Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 21, 22 75-
But we will show you that the very persons whom you worship
are reliable witnesses of Christ. It is a great point, if, to make
you believe the Christians, I can employ those on whose account
you now disbelieve them. Meantime this is the order of our
teaching, this the beginning both of our sect and name together
-with that of its founder. Let no one now charge us -with
dishonour, let no one believe any other thing than this, because
it is not permitted to any one to tell lies about his own rehgion.
For from the moment that a man says anything is worshipped
by him other than what he worships, he denies what he worships,
and transfers both worship and honour to another, and by
transferring he now no longer worships that which he denied.
We affirm and affirm openly and, torn and bleeding, as we are,
under your torture, we cry aloud, 'We worship God through
Christ.' Suppose him to be a man: it is through him and in
him that God desires himself to be known and worshipped. But
to reply to the Jews, they themselves too were taught to worship
the Lord through the man Moses: and to meet the objections
of the Greeks, Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus
at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia bound men by initiations: to
turn my attention to you also, the rulers of the nations, Numa
Pompihus, who loaded the Romans -with most irksome superstitions,
was a man. Let it be allowed to Christ to imagine
di-vinity to be his own possession, not as a mere name by which
he was to tone down to a true humanity a barbarous herd, by
making them awe-struck at the crowd of so many divine powers
that had to be appeased, as Numa did, but so as to open to the
recognition of the truth the eyes of men already refined and
deceived by their very refinement. Seek then and see whether
this di-vinity of Christ be true. If it is that on the learning
of which any one is reformed and becomes good, it follows that
the unreal (di-^dnity) must be given up, as all that method in
particular has been found out, which hiding itself under names
and representations of dead persons does by certain signs and
wonders and oracles work behef in its own divinity.
CHAP. XXII. And further we say that there are certain
spiritual substances; nor is the name unusual. The philosophers
are familiar with daemons, since Socrates himself waited on the
will of a daemon. Why not? A daemon is said to have
actually attached itself to him since boyhood, evidently to
dissuade him from good. All the poets know them., even the
untaught rabble makes constant use of them for cursing; for
they utter even the name of Satan, the chief of this e-vil class,
as it were from the soul's innate knowledge, -with the same