Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
If we are commanded, as we said above, to love our enemies, whom is left for us to hate? Likewise, if we are forbidden to return an injury—so that we don't become equal to the wrongdoer through the very act—whom can we possibly harm? Consider that point for yourselves! How often you rage against Christians, sometimes on your own initiative, sometimes in obedience to the laws! How often, even without your involvement, the mob claims its own right and attacks us with stones and fire! In their very Bacchanalian frenzy they spare not even dead Christians—dragging some, and not even whole, from the rest of the grave, from that asylum which death itself provides, tearing them apart, hacking them to pieces! Yet in all this conspiracy of hatred marked against us, this readiness to face death itself over some injury done to us, what have you ever noted us doing in retaliation—when a single night with a handful of torches could accomplish plenty of revenge, if it were permitted among us to pay back evil with evil? God forbid that a divine religion should be avenged by human fire, or grieve to suffer the very thing by which it is proven!
For if we wanted to act as open enemies rather than as secret avengers, would we lack the strength of numbers and forces? The Moors, no doubt, and the Marcomanni, and the Parthians themselves, or any nation whatsoever, however great, confined to one region and its own borders, are fewer than we, who belong to the whole world. We sprang up only recently, and already we have crowded into every place belonging to you—the cities, the islands, the strongholds, the towns, the meeting-halls, the very army camps themselves, the tribes, the decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum—leaving you nothing but your temples! For what war would we not have been fit, would we not have been eager, even outnumbered as we are, we who are slaughtered so willingly—if it were not that our religion makes it more permissible for us to be killed than to kill?
We could have fought against you, even unarmed and without rebellion, simply by parting ways—by the sheer resentment of separation. For if so vast a multitude of us had torn ourselves away from you to some remote corner of the world, the loss of so many citizens of whatever quality would certainly have covered your dominion with shame—indeed, would have punished it by that very desertion. Beyond doubt you would have been terrified at your own emptiness, at the hush surrounding you and that numbness typical of a lifeless world; you would have had to go searching for subjects to govern; foes would have outnumbered citizens left to you. As it is, your enemies are actually fewer precisely on account of the sheer numbers of Christians—since almost every city, almost every one of its citizens, now belongs to Christ. And yet it pleases you to brand us haters of mankind, when it is really human wrongdoing you should be branding.
But who would rescue you from those hidden enemies that everywhere lay waste to your minds and your health—I mean the assaults of demons—which we drive off from you without fee, without payment? This alone should have been recompense enough for our vengeance: that from then on the vacated dwelling would stand open to unclean spirits! And yet, giving no thought to the return owed for so great a protection, you have chosen to judge us not merely a nuisance to you but positively necessary as enemies—since enemies, plainly, we are, though not of the human race, but rather of human error.