Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
These wonder-mongers are also in the habit of building themselves up—toward ruin—out of certain persons who have been caught by heresy: [2] 'Why did that man, or that woman, most faithful, most prudent, most well-established in the church, cross over to that party?' [3] Whoever says this is, without knowing it, answering himself: those whom heresies were able to change cannot have been either prudent or faithful or well-established after all. And is it really so strange, do you suppose, that someone once approved should afterward fall away? [4] Saul, good beyond the rest, was later overthrown by envy. David, a man after God's own heart, was later guilty of murder and adultery. Solomon, endowed by the Lord with every grace and wisdom, was led into idolatry by women. [5] Only the Son of God, in fact, was granted the privilege of staying free from sin. What then, if a bishop, a deacon, a widow, a virgin, a teacher, even a martyr, should have lapsed from the rule of faith? Will heresies for that reason appear to hold the truth? [6] Do we measure faith against individuals, or individuals against faith? None is wise but the one who believes, none stands higher than a Christian, and none counts as a Christian save the one who holds out to the very finish. [7] You, being merely human, know each person only from the outside; you think you see what in fact you merely look at, and you see only as far as you have eyes to see. But, it is said, the eyes of the Lord are lofty. Man looks upon the face; God looks into the heart. [8] And for this reason the Lord knows those who are his own, and he roots up the plant he did not plant, and he shows the last from among the first, and he carries the winnowing-fan in his hand to cleanse his threshing-floor. [9] Let the chaff of a light faith fly off wherever it will, at whatever gust of temptation blows—the purer will be the mass of wheat laid up in the Lord's granaries. [10] Did not some of his own disciples turn aside from the Lord himself, scandalized? And yet the rest did not for that reason think they too should depart from his footsteps, but rather those who knew him to be the Word of Life, come from God, persevered in his company right to the end, even though he had calmly offered them, too, the chance to leave if they wished. [11] It is a small thing if some, too, deserted his apostle—Phygelus and Hermogenes and Philetus and Hymenaeus; the very betrayer of Christ was one of the Apostles. [12] Are we to marvel if some desert his churches, when the very fact that we suffer this shows us to be Christians, after the example of Christ himself? [13] 'They went out from among us,' he says, 'yet they did not belong to us; had they truly belonged to us, they would certainly have stayed on with us.'