Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
So then, if the partnership and mutual concord of goodness and justice cannot admit of their being pulled apart, with what face will you establish a duality of gods, assigning in separate compartments a good god here and a just god there? Where the good stands, there the just stands too. From the very beginning, indeed, the Creator was as good as he was just. Both proceeded together. His goodness worked the world into being; his justice gave it measure and proportion — the very justice that even then judged the world worthy of being made from good things, because it judged in accordance with the counsel of goodness. It is justice at work when a dividing line gets drawn: light on one side, shadow on the other; daytime set apart from nighttime; sky marked off from ground; the waters above kept distinct from those beneath; the gathered seas parted from the dry land now exposed; the greater luminary distinguished from the lesser, each ruling its own stretch of hours; male set opposite female; the tree bearing the knowledge that brings death set opposite the tree bearing life; the present world set opposite paradise; and creatures shaped from the deep set opposite creatures formed from the soil. Everything that goodness conceived, justice marked out and distinguished. All this was arranged and set in order by an act of judgment. Every position, every disposition of the elements, every effect, every motion, every state, every rising and every setting of each single thing — these are the judgments of the Creator. Do not imagine, then, that he is to be defined as a judge only from the point where evil began, and so smear justice with the taint of evil's cause. By these arguments we have shown that justice came forth together with goodness, the source of all things, so that justice itself must be reckoned innate in God and natural to him, not something acquired from outside — justice that has been found in the Lord to be the arbiter of his own works.
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