CHAPTER XXXVII.

We are forbidden to retaliate, else we might easily take our revenge, either by secret means, or as of en enemies, or even by merely withdrawing from your midst, and leaving you defenceless against the attacks of the daemons.

IF, as we said above, we are bidden to love our enemies, whom have we to hate? If likewise we are forbidden to retaliate when injured, lest we should resemble them in so acting, whom can we injure? For look at the matter yourselves. How often do you rage against the Christians, partly in gratification of your own private feelings, and partly in obedience to the laws? How often, again, does the hostile mob, taking the law into its own hands, assail us with stones and fires, without waiting for your permission [109] or instigation? Nay, with the very phrenzy of Bacchanals, they spare not even the dead bodies of Christians, but drag them out from the repose of their sepulture, from the sanctuary as it were of death, and tear them asunder, and cut them up, though they are no longer the same beings (as those who offended you) nor are they now whole. Yet what instance did you ever note of our retaliation upon you for injuries inflicted on us who are so united and so courageous even to death, when even one night with a few torches might amply work our revenge, if we were allowed to wipe out wrong with wrong? But perish the thought that our divine sect ⁹⁸ should be avenged by human fire ⁹⁹, or should grieve at the very sufferings by which it is approved. For if we wished to act the part of open enemies not of secret avengers, would the strength of multitudes and forces be wanting to us? The Moors, the Marcomanni, the Parthians themselves, or any nations indeed, which inhabit one region and their own boundaries, are more numerous, I suppose, than one which fills the whole world! We are of yesterday, and yet we have filled all your places; your cities, islands, villages, townships, assemblies, your very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum; we leave you only your temples. We can count your armies; the Christians of one province are more numerous. For what war [110] should not we, who are so willingly slaughtered, be ready and prepared, although unequal in forces, if it were not more in accordance with our religion to be slain than to slay? We might have fought against you, not in arms nor in rebellion, but merely in disunion, by the ill-will of separation only. For had so great a force of men torn themselves away from you to some corner of the remote earth, the loss of so many citizens and of such a kind would surely have brought shame upon your rule; nay, the punishment would have lain in the very desertion itself. You would undoubtedly have quaked with fear at your desolation, at the silence of things, and at the deathlike stupefaction of the world; you would have had to seek for subjects to govern. More enemies than citizens would have remained with you. For now you have fewer enemies by reason of the multitude of Christians, since nearly all the citizens ¹⁰⁰ in nearly all the states are Christians. Yet you prefer to call them the enemies of the human race.

Now who else would deliver you from those secret enemies who are ruining both your mental and physical powers in every way? I refer to the attacks of the daemons whom we expel from you without price or reward. This alone would be sufficient revenge for us, that you should henceforth lie exposed to them, an empty tenement for unclean spirits. And without even so much as thinking of giving [111] us any compensation in return for so great a protection, you have preferred to adjudge as enemies, a class of men who are not only harmless, but even necessary to you: enemies indeed we are, but of error, not of the human race.