Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This is enough said against the charge of injured divinity, so that we may not seem to injure something we have shown does not exist. So then, when we are challenged to sacrifice, we plant our foot firmly against it — for the sake of our conscience's conviction, by which we are certain to whom such acts of homage actually go, beneath the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some people reckon it madness that, when we could both sacrifice now and walk away unharmed while keeping our resolve intact in our own minds, we prefer stubbornness to safety. You are, of course, giving us advice for our own good to abuse! But we know where such suggestions come from, who is really running this whole show, and how — sometimes by the cunning of persuasion, sometimes by the harshness of cruelty — he works to knock our constancy down: namely, that spirit of demonic and angelic contrivance, who, hostile to us on account of our defection from him and envious on account of God's grace toward us, wages war on your minds against us with hidden inspiration, tuning and priming you toward every perversity of judgment and every iniquity of cruelty in that undertaking we set out on from the beginning.
For although the whole force of demons and spirits of that kind has been made subject to us, still — like worthless slaves — fear sometimes mixes in defiance, and they long to hurt those they otherwise fear; for even fear breathes out hatred, besides which their desperate condition, already under pre-condemnation, counts it a consolation to enjoy their malice in the meantime, while punishment is delayed. And yet, once seized, they are subdued and give way to their true condition, and those they attack from a distance, they beg from close up. And so, when they burst out against us — in whose power they are — like slaves rebelling from their workhouses or prisons or mines or that sort of penal servitude, knowing full well that they are unequal to us and all the more ruined for the attempt, we resist them regardless as if we were equals, and we fight back, standing firm in the very thing they are attacking — and we never triumph over them more completely than when we are condemned for our faithful obstinacy.