Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now indeed there is no one who does not also put forward this: that all things were established by God and assigned to man, as we ourselves preach, and that of course all things are good, as befits a good author; that among these must be counted all the things out of which the shows are put together -- the horse, for example, and the lion, and bodily strength, and sweetness of voice; and so none of it can seem foreign or hostile to God, since it is agreed to belong to his own creation, nor ought it to be forbidden to worshippers of God, since what is not hostile to him is likewise not foreign to him. And plainly the very buildings of the places themselves -- since the stone, the rubble, the marble, the columns are God's property, he who gave these things as the raw material of the earth -- and indeed the very actions performed there take place under God's own sky.
How wise an arguer human ignorance seems to itself, especially when it is afraid of losing some such thing from the joys and fruits of this world! Indeed you will find more people kept away from this sect by the danger to their pleasures than by the danger to their lives. For even the fool does not fear death, as something owed; and even the wise man does not despise pleasure, as something given -- since for fool and wise man alike there is no reason for living except pleasure. No one denies -- because no one fails to know, since nature herself freely suggests it -- that God is the founder of the universe, and that this universe is as good as it is entrusted to man. But because they do not know God thoroughly, only by natural right and not also by intimate acquaintance -- from a distance, not up close -- they are bound to be ignorant of how he commands or forbids the administration of what he has established, and at the same time of what rival power there is, working against him to corrupt the uses of his divine creation to its own ends -- since you cannot know the will of one you barely know, nor his adversary. So it does not suffice to consider only him by whom all things were founded; one must weigh too him by whom they were twisted awry. Only so will it stand plain to what end things were founded, once it stands plain to what end they were not. Corruption and soundness lie worlds apart, precisely because a founder and a counterfeiter lie worlds apart.
As for the rest, every species of evil, which even the pagans forbid and condemn as beyond doubt, is made up out of the works of God. You see murder committed by iron, by poison, by magic bindings: iron is as much God's property as the herbs are, as the angels are. Did its maker, then, provide it for the purpose of killing a man? Yet by a single, primary command he does away with every kind of murder: "You shall not kill." Likewise gold, bronze, silver, ivory, wood, and whatever material is sought out for fashioning idols -- who put these things in the world except God, the world's author? Did he do so, then, so that they might be worshipped against him? Yet idolatry is the supreme offense against him. What belongs to God that is not what offends God? But when it offends, it has ceased to be God's, and because it has ceased to be his, it offends. Man himself, the author of every disgraceful act, is not only God's work but also his image -- and yet in both body and spirit he has deserted his own founder. For we did not receive eyes for lust, a tongue for slander, ears as a receptacle for slander, a gullet for the sin of gluttony, a belly to be gluttony's accomplice, genitals for excesses of indecency, hands for violence, feet for a wandering life -- nor was the spirit implanted in the body to become a hatchery of plots, of frauds, of injustices. I think not. For if God, the exacter of innocence, hates every malice and even mere malice merely thought up, then beyond doubt he did not establish, for the purpose of any such outcome, whatever he condemns, even though those very deeds are carried out by means of the things he created -- since this is the whole account of the condemnation: the perverse administration, by the creatures, of what was created.
We, then, who having come to know the Lord have also caught sight of his rival, who having discovered the founder have at the same time detected the forger, ought neither to wonder nor to doubt: since that very power of the forging and rivaling angel, from the beginning, cast man himself -- the work and image of God, owner of the whole universe -- down from his integrity, it likewise turned the whole of his substance, established in integrity together with him, into perversity together with him, against its own founder -- so that, in the very thing which it grieved to see granted to man and not to itself, it might both make man guilty before God and establish its own dominion.