Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We flatter ourselves badly over the necessities of human survival if, once the seal of faith is set upon us, we say: I have nothing to live on. Here I will answer that reckless claim more fully. It is said too late. The reckoning ought to have been made beforehand, on the model of that most prudent builder who first counts the cost of the work against his resources, so that he need not blush later, once begun, at running short. [2] But already you possess the Lord's own sayings and examples that strip away every excuse. What do you say? I shall be in want. But the Lord calls the poor blessed. I shall have nothing to eat — but do not think about food, he says. And for clothing we have the example of the lilies. Someone needed capital — yet all must be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. But, you say, provision has to be laid up for one's children and heirs — no one who sets his hand to the plow and turns back is fit for the work. But that was conditional, you say — no one can serve two masters. If you wish to be a disciple of the Lord, you must take up your cross and follow the Lord, that is, your own straits and torments, or simply the body, which is itself shaped like a cross. [3] Parents, spouses, children — all must be abandoned for God's sake. Do you still waver over trades and businesses and professions merely on account of children and parents? It was already demonstrated to us that pledges and crafts and businesses alike must be abandoned for the Lord's sake, when James and John, called by the Lord, leave behind their father and their boat, when Matthew is roused up from the tax booth, when even to bury one's father was judged too slow for faith. [4] Not one of those the Lord chose said, I have nothing to live on. Faith does not fear hunger. It knows that hunger, no less than every kind of death, is to be despised for God's sake. It has learned not to look back at life — how much less at food? How many, though, have actually fulfilled this? But what is hard with men is easy with God. [5] Still, let us not so flatter ourselves on God's gentleness and mercy that we indulge our needs to the point of brushing against idolatry, but rather let us shun its every breath, as we would a plague, even from a distance — not only in the matters already mentioned, but through the whole range of human superstition, whether it is enslaved to its gods or to the dead or to kings, since all of it belongs to the same unclean spirits, now through sacrifices and priesthoods, now through spectacles and their like, now through festival days.
XIII.