To the Nations 1.2

In this very matter you judge even against the form for judging crimes. For guilty persons brought before you, if they deny the charge, you press with tortures to confess; but Christians who confess of their own accord you crush with tortures to make them deny. What perversity is this, that you fight against confession, change the office of torture, and let the accused escape for nothing by compelling him against his will to deny? You governors, appointed to extort the truth, seek a lie from us alone: that we should say we are not what we are. I suppose you do not want us to be wicked, and so you are eager to shut us out of that name. Others, to be sure, you stretch on the rack and butcher for this, that they may deny what they are said to be; and yet when they deny, you do not believe them; us, if we deny, you believe at once. If you are certain that we are the most guilty of all, why are we treated by you, even in this, differently from the guilty? I do not say that you allow no room either for accusation or for defense (it is not your custom to condemn rashly people who are unaccused and undefended); but, for example, if a case of murder is being tried, the case is not closed nor the inquiry satisfied the moment the man has confessed to the name of murderer. Although you have difficulty believing those who confess, you further demand the details: how often he has killed, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, what accomplices, what harborers, so that nothing whatever about the evil man may lie hidden, nor anything be lacking to the truth being prepared for sentence. But in our case, whom you charge with more atrocious and more numerous crimes, you draw up shorter and lighter charge sheets. I suppose you do not wish to burden those whom you wish utterly destroyed, or you think there is no need to inquire into what you already know. This, then, is all the more perverse, if you force us to deny things that you know most certainly. Rather, how much better it would have suited your hatred to set aside the form of trial and strive, out of your own zeal, not for denial, lest you set free those you hate, but for the confession of each crime, so that your enmity might be sated by heaping up the punishments, while it was being established how many of those banquets each had already celebrated, how often he had rushed into incest in the dark! What more? Since the race was to be rooted out, the inquiry ought to have been spread wide and the questioning extended to accomplices and confidants. Let the dealers in infants and the cooks be brought in, and the dogs themselves that serve as bridal attendants: the matter would have been settled. Favor would even have been added to the shows. With what eagerness would people crowd into the arena to see someone fight who had devoured a hundred infants! For if such horrible and monstrous things are reported of us, they surely ought to have been brought to light, lest they seem incredible and the public hatred against us cool. For many do in fact temper their belief in such things, shuddering at the thought that human nature should seek the food of wild beasts, and a union that it has shut off from the human race.