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Here perhaps our adversaries will say that their gods also have done
some wonderful things, if now they begin to compare their gods to our
dead men. Or will they also say that they have gods taken from among
dead men, such as Hercules, Romulus, and many others whom they
fancy to have been received into the number of the gods? But our
martyrs are not our gods; for we know that the martyrs and we have both
but one God, and that the same. Nor yet are the miracles which they
maintain to have been done by means of their temples at all comparable
to those which are done by the tombs of our martyrs. If they seem
similar, their gods have been defeated by our martyrs as Pharaoh's
magi were by Moses. In reality, the demons wrought these marvels
with the same impure pride with which they aspired to be the gods of the
nations; but the martyrs do these wonders, or rather God does them
while they pray and assist, in order that an impulse may be given to
the faith by which we believe that they are not our gods, but have,
together with ourselves, one God. In fine, they built temples to
these gods of theirs, and set up altars, and ordained priests, and
appointed sacrifices; but to our martyrs we build, not temples as if
they were gods, but monuments as to dead men whose spirits live with
God. Neither do we erect altars at these monuments that we may
sacrifice to the martyrs, but to the one God of the martyrs and of
ourselves; and in this sacrifice they are named in their own place and
rank as men of God who conquered the world by confessing Him, but
they are not invoked by the sacrificing priest. For it is to God,
not to them, he sacrifices, though he sacrifices at their monument;
for he is God's priest, not theirs. The sacrifice itself, too, is
the body of Christ, which is not offered to them, because they
themselves are this body. Which then can more readily be believed to
work miracles? They who wish themselves to be reckoned gods by those
on whom they work miracles, or those whose sole object in working any
miracle is to induce faith in God, and in Christ also as God? They
who wished to turn even their crimes into sacred rites, or those who
are unwilling that even their own praises be consecrated, and seek that
everything for which they are justly praised be ascribed to the glory of
Him in whom they are praised? For in the Lord their souls are
praised. Let us therefore believe those who both speak the truth and
work wonders. For by speaking the truth they suffered, and so won the
power of working wonders. And the leading truth they professed is that
Christ rose from the dead, and first showed in His own flesh the
immortality of the resurrection which He promised should be ours,
either in the beginning of the world to come, or in the end of this
world.
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