Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] By this definition everything about God stands intact: the nature of his goodness, the reasoning of his arrangement, and the abundance of his foreknowledge and power. Still, you owe God the utmost seriousness and a special trust in the whole of his ordinance, so that you stop asking whether something could have happened against God's will. For once you hold fast to the seriousness and trustworthiness of the good God — while granting that his rational arrangements must be vindicated on their own terms — you will not be amazed that God did not step in against what he did not want to happen, in order to preserve what he did want. [2] For if he had once granted man freedom and power of choice — and granted it worthily, as we have shown — then he had certainly granted it to be enjoyed by the very authority of that grant: enjoyed, insofar as it rested with God himself, in keeping with his own nature, that is, for good (for who would grant anything against himself?); but insofar as it rested with man, in accordance with the stirrings of his own liberty (for who fails to let the one to whom he has once granted the enjoyment of a thing use it as his own mind and preference dictate?). It followed, then, that God should withdraw from the freedom once conceded to man — that is, hold in himself both his foreknowledge and his surpassing power, by which he could have intervened to keep man from attempting to misuse his freedom and so slipping into danger. [3] For if he had intervened, he would have torn up the freedom of choice which he had granted by reason and by goodness. Well then, suppose he had intervened, suppose he had torn up that freedom of choice, calling man back from the tree, keeping that cunning serpent from meeting the woman — would not Marcion cry out, "O fickle, unstable, faithless lord, tearing up what he himself established! Why did he grant free will, if he then interferes? Why does he interfere, if he granted it?" Let him choose where to brand him with error — in the granting, or in the revoking. [4] Would he not then seem all the more deceived by ignorance of the future, if he had stood in the way — and would not everyone say he had indulged man as though not knowing how it would turn out? But if he had foreknown that man would misuse his own institution, what is more worthy of God than seriousness, than fidelity to his institutions, whatever they might be? Man would have seen — had he not badly squandered what he had well received — that he himself stood guilty before the law he had refused to obey, not that the lawgiver himself had cheated his own law by not letting its prescription be carried out. [5] These are the very speeches you would most deservedly deliver against the Creator, if he had stood in the way of man's free will with the providence and power you demand of him. As it is, whisper instead on the Creator's behalf of his seriousness, his patience, his fidelity — he who discharged his own institutions both rationally and well.
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