Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I will now set forth for you myself the business of the Christian faction, so that having refuted its evils I may display its goods. We are a body knit together by shared religious conviction, by oneness of training, and by the tie of a common hope. We come together as an assembly and a congregation, so that, as though mounting a massed assault, we may besiege God with our prayers. Such force is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and those in authority, for the stability of the world, for peace among things, for the delay of the end. We meet to call to mind the divine writings, whenever the character of the present times makes it necessary either to sound a warning or to jog the memory. In any case, we feed our faith with those sacred words, we raise our hope, we fix firm our confidence, and we pack down the discipline of the precepts all the tighter by constant repetition. Here too there is exhortation, reproof, and divine censure. For judgment is passed with great weight, as befits men certain that they stand before God's gaze, and it is a striking foretaste of the coming judgment if anyone has offended so badly as to be barred from sharing in prayer, in assembly, and in every holy exchange. Those who preside are elders of proven character, who have earned that honor not by purchase but by testimony to their worth — for nothing belonging to God is had at a price. Even the fund we keep, if there is such a thing, is not collected as though religion were being bought back for a fee. Each person puts in a modest contribution on a set day each month, or whenever he wishes and only if he wishes and only if he is able — for no one is compelled; the giving is voluntary. Think of it as a deposit of devotion. For the money is spent not on banquets or drinking parties or thankless gorging, but on feeding and burying the poor, on boys and girls who lack property and parents, on aged household slaves as well, and likewise on the shipwrecked, and on any who are in the mines or on islands or in prisons — provided it is for the cause of God's own sect — they become wards of the confession they made. But it is precisely this working of love that brands us in the eyes of some. "Look," they say, "how they love one another" — for they themselves hate one another — "and how ready they are to die for each other" — for they themselves are readier to kill each other.
And that we call one another brothers — that too, I suppose, drives them mad on no other grounds than that among themselves every name for blood-kinship is a sham of affection. But we are your brothers too, by the law of nature, our common mother, even if you are scarcely men, being such poor brothers. Yet how much more rightly are they called brothers, and are brothers, who have come to know one God as Father, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who have trembled their way out of the same womb of ignorance into the one light of truth! Perhaps we are reckoned the less legitimate kind of brothers for this: that no tragic drama cries aloud about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers by virtue of a shared estate, which among you generally dissolves brotherhood instead. And so we, who are fused in mind and soul alike, have no hesitation about sharing property. Everything is held in common among us — except our wives. It is exactly there that we dissolve partnership, at the one point where the rest of mankind practices it — men who not only make free with their friends' marriages but most patiently hand over their own wives to friends as well, following, I suppose, that tradition of our ancestors and their great sages: the Greek Socrates, and Cato the Roman, who shared their wives with friends — wives they had married, presumably, for the sake of producing children, elsewhere as well as at home, though whether the women were willing I cannot say. And why, indeed, should they have troubled themselves over a chastity their husbands had so readily given away? What a fine example of Attic wisdom, what Roman gravity — the philosopher turned pimp, and the censor too!
What wonder, then, if so great a love should feast together? For you also slander our modest suppers — aside from branding them criminal — as extravagant besides. It was of us, no doubt, that Diogenes' remark was meant: "The Megarians shop for dinner as though they were to die tomorrow, but build houses as though they would never die." But it is easier to spot a splinter in another's eye than a beam in one's own. The air turns sour with the belching of so many tribes, curias, and voting-districts at their feasts; a creditor becomes a necessity for the Salii about to dine; the accountants must reckon up the costs of Hercules' tithe-feasts and public banquets; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries, a levy of cooks is called up; at the smoke of Serapis's supper the little linen-clad attendants are roused to action — yet it is the Christians' dining room alone that is put under investigation.
Our supper shows by its very name the reason for itself: it is called by the word that among the Greeks means love. Whatever it costs, it is gain to spend in the name of devotion, since by this refreshment we assist the needy — not in the manner in which among you parasites court glory by bartering away their freedom, letting themselves be fattened up amid insults on the strength of their belly's contract, but rather as, before God, greater regard is shown to the humble. If the occasion for the banquet is honorable, judge the rest of its order of conduct by that same cause! Because it belongs to the duty of religion, it admits nothing base, nothing unrestrained. No one reclines at table before prayer to God has first been tasted; food is eaten only as much as hungry people need; drink only as much as is useful to the modest. So they fill themselves as men who remember that even through the night they must worship God; so they converse as men who know the Lord is listening. After water for the hands and the lighting of lamps, each is invited to come forward and sing to God, from the holy scriptures or from his own invention, as he is able; by this it is tested how he has drunk. Prayer likewise closes the banquet. From there people depart not in gangs bent on violence, nor in bands roaming about, nor in outbursts of wantonness, but with that same care for restraint and modesty as those who have dined not so much on supper as on discipline.
This gathering of Christians is deservedly unlawful, if it matches unlawful things, deservedly to be condemned, if anyone complains of it on the same grounds one complains of factions. For whose destruction do we ever assemble? We are the same, gathered, as we are scattered; the same as a whole as each of us singly — harming no one, grieving no one. When the upright, when the good come together, when the pious, when the chaste assemble, it should not be called a faction, but a senate.