Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
For everything you throw at me, God meets you — the same one who strikes and also heals, who kills and also gives life, who humbles and also exalts, who creates evils and also makes peace — so that I may answer the heretics on this ground too. For look, they say, he himself declares that he is the maker of evils, saying, "I am he who makes evils." Seizing upon the shared use of a single word that leaves two kinds of evil confused in ambiguity — since "evils" is said both of wrongdoings and of punishments — they want him to be understood everywhere as the maker of evils, so that he can be denounced as the author of wickedness. We, however, drawing the distinction between the two senses, separating the evils of wrongdoing from the evils of punishment, the evils of guilt from the evils of penalty, assign to each category its own proper author: the devil as author of the evils of sin and guilt, God the Creator as author of the evils of punishment and penalty — so that the one class is charged to malice, the other to justice, the evils that a judgment creates set against the evils of the offense it judges. Of these evils, then, the ones that suit a judge, the Creator declares — evils, certainly, to those on whom they are visited as payment, but in their own right good, inasmuch as they are just, and defenders of the good, and enemies of wrongdoing, and in this respect worthy of God. Either prove those evils unjust, so as to prove them chargeable to malice — that is, the evils of injustice — because if they belong to justice, they will no longer be evils at all, but goods; evils only to those to whom they come, and even then goods handed out directly in place of evils. Go on, then, and maintain that it was unjust for man, the willing despiser of the divine law, to be deprived of what he had chosen to be without; unjust that the wickedness of that age was cut down first by rains, then by fires; unjust that Egypt, foulest and most superstitious of nations, ever more a tormentor of a people who were its guests, was struck with a tenfold chastisement. "He hardens Pharaoh's heart." But he who had already denied God, who had already time and again in his arrogance thrown off God's ambassadors, who had already piled further labor onto the people's toil, deserved to be handed over to destruction; and finally, as an Egyptian, he had long since stood guilty before God of a nation's idolatry, worshiping ibis and crocodile sooner than the living God. He struck the people too, but they were ungrateful. He sent bears against children too, but they were disrespecting a prophet.
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