To the Nations 1.9

But why should I marvel at your vanities, when malice and folly, joined and grown together from your natural make, have come in under the same owner, error? Indeed, because I do not marvel, I must list them, so that on recognizing them you may marvel into what folly you fall, you who want us to be the causes of every public disaster or harm. If the Tiber overflows, if the Nile does not overflow, if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if plague lays waste, if famine afflicts, at once the cry of all is: “The Christians' fault!” As if those who fear the true God had little to fear, or anything else! I suppose that, as despisers of your gods, we provoke these darts of theirs. As we stated above, for our age it is not yet three hundred years: how many disasters fell before that span upon the whole world, upon particular cities and provinces? How many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, chasms and earthquakes has the world gone through? Where were the Christians then, when the Roman state furnished so many histories of its own troubles? Where were the Christians then, when the islands Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cea went to ruin with many thousands of people, or the island larger than Asia or Africa which Plato records was sunk in the Atlantic sea? When fire poured down on the Volsinii from heaven, and on Pompeii from its own mountain? When by an earthquake the Corinthian sea was snatched away? When the flood wiped out the whole world? Where were then, I will not say the Christians, despisers of the gods, but your gods themselves, whom the places and towns in which they were born, lived, and were buried, and even those which they founded, prove to be later than that disaster? For otherwise they would not have survived to this day, had they not come after that disaster. If you do not care to reread and review the testimonies of the ages, which report things otherwise to you, in the first place so as not to pronounce your gods most unjust, who for the sake of their despisers harm their worshippers too, do you not then prove that you yourselves are in error, if you hand down as gods beings who do not distinguish you from the deserts of the profane? But if, as one or another of the silliest says, they are angry with you too because you neglect to root us out, the question of their weakness and meanness is settled: for they would not be angry with you for being slack in punishing if they could do anything by themselves. And you confess this in other ways too, whenever you think you avenge them by our punishment. If one thing is defended by another, it is defended by a greater. Let the gods, then, be ashamed to be defended by a man.