Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But what shall we answer to the rest? To begin with: supposing it true that, just as the dead are drawn from among the living, the living are likewise drawn back out of the dead, then one and the same fixed tally of human beings would have persisted throughout—namely, whatever number first stepped into life. For the living preceded the dead, the dead then sprang from the living, and afterward the living sprang once more from the dead. And because this cycle always draws on the identical stock, the sum never varies, since it is forever the same set of people cycling through. No more, and no fewer, would ever depart than would return. [2] But we find, even in the records of human antiquity, that the human race has gradually multiplied, as aboriginal peoples, or wanderers, or exiles, or the ambitious of every stripe, seize new territories—as the Scythians took the lands of Parthia, the Temenids the Peloponnese, the Athenians Asia, the Phrygians Italy, the Phoenicians Africa—while regular emigrations too, which they call ‘colonies,’ discharge swarms of a people into other territories on purpose to relieve overcrowding at home. For indeed the mother-stocks still remain in their own seats, and have besides lent out their numbers more richly elsewhere. [3] Certainly the world itself is plainly more cultivated and better furnished today than it was of old. Everything now lies open, everything is known, everything does business; famous wildernesses have been erased by the most delightful farms, forests have been tamed into ploughland, wild beasts routed by flocks, sands are sown, rocks are built upon, marshes are drained off, and there are now cities as great as cottages once were. Islands no longer bristle with menace, nor do reefs strike terror; everywhere there is a house, everywhere a people, everywhere a commonwealth, everywhere life. [4] The supreme proof of human crowding: we are a burden to the world, the elements can scarcely support us, our needs press tighter, and complaints arise on every side, since nature can no longer bear us. In truth, plague and famine and war and the swallowing-up of cities must be reckoned as a remedy, a kind of pruning-shears for the unchecked growth of the human race; and yet, though axes of this sort cut down the greatest mass of mortals time and again, the world has never once been terrified by a restitution that, a thousand years later, brought the living back out of the dead. And this indeed would have made itself felt, had the balance of loss and restitution been equal—had the living really come from the dead. [5] But why a thousand years afterward, and not straightaway, the living from the dead—since, if what is spent is not immediately replenished, the whole stock runs the risk of being used up entirely before the restitution overtakes the deficit, because this supply-line of life, so much shorter than a thousand-year term, would not have kept pace, and would therefore have been snuffed out more easily than it could be rekindled? Therefore, since a process that would have collapsed in this fashion, had the living come from the dead, has in fact not collapsed, we must not believe that the living come from the dead.