CHAPTER XII.

Your gods are nothing but names of dead men, images made of the commonest materials, which you treat with the same indignities that you inflict upon us.

BUT I now pass from these points, well aware that I shall by the very force of truth indicate what your gods are not by shewing what they are.

With regard to your gods, then, I see merely names of certain dead men of old time, and I hear stories, and I recognize religious rites founded upon the stories. And with regard to the images themselves, I find that they are nothing else but twin substances with vessels and utensils in common use; or even made out of these very vessels and utensils, as if they changed their destination by consecration, and were transformed by the capricious freak of skilled handicraft, the very process of transformation being carried out both most insultingly and sacrilegiously; so that in very truth, to us especially who are punished on account of these very gods, it may be some solace in our punishments to reflect that they themselves undergo the same things also in the process of their manufacture. You place the Christians on crosses and stakes : what image does not take its first shape in plastic clay fixed on a cross and stake? It is on the gibbet that the body of your god is first originated. You tear the sides of the Christians with claws : but to your gods axes and planes and files are more vigorously [43] applied over every limb. We surrender our necks: your gods are headless before the application of solder and glue and nails. We are cast to the beasts; those surely which you attach to Bacchus and Cybele and Caelestis ³⁰. We are burned in the fire: so, too, are the gods in their original mass. We are condemned to the mines: it is from thence that your gods derive their origin. We are banished to the islands: it is in islands that some god of yours is generally born or dies. If by these means a divinity is constituted, then those who are so punished are deified, and tortures must be hailed as tokens of divinity. True, your gods do not feel the injuries and insults attendant upon their manufacture, any more than they perceive the devotion you render them. 'O impious words! O sacrilegious abuse!' Yes, gnash your teeth and foam with rage! You are the same persons who approve of a Seneca inveighing against your superstition at greater length and more bitterly. If therefore we do not worship statues and cold images, the very facsimiles of their dead originals, which the kites and mice and spiders have an accurate knowledge of, do we not deserve praise rather than punishment for our repudiation of a recognized error? For can we appear to injure those who we are convinced have no existence at all? that which is non-existent suffers nothing from any one, simply because it is non-existent. [44]