Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
How much longer, then, most unjust nations, will you fail to recognize — indeed, will you go on cursing — your own selves, if there is no real difference between us, if we amount to a single, identical people? Given that you do not hate what you yourselves are, then join hands instead, exchange kisses, mingle embraces — the bloodstained with the bloodstained, the incestuous with the incestuous, the conspirators with the conspirators, the obstinate and vain with their own equals. Together we have offended the divine powers, together we provoke their anger. You too have your "third race," though not from a third cult — rather from a third sex, one more aptly formed by joining men to men and women to women. Or do we perhaps offend you by our very fellowship? Equality tends to breed the material of rivalry: so potter envies potter, and craftsman craftsman!
No — enough now of this pretended confession! Conscience drags the truth back, forces it to stand firm in the truth. For all these charges will exist in you alone, and are refuted by us alone — the very people they were brought against — simply by our recognizing the other side's case; from which knowledge is built, judgment formed, and a verdict properly governed. Indeed it is your own maxim that no one should judge a case without hearing both sides — a rule you neglect only where we alone are concerned. You indulge a flaw of nature: you refuse to condemn in yourselves what you condemn in others, or you fling at others the very guilt you remember in yourselves.
This is the injustice: that the informed are judged by the ignorant, the acquitted by the guilty. Take the splinter out of your own eye before you go pulling the splinter out of someone else's. Correct yourselves first, before you punish Christians! Except that, if you correct yourselves, you will no longer punish us — indeed you will become Christians; or rather, if you become Christians, you will already be corrected. Learn what it is you actually accuse in us, and you will stop accusing; recognize what you fail to accuse in yourselves, and you will start accusing yourselves instead! By now it is plain to you how much we have been able to lay open from these few small pamphlets — an inspection of error and a recognition of truth. Condemn the truth, if you can, once you have inspected it; approve error, if you think you have found it! But if you are bound by your own rule to love error and hate truth, why not at least come to know what it is you love and hate?