Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 8, 9 31
and lamps and some dogs and httle morsels of meat, to make
them strain and overturn the lamps; above all you will have
to come with your mother and sister. What if they refuse or if
you have none? What in a word are solitary.Christians to do?
Every lawful Christian will be, I suppose, either a brother or
a son. What now, even if all these things are prepared for those
who know nothing about them? At any rate they learn it
later, and endure it and pardon it! You will say they fear
punishment, though, if they declared the facts, they would
deserve every protection, and though they would rather suffer
•death than five with such a consciousness of guilt! Suppose,
however, that they are still afraid, why do they still continue
to be Christians ? For it follows that you no longer wish to be
that which you would never have become if you had known
beforehand.
CHAP. IX. To refute these charges more effectively, I will
show that these crimes are perpetrated by you both in public
and in secret, which is perhaps the reason that you have come to
Leheve them about us also. Babes were sacrificed publicly to
•Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed
the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes
of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the
soldiery of my father^, which performed that very service for
that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret
kept up. It is not the Christians only who despise you; nor
is any crime rooted out once for all, nor does any god change
his character. Since Saturn did not spare his own children,
of course he stuck to his habit of not sparing those of other
people, whom indeed their own parents offered of themselves,
being pleased to answer the call, and fondled the infants, lest
they should weep when being sacrificed. And yet a parent's
murder of his child is far worse than simple homicide. Among
the Gauls adults are sacrificed to Mercury. I leave the fables
about the Taurians to the theatres to which they belong. Lo,
in that deeply rehgious city of the pious descendants of Aeneas
there is a certain Jupiter whom at his own games they drench
with human blood. ' But,' say you,' only that of a criminal condemned
to the beasts.' This, I suppose, is of less value than that
of a human being. Or is this the viler, because it is that of an
evil man? At any rate it is the blood of homicide that is shed.
What a Christian is Jupiter, the only son of his father in point
of cruelty! But since, in a case of infanticide, it matters not
whether it is carried out as a sacred rite or out of mere caprice
^ Beading patris nostri.