Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In this you judge even against the very form of judging the wicked. For when the guilty are brought in, if they deny the charge, you press them with tortures to a confession; but when Christians confess of their own accord, you constrain them with tortures to denial. [2] What perversity is this, that you fight against a confession, that you invert the very function of torture — willing that the guilty escape, forcing the unwilling to deny? Governors, in extorting the truth from us alone you hunt for a lie, that we may say we are not what we are. [3] It would seem you have no wish for us to be counted wicked, and so you are eager to strike us off that name. Do you really aim at this with everyone else too, and put them on the rack, that they may deny what they are said to be? Yet when they deny it you do not believe them: us, if we deny, you believe at once. [4] If you are certain we are the most guilty of criminals, why in this one matter are we treated differently from the guilty? I do not even mention that you give no room either for accusation or for defense (you are used to condemning the unaccused and undefended without much scruple): [5] but, for example, if the question concerns a murderer, once he has confessed, the case is not closed nor the inquiry satisfied by the mere name of "murderer" alone (though you find confessions themselves hard to believe), [6] no — you demand, besides, all the particulars: how many killings he committed, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, with what accomplices and receivers, so that nothing at all of the man's wickedness may lie hidden or be missing to furnish the truth needed for sentencing. [7] But in our case, whom you charge with more numerous and more atrocious crimes, you draw up briefer and lighter indictments: it would seem you have no wish for further charges piled onto us, though you want us ruined by every possible accusation — or you think there's no need to look into what you already "know." [8] This then is more perverse still: that you force us to deny what you claim to know for certain — indeed, the more it suited your hatred, once the ordinary form of trial was set aside, to strive by your own special zeal not for denial (lest you free those you hate), but for the confession of each separate crime, so that your enmity might be glutted the more by a heaping-up of penalties, while it is reckoned how many of those infamous banquets each man has already attended, how often he has rushed into incest in the dark. [9] What of this — that the inquiry, meant to root out our whole race, ought to have been spread wider, the investigation extended to accomplices and confederates? The baby-killers and the cooks should have been produced, the very dogs that serve as pandars — the matter would have been cleared up. Even the public shows would have gained an attraction: with what eagerness would people flock to the arena to watch some fighter who had devoured a hundred infants! [10] For if such horrifying, such monstrous things are reported of us, they surely ought to have been dragged into the light, lest they seem incredible and the public hatred of us cool off. For indeed most people already temper their belief in such tales, out of respect for nature, which has shut off from the human race even the appetite for beastly food, let alone intercourse with it.
III.