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| Chapter XXIX. Account of Tatian’s Conversion.
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Chapter XXIX.—Account of Tatian’s Conversion.
Wherefore, having seen these things, and moreover
also having been admitted to the mysteries, and having everywhere
examined the religious rites performed by the effeminate and the pathic,
and having found among the Romans their Latiarian Jupiter delighting
in human gore and the blood of slaughtered men, and Artemis not far
from the great city498
| 498
At Aricia, near Rome. | sanctioning acts of the same kind,
and one demon here and another there instigating to the perpetration of
evil,—retiring by myself, I sought how I might be able to discover
the truth. And, while I was giving my most earnest attention to the
matter, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be
compared with the opinions of the Greeks, and too divine to be compared
with their errors; and I was led to put faith in these by the unpretending
cast of the language, the inartificial character of the writers, the
foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of
the precepts, and the declaration of the government of the universe
as centred in one Being.499
| 499
[A memorable tribute to the light-giving power of the Holy Scriptures.
“Barbarian books” (barbaric means something else)
they were; but well says Dr. Watts in a paraphrase of Ps. cxix. 96
(and comp. capp. xl., xli., infra),—
“Let all the heathen writers join to form one perfect book,
Great God if once compared with thine, how mean their writings
look!”
See his Hymns,
p. 238. Ed. Worcester, 1836.] | And, my soul being taught
of God, I discern that the former class of writings lead to condemnation,
but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue
us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants, while they
give us, not indeed what we had not before received, but what we had
received but were prevented by error from retaining.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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