Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Will you ask, then, for God's law? You have it in common, posted openly in the world, in the tables of nature — the very tables to which the apostle himself is accustomed to appeal, as when, on the matter of a woman's veil, he says: "Does not nature herself teach you?" — and as when, writing to the Romans, he says the nations do by nature the things of the law, suggesting both a natural law and a lawful nature. And in his earlier letter, affirming that men and women exchanged the natural use of their condition for the unnatural, in requital of their error, in place of a penalty, he is certainly pleading the cause of natural things. God himself, indeed, we first came to know according to nature — calling him, that is, the God of gods, presuming him good, and invoking him as judge. Do you ask whether nature ought to go ahead of us in the enjoyment of his creation? Yes — so that we not be swept along by that force by which the rival of God corrupted, together with man himself, the whole of creation that had been placed at man's disposal for fixed uses; whence the apostle too says it was subjected to vanity against its will — first to vain uses, and then overturned to shameful, unjust, and impious ones. So it is too that creation has been dragged into disrepute over the pleasures of the shows by those who do indeed feel, by nature, that everything the shows are furnished from belongs to God, but lack the knowledge to grasp this further point — that everything has been twisted by the devil. But on this subject too, on account of our lovers of sweet entertainments, I have already had my say in a Greek treatise as well.