Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So then, having said all this by way of preface to lay bare how unfair the popular hatred toward us truly is, I will now take my stand on the question of our innocence, and I will not only refute the charges brought against us, but turn them back on the very men who bring them, in order that people may learn from this as well that the very faults they don't realize belong to themselves are, in truth, absent in Christians — and at the same time so that the accusers may blush, since I am not saying the worst men accuse the best, but that they, as they would have it, accuse their own equals. We will answer point by point the charges of what we are said to commit in secret — charges which we find these same men committing openly — the charges for which we are reckoned criminal, foolish, contemptible, ridiculous.
But since our truth meets every one of these charges head-on, and in the end the authority of the laws is thrown up as a barrier against it — so that either nothing is to be questioned once the laws have spoken, or an unwilling obedience is to be set above the truth — let me first join issue with you on the laws themselves, as with the laws' own guardians.
To begin with, when you lay it down harshly, saying "It is not permitted for you to exist!" and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you are proclaiming naked force and an unjust tyranny from the citadel of power, if you deny it is permitted simply because you wish it so, not because it ought not to be permitted. But if you refuse to permit it because it ought not to be permitted, then surely what is done well ought not to be forbidden. If I can show that what your law prohibits is good, then that earlier verdict cannot stand against me — the verdict that would rightly have forbidden it, had it been evil. If your law erred, I take it, it was conceived by a man; it did not, after all, fall from the sky. Are you astonished that a man could err in framing a law, or come to his senses again in repealing one? Did not the very laws of Lycurgus, once amended by the Spartans themselves, wound their own author so deeply that he withdrew and starved himself to death in judgment on himself? And do you not, every day, as fresh experience lights up the darkness of antiquity, cut and hack down that whole ancient overgrown forest of laws using fresh blades forged from imperial decrees and rescripts? Did not Severus himself — yesterday, so to speak, that most steadfast of emperors — after all the weight of its old age, throw out the utterly pointless Papian laws, which compelled people to raise children before the Julian law even let them marry? There were also once laws letting creditors cut a condemned debtor's body into pieces; by common consent that cruelty was later erased, and the capital penalty was converted into a mark of public disgrace instead. Confiscation of goods was brought in, preferring to make a man's blood run red with shame rather than spill it outright.
How many laws still lie there among you, badly in need of clearing out — laws commended by neither the count of their years nor the rank of their framers, but by fairness alone, and so, when they are recognized as unjust, they are rightly condemned, even while they go on condemning others! How do we call them unjust? Well, if they punish the mere name, they are even foolish; but if they punish deeds, then why do they punish, under the name alone, deeds which in other people's cases are proven and defended only on the evidence of what was actually done, not on the strength of a name? Say I'm guilty of incest — why don't they investigate? Of infanticide — why don't they force it out of me? Say I commit some offense against the gods, against the emperors — why am I not given a hearing, when I have the means to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids the commission of, because a judge does not justly punish unless he first learns that what is forbidden has actually been done, and a citizen cannot faithfully obey a law while ignorant of the nature of what it punishes. No law owes the verdict of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect if it refuses to be examined, and downright wicked if, unexamined, it still rules.