Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But what a spectacle is at hand: the coming of the Lord, now unquestioned, now majestic, now triumphant! What exultation of the angels, what glory of the risen saints! What a kingdom of the righteous thereafter! What a city, the new Jerusalem! But wait—there are other spectacles still: that last and everlasting day of judgment, unforeseen by the nations, mocked by them, when this whole vast antiquity of the world and all its many generations shall be swallowed in a single fire. What breadth of spectacle there will be then! What shall I marvel at? What shall I laugh at? Where shall I rejoice, where exult—watching so many kings, who were announced as received into heaven, now groaning together with Jupiter himself and their own witnesses in the depths of darkness? And governors too, the persecutors of the Lord's name, melting in flames fiercer than those they themselves inflicted, as they rage against Christians? Whom else? Those wise philosophers, blushing before their own disciples as they burn together with them—the same men who taught them that nothing pertains to God, who assured them that souls are nothing, or that they will never return to their former bodies? Poets too, trembling not before the tribunal of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but before an unexpected Christ! Then indeed the tragedians will be worth hearing, far more vocal, surely, in their own calamity; then the actors will be recognized, far more limber through the fire; then the charioteer will be a sight, all red upon his wheel of flame; then the athletes will be there to behold, hurled not in the gymnasium but into the fire—except that I would not wish to see even them at that hour, since I would rather turn my insatiable gaze instead on those who raged madly against the Lord. 'This,' I will say, 'is the carpenter's or the harlot's son, the destroyer of the Sabbath, the Samaritan, the man with a demon. This is the one you bought from Judas; this is the one beaten with a reed and with fists, disgraced with spittle, given gall and vinegar to drink; this is the one his disciples stole away in secret so it could be said he had risen, or the gardener dragged off so the crowds coming and going wouldn't trample his lettuce beds.' To see such sights, to exult in such things—what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will grant you that out of his own generosity? And yet, in a sense, we already have these things, represented now through faith by the imagining spirit. But what of those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man? I believe they are more delightful than the circus and both tiers of the theater and every stadium put together.