CHAPTER XL.

2. Our existence is supposed to provoke the anger of the gods and to be the cause of disaster to the empire. Yet such occurrences happened before the rise of Christianity. Your own gods, too, suffer in disasters which are supposed to come from them. The presence of the Christians in the world has tempered the violence of God's judgements.

FOR the name of 'faction' ought to be applied quite otherwise to those who unite in hatred of the good and honest, who join in outcries against the life of innocent men, alleging as an excuse, forsooth, in defence of their hatred this additional falsehood, that they believe the Christians are the cause of every public disaster and every popular calamity. If the Tiber rises up to the Avails, if the Nile does not overflow the fields, if the heaven stands still ¹¹⁰, if the earth moves, if famine or pestilence arises, the first cry is, 'The Christians to the lion!' So many to one? I pray you, before Tiberius, that is, before Christ's Advent, how many disasters laid low the world and the city? We read that the islands Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos went to the bottom with many thousands of human beings. Plato also mentions that a region larger than Asia and Africa was en-gulphed by the Atlantic sea. An earthquake likewise drained the Corinthian sea, and the violence of the waves severed Lucania from Italy, and sent it off [119]  under the name of Sicily. These convulsions at all events could not happen without harm to the inhabitants. But where were, I will not say the Christian despisers of your gods, but your gods themselves, at the time when the Deluge effaced the whole world, or, as Plato thought, the plains only? For that your gods are later than the destruction of the Flood is proved by the cities themselves in which they were born and died, or which they even founded; for these cities have only remained to this day by being themselves later than that calamity. Not yet had Palestine received the Jewish swarm from Aegypt, not yet had the first members of the Christian religion taken up their abode there, when the fiery shower burnt up the neighbouring regions of Sodom and Go-morrha. The land smells of the conflagration to this day; and if any trees there attempt to bear fruit, it is for the eye only, since it crumbles to ashes on being touched. Moreover neither Tuscany nor Campania lodged any complaint about the Christians in that day when fire poured over Volsinii from heaven and over Tarpeii from its own mountain. No one yet worshipped the True God at Rome, when Hannibal at Cannae measured out by the bushel the rings of Romans who had fallen in the slaughter he had caused. All your gods were universally worshipped when the Senones seized the Capitol itself.

And it is a point too in our favour if, on the occasion of any calamity befalling cities, the same destruction included the temples with the fortifications; so that I might now turn the argument to prove that the [120] disasters do not come from your gods, because they come upon themselves. The human race has ever deserved ill of the Deity: in the first place, indeed, because they were undutiful to Him; for when they knew Him in part, they not only failed to seek Him out and approach Him as an object of fear, but even very quickly counterfeited other gods to worship : and in the next place because they, in their neglect of the Teacher of innocence and Judge and Avenger of guilt, became rooted in vices and crimes of every kind. If, however, they had sought after Him, it would have followed that they would have known Him Whom they sought; and having known, would have honoured Him; and having honoured, would have found Him rather propitious than angry.

They ought therefore to know that the same God is angry with them now, Who was ever so in time past, before the name of Christian had arisen. Why do they not understand that evils also come from Him, Whose blessings, showered upon them, they experienced before they fashioned gods for themselves, and Whose they did not perceive that the blessings were? They are guilty towards Him to Whom they are also ungrateful.

And yet if we compare earlier disasters with the present ones, the latter are lighter, from the time when the world received the Christians from God. For from that time their innocence has modified the guilt of the world; and they have begun to be intercessors with God.

Lastly, when the dry season of summer delays the [121] winter rains, and the year is an anxious one, you indeed, daily fed and forthwith about to feed, having indulged in your baths and taverns and brothels, offer sacrifices for rain to Jupiter, proclaim to the people bare-foot religious processions, seek Heaven on the Capitol, and look for clouds on your ceilings, turned away alike from God Himself and from Heaven. But we, shrunken with fastings and worn out with every kind of abstinence, holding ourselves aloof from all enjoyment of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, put Heaven to shame with our importunity, we touch God, and when we have elicited His mercy, then Jupiter is honoured by you, and God neglected.