Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 42-45 125
be made, as a complaint of one sort is balanced by the gain
coming from all other calculations.
CHAP. XLIII. I will readily confess what 'sort of people can
perhaps truly complain of the unprofitableness of the Christians.
First -will come the procurers, the pimps, the bulhes, then the
assassins, the poisoners, the magicians; hkewise the diviners,
the soothsayers, the astrologers. To be unprofitable to these
is great profit. And yet whatsoever loss there is to your
property through this sect, can be balanced by some protection
afforded by them. At what price do you value, I do not say,
those who have the power to drive out e-vil spirits from you
now—I do not now say those who offer their prayers for you
also before the true God, because perhaps you do not believe
in Him, but those from whom you have nothing to fear?
CHAP. XLIV. But indeed there is a loss to the state, as
great as it is real, to which no one pays any regard, an injury
to the state of which no one takes account, when in our persons
so many just men are wasted, so many innocent men are
squandered away. For we now appeal to your records of proceedings,
ye who daily preside over the trials of prisoners, who
by passing sentences erase the charges out of the calendar. So
many guilty persons are examined by you on various charges:
wha-t assassin there, what cutpurse, what sacrilegious person
or debaucher or thief of the baths, is there among them who
is also described as a Christian? Or, when Christians are prosecuted
on their specific charge (i.e. the charge of Christianity),
who among them is also such as so many criminals are? It
is with your own people that the prisons are always steaming,
your own people who make the mines re-echo to their sighs, the
wild beasts are always stuffed with the same, and from among
them too the givers of shows always -find herds of criminals to
feed. No one there is a Christian, unless he is nothing but a
Christian; or, if he be also anything else, he is already no
longer a Christian.
CHAP. XLV. We alone therefore are free from guilt. What
wonder, if it is ine-vitable ? For indeed it is inevitable. Taught
innocence by God, we both know it perfectly, seeing it has been
revealed by a perfect teacher, and guard it faithfully, as committed
to us by an observer who cannot be shghted. But to
you man's judgment has handed down uprightness, man's
tyranny, too, has commanded it: thence it is that you belong
to a discipline which is neither complete nor really to be feared