Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] I will refute these charges all the more effectively by showing that the very things you accuse us of are done by you yourselves, partly in the open, partly in secret — through which, perhaps, you have also come to believe them of us.
[2] In Africa infants were sacrificed openly to Saturn, right up to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests on the very trees overshadowing their temple, on votive crosses, as a punishment for their crimes — as the army of our own homeland can testify, which performed that very service for the proconsul. [3] But even now, in secret, this sacred crime persists. It is not only you Christians it holds in contempt; no crime is ever permanently uprooted, nor does any god change the customs he has established. [4] Since Saturn did not spare even his own children, he certainly went on, without sparing, to consume outsiders' children as well — children their own parents actually offered up, and did so willingly, coaxing the infants so that they would not cry as they were sacrificed. And yet there is a great difference between mere homicide and outright parricide.
[5] Among the Gauls, grown men are cut up in sacrifice to Mercury. I set aside the Taurian legends and leave them to their theaters. Look — within that city of Aeneas's devout descendants, so famed for its piety, there is a certain Jupiter whom they drench in their games with human blood. "But that's the beast-fighters," you say. That, I suppose, is somehow less than human! Or is it worse, precisely because it's the blood of a bad man? Certainly, all the same, it is poured out from homicide. Oh, a Christian Jupiter — the only father's son to feed on cruelty!
[6] But since, where infanticide is concerned, it makes no difference whether it is done as a sacred rite or by mere private choice — even though parricide differs from ordinary homicide — let me turn to the general public. How many, I wonder, of these very bystanders, gaping for Christian blood, of even you yourselves, our most just and severe governors, might I press hard upon your own consciences with the question of how many of you have done away with your own children at birth? [7] If indeed the manner of the killing makes any difference, you certainly do it more cruelly, choking out the breath in water, or exposing the child to cold and hunger and dogs; even a grown man, if he had the choice, would rather die by the sword. [8] For us, however, homicide having been forbidden once and for all, we are not permitted to destroy even the child in the womb, while the blood is still being formed into a human being. To prevent a birth is merely a hastened murder, and it makes no difference whether one snatches away a soul once born, or tears one apart in the act of being born. He too is a human being who is going to be one; every fruit already exists in its seed.
[9] As for the feeding on blood and dishes of that tragic kind — read, and see if it is not recorded somewhere, in Herodotus I believe, that certain nations sealed a treaty by each drinking blood drawn from the other's arm. Something of the sort was tasted, I know not what, in Catiline's day too. They say too that among certain tribes of the Scythians, each dead man is eaten by his own kin. [10] But I need not range so far. This very day, right here, blood consecrated to Bellona, drawn from a gashed thigh and caught in the cupped palm, is given as a seal to her devotee. [11] And those men too, who at the arena games gulp down, in their eager thirst, the fresh blood of slaughtered criminals, running warm from the throat, as a cure for the falling sickness — where are they? And what of those who dine on the arena's beast-fed dainties, who go after boar or stag? That boar was wiped clean of the blood he wrestled and drew; that stag lay steeped in a gladiator's blood. Men crave the very bellies of bears, still undigested from human entrails; so flesh belches back from man that has been fed on man. [12] You who eat such things — how far are you, really, from the banquets of the Christians? And do those others do less, who with wild lust gape after human limbs, because they devour them alive? Are they less consecrated to filth by human blood, because they only lap up blood that is still to come? They do not, granted, eat infants — but rather the grown.
[13] Let your error blush before Christians, who do not so much as taste the blood of animals at our meals, and who for that very reason also abstain from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be defiled by blood buried even within the flesh. [14] And yet, among your tests for Christians, you press on us sausages stuffed with blood, perfectly certain, of course, that this is the very thing forbidden them, by which you mean to trip them into straying. But how does it make sense that men you are confident shrink in horror from the blood of cattle should be believed to gape after human blood — unless perhaps you suppose they have found it sweeter? [15] That very test, in fact, ought to be applied to the examination of Christians, just as the burning coal and the incense-box are. For in that way they would be proven guilty by craving human blood exactly as they are proven guilty by refusing to sacrifice; otherwise, they would have to be denied conviction for not tasting it, exactly as for not sacrificing. And in any case, from the hearing of prisoners and the condemning of the guilty, you would certainly never run short of human blood.
[16] Now then, who is more given to incest than those whom Jupiter himself has instructed? Ctesias reports that the Persians mingle with their own mothers. But the Macedonians too are suspect, since, the first time they heard the tragedy of Oedipus performed, they laughed at his anguish over incest and said: " Drive on — into your mother! " [17] Consider now how much room errors like these leave for incestuous mingling, given how much material the passivity of self-indulgence supplies. To begin with, you expose your own children, to be picked up by whatever passing stranger's pity, or to be adopted, once given up, by better parents. Once a lineage has been alienated in this way, the memory of it is bound eventually to be scattered; and the moment an error strikes, incest then spreads on, generation creeping after generation along with the crime. [18] Then again, wherever one happens to be — at home, abroad, across the sea — lust is a constant companion, and its leaps can easily plant children, unknown to their fathers, in any place, out of some stray portion of seed, so that a lineage scattered in this way through human commerce may converge again upon its own kin, blind to the blood-tie of incest it cannot recognize. [19] We are fenced off from any such outcome by a most careful and faithful chastity; and to the very degree that we are safe from illicit unions and from any straying after marriage, to that same degree we are safe from falling into incest. Some among us, far more secure still, drive off the whole force of this error by lifelong virgin continence — old men who have remained boys.
[20] If you considered that these things exist among yourselves, you would see accordingly that they do not exist among Christians. The same eyes would report both facts. But a double blindness pairs up readily enough: those failing to notice what is actually present imagine they perceive what isn't there at all. I will go on to show this in everything. For now, let me speak of the more obvious matters.