If I go minutely into the particulars of our doctrine, let it not
surprise you. It is that you may not be carried away by the popular and
irrational opinion, but may have the truth clearly before you. For presenting
the opinions themselves to which we adhere, as being not human but uttered and
taught by God, we shall be able to persuade you not to think of us as atheists.
What, then, are those teachings in which we are brought up? “I say unto you,
Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that persecute you;
that ye may be the sons of your Father who is in heaven, who causes His sun to
rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Allow me here to lift up my voice boldly in loud and audible outcry,
pleading as I do before philosophic princes. For who of those that reduce
syllogisms, and clear up ambiguities, and explain etymologies, or of those
who teach homonyms and synonyms, and predicaments and axioms, and what is the
subject and what the predicate, and who promise their disciples by these and
such like instructions to make them happy: who of them have so purged their
souls as, instead of hating their enemies, to love them; and, instead of speaking
ill of those who have reviled them (to abstain from which is of itself an
evidence of no mean forbearance), to bless them; and to pray for those who plot
against their lives?
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