Argument:
The Story About Christians Drinking the Blood of an Infant that They Have
Murdered is Barefaced Slander. But the Gentiles, Both Cruelly Expose Their
Children Newly Born, and Before They are Born Destroy Them by a Cruel Abortion.
Christians are Neither Allowed to See Nor to Hear of Manslaughter.
“And now
I wish to meet him who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter
and blood of an infant. Do you think that it can be possible for so tender, so
little a body to receive those fatal wounds; for any one to shed, pour forth,
and drain that new blood of a youngling, and of a man scarcely come into
existence? No one can believe this, except one who can dare to do it.
And I see
that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds;
at another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death.
There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the
source of the future man in their very bowels, and thus commit a parricide
before they bring forth. And these things assuredly come down from the teaching
of your gods.
For
Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason were infants
sacrificed to him by parents in some parts of Africa, caresses and kisses
repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed.
Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a
sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury
human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman sacrificers buried living a
Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this day,
Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is worthy of the
son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man. …
They also
are not unlike him who devours the wild beasts from the arena, besmeared and
stained with blood, or fattened with the limbs or the entrails of men. To us it
is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide; and so much do we shrink
from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our
food.”
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