Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But on the contrary, the name of faction ought to be fitted to those who conspire in hatred of the upright and the honest, who cry out together against innocent blood, offering as a shield for their hatred that further absurdity, that they suppose the Christians are the cause of every public calamity, every misfortune of the people. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise over the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth shakes, if there is famine, if there is plague, at once the cry goes up: "The Christians to the lion!" So many, for one cause?
I ask you, before Tiberius — that is, before the coming of Christ — how many calamities befell the world and its cities! We read that Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos sank into the sea with many thousands of people. Plato too records that a landmass greater than Asia or Africa was swallowed by the Atlantic sea. And an earthquake swallowed the sea at Corinth, while the pounding surf tore away a stretch of Lucania and left it set apart under the label Sicily. Surely none of this could have come to pass without loss to those dwelling there. But where, then — I will not speak of the Christians who scorn your gods, but where, then, was your own divine company, when a deluge wiped out the entire world, or, as Plato held, merely the plain? For proof that they are gods of a later date lies in the very towns where they came to be born and where they died, the ones they themselves established — for otherwise those cities would not survive to this day, being themselves also the offspring born after that disaster. Not yet had Palestine received the swarm of Jews out of Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian sect yet settled there, when a rain of fire burned up the neighboring regions, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land still smells of that burning, and if any fruits of trees grow there, they only try to be fruit for the eyes; touched, they crumble to ash. Nor were Etruria and Campania complaining about Christians when fire poured from the sky on Vulsinii and from their own mountain on Pompeii. No one at Rome yet worshiped the true God when Hannibal was measuring out by the bushel the rings stripped from the slain Romans after Cannae. All your gods were being worshiped by everyone when the Senones themselves occupied the Capitol. And it is well that, if any disaster befalls cities, the same calamities strike the temples as strike the walls, so that I may now turn this back on you: these things do not happen because of the gods, since they happen to the gods as well.
The human race has always deserved ill of God — first, because it was ungrateful to him, whom, though it knew him in part, it did not seek out, but instead invented for itself other gods besides to worship; and then, because in failing to seek the master of innocence, the judge and exacter of guilt, it grew hardened into every vice and crime. But if it had sought him, it would have followed that it would come to know the one it sought, and having come to know him, observe him, and having observed him, find him gracious rather than angry. So now too it ought to know that this same God is angry, just as he always was in the past, before men were called Christians. If mankind enjoyed his goods before it fashioned gods for itself, why should it not understand that the evils, too, come from the one whose goods it failed to recognize? Guilt for the ingratitude lies with the very one guilty of it.
And yet, compare the calamities of old — what happens now is lighter, ever since the world received Christians from God. For from that time the innocence of the age has tempered its own injustices, and men have begun to be intercessors before God. Indeed, when the rains suspend summer and winter alike and the year hangs in doubt, you — well fed every day and about to dine again presently — while the baths, the taverns, and the brothels go on doing business, offer rain-sacrifices to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions for the people, hunt for the sky at the Capitol, wait for clouds to appear from the ceiling — turned away all the while from God himself and from heaven. But we, dried out with fasting and wrung dry by every abstinence, cut off from every fruit of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, batter heaven with our persistent pleading, we touch God — and when we have wrenched mercy from him, the credit goes to Jupiter.