Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I shall answer more pointedly the excuses of craftsmen of this sort, who by rights should never be received within the household of God, if the rule of it is understood. Take first that familiar objection so often thrown out: 'I have no other way to make a living.' It can be countered more sharply still: so you must live, must you? What business have you with God, if you live by your own laws? Then there is the argument they dare to draw from Scripture, that the apostle said: 'Let each one remain in the calling in which he was found'—as though by this reading we could all go on persisting in our sins. For not one of us was found other than a sinner, since Christ came down for no other reason than to free sinners. Likewise they say he commanded, by his own example, that each man should work with his own hands for his living. If this precept is defended by appeal to 'hands' in general, then I suppose bathhouse thieves too live by their own hands, and robbers themselves work with their hands for their living, and forgers too, of course, work their evil letters not with their feet but with their hands, and actors earn their bread not with their hands alone but with their whole bodies. Let the church, then, stand open to all who sustain themselves by their hands and by their labor, if there is no exception among the trades that God's discipline does not admit. But someone objects, against the prohibition of the forbidden likeness: 'Why then did Moses in the wilderness make an image of a bronze serpent?' That instance stands apart, one of those figures constructed toward some hidden arrangement, not toward a relaxation of the law, but for the sake of its own prefigured pattern. Otherwise, if we interpret such things the way the enemies of the law do, shall we too—as the Marcionites do—charge inconsistency upon the Almighty, whom they seek to destroy in just this way, as changeable, since he forbids in one place and commands in another? But if anyone questions whether the bronze serpent's shape, lifted up in that fashion, signified the Lord's cross, which would deliver us out of the grip of serpents—meaning the devil's angels—by nailing up in itself the devil, the serpent, put to death; or whatever alternate reading of that emblem has been disclosed to more capable minds—provided the apostle affirms that all these things happened to the people then as figures. It is well, then, that the same God both forbade by law the making of a likeness and by a special command ordered the likeness of a serpent to be made. If you hold that it is the same God, you have his law: 'You shall not make a likeness.' And if you also weigh the later command to make a likeness—then you too, imitate Moses: make no idol against the law, unless God has likewise commanded you to.
VI.