Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Look now also at the very examples of divine power. Daylight expires into nightfall, laid to rest on every side beneath the dark; the world's glory is put into mourning, its whole substance blackened: all things grow filthy, fall silent, stand stunned; everywhere there is a stoppage of business, a stillness of things — so is the lost light mourned. [2] And yet again, with its full array, its dowry, its sun, that same day, whole and entire, comes back to life for the whole world, killing its own death, night, tearing open its own burial-place, the darkness, becoming its own heir — until night too comes back to life, with its own retinue restored. [3] The stars' rays are rekindled, though the morning blaze had put them out; the stars' absences, which the passage of time had removed, are brought back; the moon's mirror-faces, worn down by the monthly count, are refurbished. [4] Winters and summers, springs and autumns, roll round again, each with its own strengths, habits, fruits. Indeed the earth too takes its lesson from heaven: to clothe the trees again after their stripping, to color the flowers anew, to set the grasses up once more, to bring forth again the very seeds that were consumed — and not to bring them forth until they have been consumed. [5] A wondrous logic: out of the defrauder, a preserver; it intercepts in order to give back, it destroys in order to keep, it kills in order to make alive, it damages in order to make whole, it first squanders in order even to increase — since indeed it restores things richer and more cultivated than it had wiped out: truly a usury made of ruin, a profit made of loss and injury. [6] Let me say it once for all: the whole created order is a thing of recurrence. Whatever you meet with has already been; whatever you lose will be again. Nothing is not repeated: all things return to their state once they have departed, all things begin again once they have ceased; they are ended only so that they may come to be; nothing perishes except into salvation. [7] This whole revolving order of things is, then, a testimony to the resurrection of the dead: God prescribed it first in works before he did in letters, proclaimed it first in powers before he did in words. [8] He sent nature ahead of you as a schoolmistress, meaning later to send prophecy as well, so that you might the more readily believe prophecy, being already nature's pupil — so that the moment you hear it you might accept at once what you have already seen everywhere — and not doubt that the God whom you know to be the restorer of all things is also the reviver of the flesh. [9] And surely, if everything comes back to life for man's sake, since it was for him that all this was supplied — and they were provided for no one but man, that is, for the flesh as well — how can it be that this very flesh should perish utterly, the flesh for whose sake, and to whom, nothing else is allowed to perish?