Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
If we come out equal on the matter of gods, it follows that there should be no difference either in our sacrifices, or in what is held sacred between us — so that the comparison is satisfied from another angle too. We, they say, offer or consecrate through infanticide. As for you — if it has slipped your memory that you stand convicted of transactions involving murder and the killing of infants, you will recall it soon enough in its proper place; for now I am postponing most of this, so as not to seem to go over the same ground everywhere. Meanwhile, as I said, from another quarter the balance is not lacking. For even if our supposed crime differs, you are no less infanticides yourselves — you who, though forbidden by law to smother infants once born, evade no laws more completely, with more impunity, more securely, under the whole community's knowing eye, than these, by the paperwork of a single temple-keeper. Nor does it change anything that you don't kill them with a ritual blade. In fact this is the crueler way — by cold and starvation, or to the beasts if you expose them, or by a slower death in water if you drown them. And if in some respect your practice seems less alike, add this to the account: that you are destroying your own offspring, and it will more than make up, indeed it will heap up beyond measure, whatever fell short of matching by reason.
But we are also said to feast on this impious sacrifice. Well, once this too is recognized as happening among you, where it is more conveniently placed, we are not much set apart from your own voracity. If that practice of yours is shameless and ours cruel, then we are joined together — perhaps by nature, since savagery and shamelessness always keep company. Though really, what do you do less of — or rather, what do you not do more of? Is it a small thing that you gape after human flesh, since you devour the living and the grown? Is it a small thing that you lap up human blood, since you draw out blood that has yet to be shed? Is it a small thing to feed on an infant, since you drink down an infant entire before it is even born?
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