Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So then, up until man's transgression, God was from the beginning only good — thereafter he becomes judge, and severe, and (as the Marcionites would have it) savage. At once the woman is condemned to bear children in pain and to be subject to her husband — she who before had heard, without a trace of sorrow, the blessing of increase for her race: "Increase and multiply" — she who had been appointed to be a help to the man, not a servant. At once the earth too is cursed, though before it had been blessed. At once thorns and thistles, though before there was grass and herbs and fruit-bearing trees. At once sweat and toil for bread, though before food was free from every tree and sustenance secure. Thereafter man is destined for the earth, though before he was made from the earth; thereafter destined for death, though before destined for life; thereafter clothed in skins, though before naked without a qualm. So the goodness of God comes first, according to nature; the severity comes after, according to a cause. The one is innate, the other incidental; the one proper to him, the other adapted to circumstance; the one original, the other applied as needed. For nature ought not to have kept goodness inoperative, nor should a cause have let severity go by unexercised. God gave the one to himself, the other to the situation. Begin now, then, to make out a case against the standing of the judge, as an accomplice of evil — you who for that very reason dreamed up another god, only good, simply because you cannot stomach a judge. And yet we have shown that even that other god is a judge as well; or if not a judge, then certainly the founder of a discipline that is perverse and pointless, since it is never enforced — that is, never judged. You cannot disapprove of God as judge without approving a god who is not a judge; and beyond doubt you will then have to indict justice itself, since it is justice that produces the judge — or else you must count it among the varieties of malice, that is, list injustice under the titles of goodness. For now, on your reckoning, justice becomes evil, if injustice is good. Further, once you are forced to pronounce injustice the worst of things, that same yoke compels you to reckon justice the best. For nothing that rivals evil is anything but good, just as nothing that rivals good is anything but evil. So then, in the same measure that injustice is evil, justice is good. And it must be reckoned not merely a species of goodness but its guardian, because goodness stripped of the rule of justice, left unable to be just, forfeits its own name as goodness — an unjust goodness is no goodness at all. For nothing is good that is unjust, but everything is good that is just.
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