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Let those who have no gratitude to Christ for His great benefits,
blame their own gods for these heavy disasters. For certainly when
these occurred the altars of the gods were kept blazing, and there rose
the mingled fragrance of "Sabaean incense and fresh garlands;" the
priests were clothed with honor, the shrines were maintained in
splendor; sacrifices, games, sacred ecstasies, were common in the
temples; while the blood of the citizens was being so freely shed, not
only in remote places, but among the very altars of the gods. Cicero
did not choose to seek sanctuary in a temple, because Mucius had
sought it there in vain. But they who most unpardonably calumniate
this Christian era, are the very men who either themselves fled for
asylum to the places specially dedicated to Christ, or were led there
by the barbarians that they might be safe. In short, not to
recapitulate the many instances I have cited, and not to add to their
number others which it were tedious to enumerate, this one thing I am
persuaded of, and this every impartial judgment will readily
acknowledge, that if the human race had received Christianity before
the Punic wars, and if the same desolating calamities which these wars
brought upon Europe and Africa had followed the introduction of
Christianity, there is no one of those who now accuse us who would not
have attributed them to our religion. How intolerable would their
accusations have been, at least so far as the Romans are concerned,
if the Christian religion had been received and diffused prior to the
invasion of the Gauls, or to the ruinous floods and fires which
desolated Rome, or to those most calamitous of all events, the civil
wars! And those other disasters, which were of so strange a nature
that they were reckoned prodigies, had they happened since the
Christian era, to whom but to the Christians would they have imputed
these as crimes? I do not speak of those things which were rather
surprising than hurtful, oxen speaking, unborn infants articulating
some words in their mothers' wombs, serpents flying, hens and women
being changed into the other sex; and other similar prodigies which,
whether true or false, are recorded not in their imaginative, but in
their historical works, and which do not injure, but only astonish
men. But when it rained earth, when it rained chalk, when it rained
stones, not hailstones, but real stones, this certainly was
calculated to do serious damage. We have read in their books that the
fires of Etna, pouring down from the top of the mountain to the
neighboring shore, caused the sea to boil, so that rocks were burnt
up, and the pitch of ships began to run, a phenomenon incredibly
surprising, but at the same time no less hurtful. By the same violent
heat, they relate that on another occasion Sicily was filled with
cinders, so that the houses of the city Catina were destroyed and
buried under them, a calamity which moved the Romans to pity them,
and remit their tribute for that year. One may also read that
Africa, which had by that time become a province of Rome, was
visited by a prodigious multitude of locusts, which, after consuming
the fruit and foliage of the trees, were driven into the sea in one
vast and measureless cloud; so that when they were drowned and cast
upon the shore the air was polluted, and so serious a pestilence
produced that in the kingdom of Masinissa alone they say there perished
800,000 persons, besides a much greater number in the
neighboring districts. At Utica they assure us that, of 30,000
soldiers then garrisoning it, there survived only ten. Yet which of
these disasters, suppose they happened now, would not be attributed to
the Christian religion by those who thus thoughtlessly accuse us, and
whom we are compelled to answer? And yet to their own gods they
attribute none of these things, though they worship them for the sake
of escaping lesser calamities of the same kind, and do not reflect that
they who formerly worshipped them were not preserved from these serious
disasters.
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