Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 6, 7 25
language itself you have abandoned your ancestors. You are
always praising old times, but you change your position from
•day to day. By this it is shown that, in departing from the
good customs of your ancestors, you retain and preserve those
which you ought not, while you have not preserved those which
you ought. Even the very thing that you still seem most faithfully
to guard, as handed down by your ancestors, that in which
most of all you have marked the Christians as guilty of transgression,
I mean zeal in the worship of the gods, (concerning
which early ages made the greatest mistakes,) although you have
built up again the altars to Serapis, now become a Roman,
although you present the frantic orgies of your worship to
Bacchus, now an Italian, I will show in the proper place that
these are ahke looked down upon and slighted and undermined
.by you against the authority of your ancestors. But now I will
reply to that evil reputation for secret crimes, to clear my way
for the more open ones.
CHAP. VII. We are called abominable from the sacrament
of infanticide and the feeding thereon, as well as the incestuous
intercourse, following the banquet, because the dogs, that overturn
the lamps, (our pimps forsooth of the darkness) bring
about the shamelessness engendered by our impious lusts.
Yet we are but called so on each occasion, and you take no pains
to bring to light what we have been so long charged with. Therefore
either prove the fact, if you believe it, or refuse to beheve it,
you who have not proved it. For your want of straightforwardness
a preliminary objection is raised against you, that that
cannot be true which not even you yourselves dare to search out.
It is quite a different duty that you lay upon the executioner
against the Christians, namely, not that they should say of what
they are guilty, but that they should deny what they are. The
beginning of this teaching, as I have already stated, dates from
Tiberius. Truth from the first was accompanied by hatred of
herself: from her first appearance she is an enemy. She has
as many enemies as there are strangers to her, the Jews indeed
quite specially so from jealousy, the soldiers from their violence,
and even the very members of our households from natural illfeeling.
We are daily besieged, we are daily betrayed, even
in our very meetings and assembhes we are frequently surprised.
Who ever came upon an infant waihng under such circumstances?
Who ever kept for the judge the bloodstained faces of Cyclopes
and Sirens just as he had found them? Who detected even on
our wives any trace of impurity ? Who when he had discovered
such crimes, concealed them or sold his concealment of them,