Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 9, 10 37
years, children in innocence. If you considered such to be the
case among yourselves, you would in consequence see clearly
that it was not the case among the Christians. The same eyes
would have reported both alike. But the two kinds of bhndness
easily combine: those who do not see what really is,
naturally think they see what is not. I will show this to be
the case throughout. Now I will speak about more open sins.
CHAP. X. You accuse us of refusing to worship the gods,
and to spend money on sacrificing for the emperors. It follows
that we refuse to sacrifice for others on the same principle that
we refuse even to sacrifice for ourselves, viz. by refusing once
for all to worship the gods. Consequently we are charged -with
sacrilege and treason. This is the main point in the case, nay it
is the whole case, and certainly worthy of investigation, if neither
prejudice nor unfairness is to be the judge, the' one despairing
of the truth, the other objecting to it. We cease to worship
your gods, from the moment we learn that they are no gods.
This therefore is what you ought to demand, that we should
prove that they are no gods, and therefore not to be worshipped,
because then only would it have been our duty to worship -them,
if they had been gods. Then too the Christians would have
deserved punishment, if it were certain that those whom they
did not worship, because they thought they had no existence,
were gods after all. 'But to us,'you say,'they are gods.' We
make application and appeal from you to your conscience; let
that judge us, let that condemn us, if it is able to deny that all
these gods of yours were human beings. If conscience shall
itself contest this, it -will be refuted from its o-wn documents of
ancient times, from which it has learned of them, for they give
evidence preserved to our day both of the communities in which
they were born and of the districts in which they did some work
of which they have left traces, and in which they are shown
actually to have been buried. Now shall I rtm over them one by
one, so many and so great as they are, new, old, barbarian, Greek,
Roman, strangers, captives, adopted, indi-vidual, common, male,
female, country, city, naval, military? It needs leisure even
to follow out their titles, even to sum up all in brief, not that you
may learn but that you may be reminded of them: for certainly
you play the part of those that have forgotten. Pre-vious to
Saturn there is no god among you, from him dates the origin of
all deity or at least of the more powerful and better known
divinity. Therefore what is established -with regard to the
origin, -will be vahd also -with regard to the later time. With
regard to Saturn therefore, if we make appeal to what we can