the more holy;

nay rather, the more holy they are, the more taxable. Majesty is turned into a source of profit: religion goes begging around the taverns; you exact a fee for the ground of a temple, for entrance to a shrine. It is not permitted to know the gods for free—they are for sale. What do you do at all to honour them that you do not also confer on your dead? Temples likewise, altars likewise. The same garb and insignia on the statues; as the dead man's age was, his craft, his occupation, so is the god. How does Jove's funeral banquet differ from the graveside meal, the sacred ladle from the drinking-cup, the soothsayer from the corpse-dresser? For the soothsayer too attends the dead. But it is fitting that you dedicate to deceased emperors the honour of divinity, seeing that you assign it to them even while living.

Your gods will take it kindly—nay, they will be grateful—that their own masters become their equals. But when you worship Larentina, a public harlot (would that it were at least Lais or Phryne), among the Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you inaugurate Simon Magus with a statue and an inscription "To the Holy God"; when you make some fellow from the imperial pages' school a god of the senate—the old gods, though no more noble, will nonetheless reckon it an affront from you that this was permitted to others too, which antiquity conferred on them alone. XIV. I wish also to review your rites.

I will not say what sort of people you are in sacrificing, when you slaughter whatever is worn out and diseased and mangy, when from the fat and sound victims you lop off whatever is superfluous—the little heads and the hooves, which at home too you would have set aside for the slaves or the dogs; when out of the tithe due to Hercules you do not put even a third part upon his altar. I will rather praise your wisdom, that you rescue something from what is lost. But turning to your literature, by which you are formed in prudence and the liberal accomplishments, how many mockeries I find! That the gods, on account of the Trojans and the Achaeans, joined battle among themselves and fought like matched pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a human arrow, because she wished to snatch away her son Aeneas, who had all but been killed by that same Diomedes;

that Mars was almost consumed after thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, lest he should suffer the same violence from the other heaven-dwellers, was freed by the work of a certain monster, and now weeps at the fall of Sarpedon, now foully lusts after his own sister with the mention of former mistresses no less once beloved. Thereafter, what poet, on the authority of his prince, is not found to be a defamer of the gods? This one assigns Apollo to King Admetus for the pasturing of cattle; that one hires out Neptune's builder's labours to Laomedon. There is also that one among the lyric poets—Pindar, I mean—who sings that Aesculapius, by the desert of avarice, because he practised medicine harmfully, was condemned by a thunderbolt. Wicked Jupiter, if the bolt is his—impious toward his grandson, envious toward the craftsman!

These things ought neither to have been reported as true nor invented as false among the most religious of men. Not even the tragic or comic poets refrain from prefacing their plays with the calamities or the errors of some god's house. I say nothing of the philosophers, content with Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, used to swear by an oak and a goat and a dog. "But Socrates was condemned for this very reason, because he was destroying the gods." Plainly, of old—that is, always—truth is an object of hatred. Yet when the Athenians, repenting of their verdict, afterward punished the accusers of Socrates and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the rescinding of his condemnation renders testimony to Socrates.

But Diogenes too makes some jest against Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings on three hundred Joves—or Jupiters, as they should be called—without heads. XV. The rest of the talents devoted to wantonness likewise labour for your pleasures at the cost of the gods' disgrace. Consider the elegances of the Lentuli and Hostilii—whether it is mimes or your gods you laugh at in their jokes and tricks: "Anubis the adulterer," and "the masculine Moon," and "Diana flogged," and "the reading of dead Jupiter's will," and "three starving Herculeses derided." But the actors' scripts too portray every foulness of them.

The Sun mourns his son cast down from heaven while you rejoice, and Cybele sighs for her disdainful shepherd while you feel no shame, and you endure to have Jupiter's obituaries sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva judged by a shepherd. That the very image of your god should clothe an ignominious and infamous head, that an impure body, trained by effeminacy for that art, should represent some Minerva or Hercules—is not majesty violated and divinity outraged while you applaud? Plainly you are more religious in the arena, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods likewise dance, furnishing plots and tales to the condemned—except that the condemned too often put on the persons of your very gods.

We once saw Attis castrated, that god from Pessinus, and a man who was being burned alive had put on the person of Hercules. We laughed too, amid the sportive cruelties of the noon-day shows, at Mercury testing the dead with his branding-iron; we saw also Jove's brother dragging off the corpses of gladiators with his mallet. If one could still investigate each of these particulars—whether they disturb the honour of divinity, whether they efface the traces of your gods' majesty—they must certainly be reckoned as marks of contempt, both of those who enact such things and of those for whom they are enacted. But grant that these are mere sport!

But if I add what the conscience of all will no less recognize—that adulteries are arranged in the temples, that pandering is transacted among the altars, that in the very lodgings of the sacristans and priests, under the same fillets and caps and purple robes, lust is discharged while the incense burns—I do not know but that your gods complain more of you than of the Christians. Certainly it is always from your ranks that the sacrilegious are caught; for the Christians know the temples not even by day. They would perhaps despoil them themselves, if they too adored them. What, then, do those worship who do not worship such things? It is now readily understood that they are worshippers of truth who are not of falsehood, and that they no longer err in that in which, by acknowledging that they had erred, they have ceased to err.

Grasp this first, and from it draw the whole order of our sacred mystery, once false opinions have been beaten back. XVI. For, as some of you have done, you have dreamed that our god is an ass's head. This suspicion Cornelius Tacitus insinuated. For he, in the fifth book of his Histories, having begun the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, having argued what he pleased both about that very origin and about the name and religion of the nation, reports that the Jews, when they had been set free from Egypt—or, as he thought, driven out—wandering through the deserts of Arabia in regions most destitute of water, when they were being wasted by thirst, made use of wild asses (which, coming from pasture, were reckoned to be seeking a drink) as guides to a spring, and for that favour consecrated the likeness of a similar beast.

And thus, I suppose, it was thence presumed that we too, as being near of kin to the Jewish religion, are initiated to the same image. But indeed the same Cornelius Tacitus—that man most loquacious of lies, to be sure—reports in the same History that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and on that account entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, found there no image at all. And surely, if that were worshipped which was represented by some effigy, nowhere would it be displayed more than in its own sanctuary—the more so because it did not even fear outside witnesses, empty though the cult was. For only to the priests was access permitted; even the sight of it was forbidden to all others by a veil hung across.

You will not, however, deny that you yourselves worship all beasts of burden, and whole troops of pack-horses along with their Epona. Perhaps we are censured for this—that among the worshippers of every kind of cattle and beast, we alone are ass-worshippers. But he too who thinks us devotees of the cross will be a fellow-worshipper of ours. When some piece of wood is propitiated, let its shape be considered—since the quality of the material is the same; let its form be considered—provided it is the very body of a god. And yet how much does Attic Pallas differ from the stake of a cross, or Pharian Ceres, who stands forth without an effigy as a rough post and a shapeless piece of wood? Every stout timber that is fixed upright in its station is part of a cross. We, if anything, worship a god whole and entire. We have said that the origin of your gods is derived by the modellers from the cross.

But you also adore Victories on trophies, though crosses are the very entrails of trophies. The whole religion of the Romans, being military, venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those tiers of images on the standards are necklaces of crosses; those hangings of the banners and pennons are the robes of crosses. I praise your care: you were unwilling to consecrate crosses uncultivated and bare. Others, more humanely and more plausibly, believe the Sun to be our god. To the Persians, perhaps, we shall be assigned—though we do not adore the Sun painted on linen, since we have it everywhere on its own disc. In short, thence comes the suspicion, because it has become known that we pray toward the region of the east.

But most of you too, out of an occasional affectation of worshipping heavenly things, move your lips toward the sunrise. Likewise, if we devote the day of the Sun to gladness, it is for a reason far other than the worship of the Sun: we come only second after those who assign the day of Saturn to leisure and feasting, themselves deviating from the Jewish custom, of which they are ignorant. But there has lately been published, in this very city, a new exhibition of our god, ever since a certain hireling condemned to fight the beasts set up a picture with an inscription of this kind: "The God of the Christians, Onokoiotes." It had ass's ears, was hoofed on one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed both at the name and at the shape.

But those men ought at once to have adored a two-formed deity, they who have received gods with heads mixed of dog and lion, and horned from goat and ram, and goats from the loins, and serpents from the legs, and winged on foot or on back. This I have said out of superfluity, lest I should have passed over any rumour unrefuted, as though from a bad conscience. All these matters, now that we have turned to the demonstration of our own religion, we shall clear away. XVII. What we worship is one God, who by the word with which he commanded, by the reason with which he ordered, by the power with which he was able, brought forth this whole mass, with all the furniture of elements, bodies, and spirits, out of nothing, for the adornment of his majesty—whence the Greeks too accommodated to the world the name kosmos.

He is invisible, though he is seen; incomprehensible, though he is represented through grace; inestimable, though he is estimated by human senses; and for that reason he is true and so great. But that which can be commonly seen, comprehended, and estimated, is less than the eyes by which it is grasped, than the hands by which it is defiled, than the senses by which it is discovered; whereas what is immense is known to itself alone. This is what makes God able to be conceived, while he cannot be comprehended in the conceiving; thus the force of his greatness presents him to men as both known and unknown. And this is the sum of the offence of those who will not recognize him whom they cannot be ignorant of.