Against Celsus 4.23

After this, laughing in his usual way at the race of Jews and Christians, he has compared them all to “a cluster of bats, or ants coming out of their nest, or frogs holding council around a marsh, or worms in assembly in a corner of the mud, disputing with one another which of them are the greater sinners, and saying: ‘God reveals and announces everything to us beforehand; and, abandoning the whole world and the heavenly motion and disregarding the vast earth, he governs for us alone, and makes proclamations to us alone, and does not cease sending and seeking how we may be with him forever.’” And in his fiction he makes us like worms saying: “There is God, and after him we, who have been made by him wholly like God; and all things have been put under us, earth, water, air, and stars; and all things are for our sake, and have been appointed to serve us.” And the worms in his account, that is, we, say: “Now, since some among us do wrong, God will come or will send his Son to burn up the unjust, and the rest of us will have eternal life with him.” And he adds to all this that “these things would be more tolerable from worms and frogs than from Jews and Christians disputing with one another.”