Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
If, then, we see that good and well-minded servants conduct themselves after the pattern of their master's disposition — since the very art of earning goodwill is compliance, and true discipline of compliance is obedient submission — how much more ought we, who are servants of the living God, be found conformed to the Lord, since his judgment on his own turns not on shackle or freedman's cap, but on the eternity of either punishment or salvation! To avert such severity, or to attract such generosity, requires a diligence of compliance as great as the things which either that severity threatens or that generosity promises. And yet we exact obedience not only from men bound by servitude or owing compliance on some other legal ground, but even from cattle, even from beasts, understanding that they were provided and handed over to us by the Lord for our use. Shall the things God has put in subjection to us, then, be better than we are at the discipline of compliance? Even dumb creatures that obey recognize their master: and shall we hesitate to listen to the one Lord to whom alone we are subject? How unjust, indeed how thankless it is, that what you obtain from others through someone's kindness, you should refuse to repay to that very one through whom you obtained it! Nor need I say much more about the compliance owed by us to the Lord God: the mere acknowledgment of God is enough to make one understand what is incumbent on him. But lest I seem to have dragged in compliance as something foreign to my subject, compliance itself is drawn from patience: no one impatient truly complies, and no one who complies is without patience. Since the Lord, then, both demonstrator and receiver of every good, has borne patience about in his own person, who could treat lightly the good it is? For who can doubt that every good, because it belongs to God, ought to be pursued with the whole mind by those who belong to God? By these considerations, in short compass and as it were by way of a preliminary ruling, both the commendation and the exhortation to patience stand established.