Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I will not omit a description of the heretical way of life itself — so trivial a thing it is, so worldly, so purely human in cast, lacking gravity, lacking authority, lacking discipline, fitting its faith to a nicety. [2] To begin with, no one can tell who is a catechumen and who is a believer — they come in together, listen together, pray together; and if pagans should show up as well, they will throw what is holy to dogs and pearls — not real ones — to pigs. [3] What they want to call simplicity is really the collapse of order, and the discipline we take such care over they call flattery. They mix and merge peace with everybody, indiscriminately. [4] It makes no difference to them, however much they differ among themselves, so long as they conspire together to storm the one truth. All of them are puffed up, all of them promise "knowledge." Their catechumens are perfected before they are even taught. [5] And the women among these heretics — how shameless! They dare to teach, to argue, to perform exorcisms, to promise cures, and quite possibly even to baptize. [6] Their ordinations are reckless, casual, inconsistent: now they install men fresh out of the font, now men still bound to the world, now apostates from our ranks — binding them by the lure of rank, since they cannot bind them by truth. [7] Nowhere is promotion easier than in a rebel camp, where the mere fact of being there counts as merit. [8] And so one man is bishop today, another tomorrow; today's deacon is tomorrow's reader; today's presbyter, tomorrow's layman. For they even lay priestly duties on laymen.