Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Since, then, no other world appears, any more than its god does, the consequence is that they divide the two categories of things, the visible and the invisible, between two creator-gods, and thereby claim the invisible things for their own god. But who — apart from a heretical spirit — could ever be persuaded that the invisible things belong to one who put forward nothing visible beforehand, rather than to one who, having made the visible things, thereby also earned credit for the invisible — since it is far more just to trust someone with a track record of examples than someone with none at all? We shall see, when we come to examine your apostle too, to which author he assigns the invisible things. For now, it is chiefly by common sense and by fair argument that we lay the groundwork of conviction, ahead of the appeal to scripture that will follow, establishing that this diversity of visible and invisible things is to be assigned to the Creator precisely because his whole operation consists of such diversities — of bodily and incorporeal things, of things that live and things that do not, of things that speak and things silent, of what moves and what stays fixed, of fertile and barren, of dry and moist, of hot and cold.
So too diversity has tempered man himself, both in body and in feeling. Some limbs are strong, others weak; some honorable, others shameful; some come in pairs, others stand alone; some match, others do not. Likewise in feeling: now joy, now anxiety; now love, now hatred; now anger, now gentleness. But if this is so — if the whole universe has been tuned by conditions that rival and answer one another — then invisible things too are owed to the visible, to be assigned to no other author than the one to whom their rivals belong, since it is the Creator himself who marks out these contrasts, commanding what he forbade and forbidding what he commanded, striking down and healing. Why, in this one category alone, do they insist he must be uniform — creator of visible things only — when by the very same logic he must be believed to have made both the visible and the invisible, just as he made both life and death, both evils and peace? And indeed, if those invisible things are greater than the visible creatures, which in their own sphere are already great, then it fits all the more that the greater things belong to him to whom the great things belong — since neither the great, let alone the greater, can suit one to whom not even the modest things can be shown to belong. Turn to chapter 17.