Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
But since the form of the faith remains fixed in its own order, ask and probe it as much as you like, pour out every appetite of curiosity, and if something still seems to you to hang in ambiguity or lie shadowed in obscurity, well, there is surely some brother who teaches, gifted with the grace of knowledge, or someone practiced among the well-trained, or someone at your side who searches more carefully still. In the end, it is better not to know something than to know it in the wrong way — better not to be aware of what you ought not to know, precisely because you already know what you ought to know. "Your faith," it says, "has made you whole" — not your drilling in the Scriptures. Faith is set within a rule; it has its law, and its salvation from keeping that law. Drilling, by contrast, consists in mere curiosity, and its only glory is a reputation for expertise. Let curiosity yield to faith, let glory yield to salvation. At the very least, let them not shout each other down — let them fall silent instead. Against the rule, to know everything is to know nothing. Even if heretics were not, by that very fact, enemies of the truth, even if we were never warned to flee them, what sort of thing is it to sit down and confer with men who themselves confess they are still seeking? For if they really are still seeking, they have found nothing certain yet, and so whatever they seem for the moment to hold, they betray their own uncertainty precisely by the fact that they are still seeking. So you, seeking in step with them, looking to men who are themselves still seeking — doubtful consulting the doubtful, uncertain consulting the uncertain, blind led by the blind — you are bound to be led straight into the pit. But when it is to deceive that they pretend still to be seeking, so as to worm their own arguments into us by injecting anxiety, and then, the moment they have got us, they turn round and defend as settled the very things they had said still needed inquiry — then we must refute them in such a way that they know it is not Christ we are denying to them, but themselves. For as long as they are still seeking, they do not yet hold it; and as long as they do not yet hold it, they have not yet believed; and as long as they have not yet believed, they are not Christians. But even when they do in fact hold it and believe it, they still say it must be sought — in order to defend it. Before they can defend it, then, they deny what they believe, confessing by their very seeking that they have not yet believed. Men who are thus not even Christians to themselves — how much less are they Christians to us? Men who come by trickery — what kind of faith are they arguing for? What truth are they patronizing, when they lead that truth in on the arm of a lie? "But," they say, "they themselves work from the Scriptures, and persuade from the Scriptures." Of course — from where else could they possibly speak about matters of faith, except from the documents of the faith?