By Water & Blood

Chapter 4

With good reason then do we avow that we have been freed from all this, and rescued from the long and antiquated delusion as from some terrible and most grievous disease. First, we have been delivered by the grace and beneficence of Almighty God, and secondly by the ineffable power of our Saviour's teaching in the Gospel, and thirdly by sound reasoning, because we judged that it is an unholy and impious thing to honour with the adorable name of God mortals who have long been lying among the dead, and have not even left a memory of themselves as virtuous men, but have handed down examples of extreme incontinence and wantonness, of cruelty also and insanity, for those who come after them to follow.

For must it not be the extreme of folly for lovers of temperance to yield the first place to the base and licentious, and for the wise and sensible to render august worship to those who have lost their senses, and those who practise justice and benevolence to those who, through excess of cruelty and inhumanity, are involved in the pollutions of infanticide and parricide?

And does it not surpass every excess of impiety to degrade the adorable and all-holy name of God to parts of the human body, male and female, which we may not speak of, and to the irrational nature of brute beasts; and to honour as divine such foul and inhuman deeds as, even in the case of human malefactors would, if proved, fall under the inexorable penalties of the laws? But why need we spend time in proclaiming to every man, barbarian and Greek alike, his deliverance from the evils described, and in bringing to light the reasonableness of our revolt from gods falsely so called, when already the greater number even of the most superstitious, having woke up as it were from a deep slumber, and cleared the eye of the soul of its ancient film, became conscious of the deep folly of the error of their fathers, and took their stand upon reasoning, and withdrew from the old path, and chose the other way?

Some of these made a bold assault, and with broad derision poured contempt upon the whole mythology of their own forefathers; while others, who shrank from the dogma of atheism, neither stood upon their old ways, nor withdrew from them altogether, but, with the purpose of glossing over and explaining their own dogma, gave to the true histories of the gods who had been celebrated among them the title of fables invented by poets, and said that physical theories were concealed in them. And however much they fail to bring any proof whatever of the truth of these theories, it will nevertheless be necessary for us to set forth for examination their solemn doctrines, that thus we may prove the reasonableness of that retreat from them which was provided for us solely by the teaching of our Saviour in the Gospel. Come then, let us take up their argument from the beginning and examine it.

CHAPTER V.

For not in a mere part of the earth, nor in a corner of the land of one nation, but throughout the whole inhabited world, where the power of the most superstitious delusion especially prevailed, He, like a sun of intelligent and rational souls, spread abroad the beams of His own light: He translated us all, of every race of mankind, barbarians and Greeks alike, as it were from a terrible darkness and most gloomy and obscure night of superstitious error into the bright and shining day of the true worship of God the King of all.

Certainly the statements that have been already quoted have plainly taught us, that those who in cities and villages have been excited about this delusion of many gods were all universally serving and worshipping images of the dead, and statues of men who have long since passed away. For the men of old, because of the extreme savageness of their life at that time made no account of God the Creator of all, nor paid any heed to the divine judgement which takes vengeance on wrong doing, but cast themselves headlong into every kind of profanity.

For at that time there were no laws yet established for the guidance of life, no civilized government set in order among men, but they led a loose and wandering life like that of the beasts: and some of them, like irrational animals, cared for nothing beyond the filling of their belly, and among these the first kind of atheism found a home; but others, being in some small degree stirred by natural instincts, conceived that God, and God's power, was some good and salutary thing, and because they wished to find Him, they raised their souls aloft to heaven, and there stopping short in thought, and being astonished at the various beauties of the luminaries which gave and received light in heaven, declared that these were gods.

But a third and different class cast themselves down upon earth, and seeing those who had been thought to excel their contemporaries in wisdom, or had become masters of the multitude by strength of body and power of government, such as giants or tyrants, or even sorcerers and quacks, who after some falling off from holier ways had devised their evil arts of sorcery, or others who had been the authors of some common benefit to human life,----to these, both while yet living and after death, they gave the title of gods. And from this cause the houses of their gods are mentioned as being tombs of the dead, as Clement relates in his Exhortation to the Greeks, bringing forward Greeks themselves as witnesses of his statement. Listen then again, if it please you, to what he writes in the following style:^[57]