To Scapula 2

We worship one God, whom you all know by nature, at whose lightning and thunder you tremble, at whose benefits you rejoice. The others, whom you yourselves think to be gods, we know to be demons. Yet it is a matter of human right and natural power for each person to worship what he thinks fit; one person's religion neither harms nor helps another. But it is no part of religion to compel religion, which ought to be taken up freely, not by force, since even sacrificial victims are required from a willing mind. So even if you compel us to sacrifice, you will render no service to your gods. For they will not want sacrifices from the unwilling, unless they are quarrelsome; but a god is not quarrelsome. Indeed, he who is the true God bestows all his gifts equally on the profane and on his own, and for that reason he has also appointed an eternal judgment on the grateful and the ungrateful. Yet you have never caught us, whom you consider sacrilegious, even in theft, much less in sacrilege. But all those who plunder temples both swear by the gods and worship them; they are not Christians, and yet they are caught committing sacrilege. It would take long to recount in what other ways all the gods are both mocked and despised by their very worshipers. So too we are defamed in the matter of the emperor's majesty; yet Christians could never be found to be followers of Albinus or Niger or Cassius; rather, the very people who had sworn by the emperors' guardian spirits up to the day before, who had both offered and vowed sacrifices for their safety, who had often condemned Christians, were found to be their enemies. A Christian is no one's enemy, much less the emperor's, whom, knowing that he is appointed by his God, he must love, revere, and honor, and wish him safe together with the whole Roman empire, as long as the world shall stand; for so long will it stand. We therefore honor the emperor too, in the way that is both lawful for us and good for him: as a man second to God, having received from God whatever he is, and less than God alone. This he himself will wish. For so he is greater than all, while he is less than the true God alone. So he is greater than the gods themselves, since they too are in his power. Accordingly, we also sacrifice for the emperor's safety, but to our God and his, and as God has commanded, with pure prayer. For God, the founder of the universe, has no need of any smell or blood. These are the food of demons. And demons we not only reject but also overcome, expose daily, and drive out of people, as is known to very many. So we pray all the more for the emperor's safety, asking it from him who is able to grant it. And it can be clear enough to you that we act from the discipline of divine patience, since, so great a multitude of people, almost the greater part of every city, we live in silence and modesty, known perhaps more as individuals than as a body, and recognizable by nothing else than by the amendment of our former vices. For far be it from us to take it ill that we suffer what we desire, or to plot any vengeance of our own, which we await from God.