Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Proof of your ignorance — which, even as it mounts your defense, convicts you of injustice — lies ready to hand: everyone who, alongside you, once did not know, and, alongside you, once hated, the moment they come to know, stop hating; those who stop being ignorant stop hating — indeed, they themselves become the very thing they hated, and begin to hate what they themselves once were. So it is that day after day you groan over the growing number of Christians; you cry out that the city is under siege, that there are Christians in the fields, in the outposts, on the islands; you grieve, as though it were some loss to you, that every sex, every age, every rank without exception is deserting to us. And yet even this does not move your minds to reckon there might be some hidden good behind it; you refuse to suspect anything more honest, you have no wish to look into it more closely — on this one point alone human curiosity goes numb. You love not knowing what others rejoice to have found; you would rather stay ignorant, because you already hate — as if you were certain you would not hate it, once you knew. And yet if no ground for the hatred can be found, then clearly the best course is to abandon a prior injustice; but if a real cause should turn up, nothing is taken from the hatred — if anything, it only grows, now backed by a clear conscience of justice. Unless, that is, it shames you to correct yourselves, or irks you to have to explain.
I know very well the answer with which you generally meet this evidence of our ever-growing numbers: it proves nothing good, you say, simply because it converts and sweeps along so many. I am familiar enough with a change of mind for the worse. How many deserters from the good life are there? How many turncoats gone over to perversity? Many change in good faith, no doubt — more still, these days, given the state the times are in. But the comparison you are drawing simply does not hold up. For everyone agrees about what is bad — so much so that not even the guilty parties themselves, the ones who cross over to evil and turn from good to wrong, dare defend evil as though it were good. They treat their shameful acts as things to fear, their impious acts as things to be ashamed of. In the end they are eager to hide, they avoid being seen, they panic when caught, they deny it when accused; even under torture they do not easily or consistently confess, and once condemned, they are certainly not happy about it. In fact they reproach themselves for what they had become, and blame their fall from innocence into a corrupted mind on chance, or on fate. They refuse to own it as truly theirs, precisely because they cannot deny that it is evil.
But what of this sort does a Christian ever do? No one is ashamed, no one regrets it — except only his former life. If he is denounced, he glories in it; if he is dragged off, he does not resist; if he is accused, he does not mount a defense; questioned, he confesses; condemned, he glories in that too. What manner of wickedness can this be, where the very character of wickedness collapses?
II.