Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
You, then, are the troublemakers of human affairs, you are the guilty ones, always the enticers of public misfortune, among whom God is spurned and statues are worshiped. For surely it is more credible that the one who is neglected should be angry than the ones who are worshiped; or else your gods are grossly unjust, if because of the Christians they injure their own worshipers too, whom they ought instead to set apart from the deserts of the Christians! "This," you say, "rebounds on your own God as well, if he too, on account of his profane worshipers, allows harm to fall on them." Grant first a hearing to his arrangements, and you will not turn the charge back on us. For he who has set a single eternal judgment after the end of the age does not rush the sorting-out that is the very condition of judgment, ahead of the end of the age. In the meantime he is even-handed toward the whole human race, both indulgent and reproving; he willed that both benefits and hardships should be common to the profane and the pious alike, so that by that same shared lot all of us might experience both his gentleness and his severity. Because we have learned this directly from him, we love his gentleness, we fear his severity; you, on the contrary, despise both. And the result is that all the world's calamities fall on us, if at all, as a warning, but on you as a punishment from God. Yet in fact we are not harmed at all — first, because in this present age nothing matters to us except how quickly we may leave it; and further, because if any misfortune is inflicted, it is charged to your account. But even if some of these things graze us too, as being bound up with you, we rejoice all the more, recognizing in them the divine predictions being confirmed, which strengthen our confidence and the faith of our hope. But if, on the other hand, every evil that befalls you comes from the very gods you worship, and comes because of us, why do you persist in worshiping such thankless, such unjust gods, who ought rather to be helping and standing by you in the Christians' suffering?