Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We alone, then, are innocent! What wonder, if it must be so? And indeed it must be so. Taught innocence by God, we know it in its perfection, as revealed by a perfect Master, and we keep it faithfully, as commanded by a Judge who cannot be despised. But to you, human estimation has handed down innocence, and human authority likewise has enforced it; hence you have no discipline full enough, or fearsome enough, to match the truth of innocence. A man's wisdom in demonstrating the good is exactly as great as his authority in exacting it — the one as easy to deceive as the other to hold in contempt. And indeed, which is fuller: to say "You shall not kill," or to teach "Do not even grow angry"? Which more perfect: to forbid adultery, or to bar even the solitary lust of the eyes? Which more thorough: to prohibit the wrongdoing, or the evil word as well? Which better equipped: not to permit injury, or not even to allow retaliation for it? And all this while you should know that even your own laws, which seem to advance toward innocence, were borrowed from the divine law as an older pattern. We have already spoken of the age of Moses.
But how great, after all, is the authority of human laws, when a man can both escape them — often by hiding amid his own offenses — and sometimes despise them, offending either by choice or by necessity? Consider too that however brief, the punishment for any crime will still, after all, not outlast death. So too Epicurus cheapens every torment and pain, pronouncing the mild sort contemptible and the great sort not long-lasting. But we, who are marked and scored under God, the watcher of all things, and who look ahead to eternal punishment from him, are rightly the only ones who attain to innocence — both for the fullness of his knowledge, and for the difficulty of hiding, and for the magnitude of the torment, not brief but everlasting — fearing him whom even the one who judges those who fear must himself fear: God, not a proconsul.