The Testimony of the Soul 2

We do not please when we proclaim God, the one God under this one name, from whom all things are and under whom the universe is. Give your testimony, if you know it to be so. For we hear you too, openly and with full freedom, which is not allowed to us, at home and abroad, speaking thus: “What God has given,” and “If God wills.” By that expression you both signify that there is someone, and confess that all power belongs to him to whose will you look; at the same time you deny that the others are gods, while you call them by their own names: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva. For you affirm him alone as God whom you name simply “God,” so that, when you do sometimes call those others gods, you seem to have used the word as something foreign, as if on loan. Nor is the nature of the God whom we proclaim hidden from you. “God is good,” “God does good” is your saying. Plainly you add, “But man is evil,” that is, by a contrary statement, reproaching man indirectly and figuratively as evil precisely because he has departed from the good God. Again, since with the God of goodness and kindness every blessing is among us the highest sacred bond of our discipline and way of life, you say “God bless you” as easily as a Christian must; and when you turn the blessing of God into a curse, by that very saying you confess, as we do, that all his power over us stands firm. There are some who, while not denying God, certainly do not consider him an overseer and arbiter and judge; in this above all they reject us, who fly over to this discipline for fear of the judgment that is preached. They honor God, as they think, by freeing him from the cares of watching and the troubles of punishing, and they do not even ascribe anger to him. “For if God is angry,” they say, “he is corruptible and subject to passion; and what suffers and is corrupted can also undergo destruction, which God does not undergo.” Yet the same people elsewhere confess that the soul is divine and bestowed by God, and so fall into the testimony of the soul itself, which is to be turned against their former opinion. For if the soul is either divine or given by God, it doubtless knows its giver; and if it knows him, it certainly also fears him, and fears him so much, after all, as its author. Or does it not fear him whom it would rather have gracious than angry? Where, then, does the soul's natural fear of God come from, if God does not know how to be angry? How is one feared who cannot be offended? What is feared except anger? Where does anger come from except from punishment? Where does punishment come from except from judgment? Where does judgment come from except from power? Whose power is supreme except God's alone? From this, then, O soul, from your consciousness, it comes readily to you, at home and abroad, with no one mocking or forbidding, to proclaim: “God sees all,” and “I commend it to God,” and “God will repay,” and “God will judge between us.” Where do you get this, you who are not Christian? And indeed very often, crowned with the fillet of Ceres, clad in the scarlet cloak of Saturn, in the linen of the goddess Isis, in the very temples, in short, you call on God as judge. You stand under Aesculapius, you adorn Juno in bronze, you … Minerva's helmet with dark shapes, and you call none of the gods present to witness. In your own forum you appeal to a judge from elsewhere; in your own temples you allow another God. O testimony of the truth, which makes you a witness for the Christians even in the presence of demons!