On the Christian Religion

to deceive, nor could they have been deceived in any way. What was the cause that many, both Jews and Gentiles, most learned in any discipline, and many wealthy men, having set aside their own affairs and delights, preferred to die cruelly with those rustic and mendicant disciples of Christ rather than to live with the delights of the world? Let us hear that divine man, Tertullian of Carthage, crying out thus in his Apology to the Roman judges: “But do this, good governors; torture, rack, condemn, and grind us down: your iniquity is the proof of our innocence; for this reason God permits us to suffer these things. For recently, in condemning a Christian woman to a pander rather than to a lion, you confessed that a violation of our chastity is considered by us to be more atrocious than any punishment or any death. And yet, your quest and cruelty accomplish nothing; it is rather an allurement for our sect. We become more numerous as often as we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed. We have filled all things.” And as if it were not allowed to be killed rather than to kill in this discipline, we could have been unarmed and not rebels, but merely discordant, having contended against you by the sheer burden of our separation. For if so great a force of men had broken away from you to some most remote part of the world, it would have certainly overwhelmed your dominion and punished you with the loss of so many citizens, and indeed with the very desolation of your rule. Without a doubt, you would have trembled at your own solitude, at the silence of things, and because of a certain stupor of a dead city, you would have asked whom you might rule; for you have almost all citizens as Christians. Origen also, in the fourth book of De Principiis, says: “Countless men in every region of the world, having left behind their ancestral laws, have suddenly accepted the Christian law and have most willingly both suffered and continue to suffer daily all kinds of tortures and death for its glory.” Now indeed, if I wished to count the thousands of men in any doctrine, especially those excelling in philosophy, who were disciples of Christ