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| Truth and Reality Pertain to Christians Alone. The Heathen Counselled to Examine and Embrace It. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter
XX.—Truth and Reality Pertain to Christians Alone. The Heathen
Counselled to Examine and Embrace It.
How long therefore, O most unjust heathen, will
you refuse to acknowledge us, and (what is more) to execrate your own
(worthies), since between us no distinction has place, because we are
one and the same? Since you do not (of course) hate what you yourselves
are, give us rather your right hands in fellowship, unite your
salutations,759 mingle your embraces,
sanguinary with the sanguinary, incestuous with the incestuous,
conspirators with conspirators, obstinate and vain with those of the
selfsame qualities. In company with each other, we have been traitors
to the majesty of the gods; and together do we provoke their
indignation. You too have your “third race;”760 not indeed third in the way of religious
rite,761
761 As the Christians were
held to be; coming after (1) the heathen, (2) the Jews. See above, c.
viii., and Scorpiace, c. x. | but a third race in sex, and, made up as it
is of male and female in one, it is more fitted to men and women (for
offices of lust).762 Well, then, do we
offend you by the very fact of our approximation and agreement?
Being on a par is apt to furnish unconsciously the materials for
rivalry. Thus “a potter envies a potter, and a smith a
smith.”763
763 An oft-quoted proverb in
ancient writers. It occurs in Hesiod (Opp. et Dies) 25. | But we must now
discontinue this imaginary confession.764
764 Literally, “cease
henceforth, O, simulated confession.” | Our
conscience has returned to the truth, and to the consistency of truth.
For all those points which you allege765 (against us)
will be really found in ourselves alone; and we alone can rebut them,
against whom they are adduced, by getting you to listen766
766 This seems to be the
force of the “agnitione,” which Oehler renders
“auditione.” | to the other side of the question, whence
that full knowledge is learnt which both inspires counsel and directs
the judgment. Now it is in fact your own maxim, that no one
should determine a cause without hearing both sides of it; and it is
only in our own case that you neglect (the equitable principle). You
indulge to the full767 that fault of human
nature, that those things which you do not disallow in yourselves you
condemn in others, or you boldly charge768
against others those things the guilt of which769 you
retain a lasting consciousness of770 in yourselves.
The course of life in which you will choose to occupy yourselves is
different from ours: whilst chaste in the eyes of others, you
are unchaste towards
your own selves; whilst vigorous against vice out of doors, you succumb
to it at home. This is the injustice (which we have to suffer), that,
knowing truth, we are condemned by those who know it not; free from
guilt, we are judged by those who are implicated in it. Remove the
mote, or rather the beam, out of your own eye, that you may be able to
extract the mote from the eyes of others. Amend your own lives first,
that you may be able to punish the Christians. Only so far as you shall
have effected your own reformation, will you refuse to inflict
punishment on them—nay, so far will you have become Christians
yourselves; and as you shall have become Christians, so far will you
have compassed your own amendment of life. Learn what that is which you
accuse in us, and you will accuse no longer; search out what that is
which you do not accuse in yourselves, and you will become
self-accusers. From these very few and humble remarks, so far as we
have been able to open out the subject to you, you will plainly get
some insight into (your own) error, and some discovery of our
truth. Condemn that truth if you have the heart,771
but only after you have examined it; and approve the error still, if
you are so minded,772 only first explore
it. But if your prescribed rule is to love error and hate truth, why,
(let me ask,) do you not probe to a full discovery the objects both of
your love and your hatred?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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