Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 37 109
upon you for injuries inflicted on us who are so united and so
stout-hearted even to death, when even a single night with
a few httle torches could effect abundant vengeance, if it were
allowable amongst us to wipe out wrong with wrong? But
a truce to the thought that a sect actuated by the spirit of
God should either be avenged by the torch of man or should
shrink from suffering that by which it is tested. For if we
-wished to play the part also of declared enemies, and not merely
that of secret avengers, should we lack the force of numbers
and of troops ? The Moors and the Marcomani and the Parthians
themselves, or any races of whatsoever size, which are limited
nevertheless to one place and to their own territory, are I suppose
more numerous than we are whose region is coextensive with
the whole world! We are but of yesterday, yet we have filled
all that is yours, cities, islands, fortified towns, country towns,
centres of meeting, even camps, tribes, classes of pubhc attendants,
the palace, the senate, the forum; we have left you only
your temples. For what war should we not have been fitted
and ready, even if we had been unequal in forces, we, who are
so -wilhng to be butchered, if it had not been more permissible
according to this teaching of ours to be slain than to slay ? We
could also. Unarmed, and not rebellious but merely disagreeing,
have fought against you, using only the weapon of the ill-will
which our separation creates. For if such a mass of men as
we are had broken off from you and gone to some distant corner
of the world, the loss of so many citizens, of whatever sort,
would assuredly have shamed your rule, nay rather would have
punished it even by the very fact of its desertion. Without
doubt you would have been panic-stricken at your solitude,
at the silence of business and the death-hke stupefaction of
the world; you would have had to seek subjects to rule over.
More enemies would have remained to you than subjects. Now
as a matter of fact you have fewer enemies, in consequence of
the multitude of the Christians, owing to the fact that nearly
aU the citizens you have in nearly all the cities are Christian.
But you have chosen to call them enemies of the human race
rather than of human error. Moreover, who would have
snatched you from those secret enemies that everywhere play
havoc with your minds and health ? I mean from the incursions
of spirits, which we drive from you, without reward and without
price. This alone would have been sufficient for our vengeance,
that an empty tenement was then left open to unclean spirits.
Further, without even a thought of the compensation required
for so great a protection, you have preferred to consider as
enemies a class which is not only harmless to you, but even