Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 26, 27 93
Judea would never have reigned in the past, since she disdained
all these ordinary di-vinities; and yet ye Romans for some time
honoured her God -with -victims, her temple -with gifts and her
people with treaties, nor would you ever have ruled over her, if
she had not sinned against God and finally against Christ also.
CHAP. XXVII. This meets the charge of injury to your
gods, since we cannot be supposed to injure that which we
have shown to be non-existent. Therefore when we are
chaUenged to sacrifice, we make a stand against it on the
strength of our conscience, whereby we are assured who those
are to whom these services extend under the profanation oi
images and the deification of human names. But some think
it madness that, when we might both sacrifice at the time and
depart uninjured, while retaining our own private opinions, we
should prefer stubbornness to safety. Forsooth you are giving
us ad-vice how to take advantage of you; but we recognise the
source of such hints, who it is that prompts all this, and how
at one time by cunning advice, at another by harsh cruelty,
he is working towards the overthrow of our firmness. Assuredly
that spirit of daemonic^ and angehc nature, which, being our
enemy on account of its separation (from God) and being
jealous on account of the favour of God (shown to us), wars
against us from the fortress of your minds, which by a secret
influence are regulated and equipped for all that perversity of
judgment and unfairness of cruelty which we began to describe
at the outset. For although all the power of daemons and spirits
of that kind is subject to us, yet hke worthless people and slaves
they sometimes mingle obstinacy with fear, and are eager to
injure those, of whom at another time they are afraid: for even
fear breathes hatred. Furthermore their hopeless state, arising
from the fact of their being foredoomed, gleans from the delay
of punishment the solace of enjoying their e-vil disposition during
the meantime. And yet when they are seized they are subdued
and yield to their fate, and those whom they attack afar off, they
supplicate when they are nigh. Therefore when, hke rebellious
slaves, confined in barracoons or prisons or mines or quarries
or suffering any other penal servitude of this kind, they break
out against us in whose power they are, kno-wing fuU well both
that they are ill-matched and that they are thus all the more
undone, we resist them against our will as equals and attack
them in return, continuing in that which they attack, and we
never triumph over them more than when we are condemned for
the persistence of our behef.
'' Read daemonicae, probably the only form kno-wn to Tertullian.