Against Celsus 6.53

Then, I think, mixing sects with sects and not noting that these views belong to one sect and those to another, he brings forward the objections we raise against Marcion, perhaps having misunderstood these too from some who argue against him in a cheap and unlearned way, not very intelligently. Setting out, then, what is said against Marcion, and not noting that he is speaking against him, he says: Why does he send secretly and destroy the works of this one? Why does he force his way in stealthily and lead astray and deceive? Why does he beguile those who, as you say, have been condemned or cursed by this one, and carry them off like a slave-dealer? Why does he teach them to run away from their master? Why to flee from their father? Why does he adopt them himself, without the father's consent? Why does he profess to be the father of strangers? And he adds to these, as though in astonishment: A fine god indeed, who desires to be the father of sinners condemned by another, of the disinherited, and, as they themselves say, of refuse, and who is unable to punish the one he sent to carry them off from him when he was caught. Next, as though addressing us who confess that this world belongs to no alien or strange god, he says such things as this: If these are his works, how did God make evil things? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? How does he repent when men become ungrateful and wicked, and find fault with his own art, and hate and threaten and destroy his own offspring? Or where will he carry them off to out of this world, which he himself made? Here too, it seems to me, without making clear what evils are, although among the Greeks too there have been many schools of thought about goods and evils, he snatches at it as though it followed for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all, that in our view God is the maker of evils. Let the matter of evils be as it may, whether God made them or not, or whether they came about as a consequence of his principal works; but I wonder whether what he thinks follows for us, who say that this world too is the work of the God over all, namely that God made evils, does not follow also from what he himself says. For one might say to Celsus: If these are his works, how did God make evil things? How is he unable to persuade and admonish? And the greatest fault in argument is when someone accuses those of other views of holding unsound doctrines, while he himself has the same faults in his own doctrines much more.