Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] These points, once weighed, show the whole order of God the judge to be the workman — and, to put it more worthily, the guardian — of that catholic and supreme goodness which the Marcionites refuse to acknowledge in this same God, wanting it kept separate from any judicial sensibilities and pure in its own isolated state: the goodness that rains on the good and the bad alike and makes its sun rise on the just and the unjust — something the other god provides not at all. For even though Marcion dared to strike this very testimony to Christ's Creator out of the Gospel, the world itself stands inscribed with it and is read by every conscience. [2] And this very patience of the Creator will stand in judgment against Marcion — that patience which awaits a sinner's turning back rather than longing for his death, and which favors mercy over sacrifice; which turned aside the destruction already decreed for the Ninevites, and granted Hezekiah's tears a span of extra life, and restored the kingdom of Babylon to its tyrant once he had done penance — that same mercy, I say, which granted Saul's doomed son to a people's devotion, and freed David, once he confessed his sin against the house of Uriah, by pardon, and restored Israel itself as many times as it judged it, and revived it as many times as it rebuked it. [3] So do not merely look at the judge and be converted also to the model of the supremely good. Note him when he punishes, but consider him also when he forgives. Weigh his gentleness against his severity. Once you have discovered both meeting together in the Creator, you will also discover in him that very quality on account of which you put faith in another god. Come, finally, to an inspection of his teachings, his disciplines, his precepts and counsels. You will say, perhaps, that these too are fixed by human laws. But before the Lycurguses and Solons of the world, there was Moses, and there was God. No posterity fails to receive from its beginnings. [4] Yet it was not from your god that my Creator learned to prescribe: You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet what is another's, honor your father and mother, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. To these principal counsels of innocence, chastity, justice, and piety are added prescriptions of humanity as well — such as freedom granted to slaves once every seven years, with the land likewise given its rest in that same season, yielding its place to the poor, and even the ox treading out the grain has the muzzle loosed from its mouth so as to enjoy the fruit of its present labor — so that this premeditated humanity, practiced first on beasts, might the more readily be schooled toward the relief of men.
18.