Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But the question is asked: by whom is the understanding of the things that serve the heresies twisted awry? By the devil, of course, whose business it is to twist the truth -- who apes the very substance of the divine sacraments in the mysteries of idols. He too baptizes certain of his believers and faithful; he promises the washing away of sins from a bath; and if I still remember Mithras rightly, he marks his soldiers there on their foreheads. He also celebrates an offering of bread, and brings in an image of the resurrection, and buys back a crown under the sword. What of the fact that he even sets up a high priest bound to a single marriage? He has virgins too, he has those who practice continence. For the rest, if we go back over the superstitions of Numa Pompilius -- if we consider the priestly offices and insignia and privileges, the ministries and instruments and vessels of those who offer sacrifice, the elaborate rules of the sacrifices themselves and the expiations and vows -- is it not plain that the devil has imitated that fussy exactness of the Jewish law? He, then, who was so eager to rival and reproduce, in the business of idolatry, the very things by which the sacraments of Christ are administered, was of course equally eager and equally able, by the same cleverness, to adapt the instruments of divine matters and of holy Christians too -- sense for sense, word for word, parable for parable -- to suit a profane and rival faith. And so no one ought to doubt either that the spiritual forces of wickedness, from which even the heresies come, were sent in by the devil, or that the heresies are any different from idolatry, since they belong to the same author and the same working as idolatry does. Either they invent another god set over against the Creator, or, if they confess a single Creator, they discourse of him otherwise than he truly is. And so every lie they tell about God is, in a certain sense, a kind of idolatry.