Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IV/Tertullian: Part Fourth/To His Wife/II/Chapter 6

by Tertullian

Chapter VI.—Danger of Having to Take Part in Heathenish Rites, and Revels.

The handmaid of God^[1] dwells amid alien labours; and among these (labours), on all the memorial days^[2] of demons, at all solemnities of kings, at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, she will be agitated by the odour of incense.  And she will have to go forth (from her house) by a gate wreathed with laurel, and hung with lanterns, as from some new consistory of public lusts; she will have to sit with her husband ofttimes in club meetings, oft-times in taverns; and, wont as she was formerly to minister to the “saints,” will sometimes have to minister to the “unjust.”^[3]  And will she not hence recognise a prejudgment of her own damnation, in that she tends them whom (formerly) she was expecting to judge?^[4] whose hand will she yearn after? of whose cup will she partake?  What will her husband sing^[5] to her, or she to her husband?  From the tavern, I suppose, she who sups upon God^[6] will hear somewhat!  From hell what mention of God (arises)? what invocation of Christ?  Where are the fosterings of faith by the interspersion of the Scriptures (in conversation)?  Where the Spirit? where refreshment? where the divine benediction?  All things are strange, all inimical, all condemned; aimed by the Evil One for the attrition of salvation!

Footnotes

1. Comp. Luke i. 38, and de Cult. Fem., b. ii. c. i. ad init.
2. Nominibus; al. honoribus.
3. Sanctis—iniquis.  Comp. St. Paul’s antithesis of ἀδίκων and ἁγίων in 1 Cor. vi. 1.
4. See 1 Cor. vi. 2, 3.
5. See Eph. v. 19.
6. So Oehler understands (apparently) the meaning to be.  The translator is inclined to think that, adopting Oehler’s reading, we may perhaps take the “Dei” with “aliquid,” and the “cœnans” absolutely, and render, “From the tavern, no doubt, while supping, she will hear some (strain) of God,” in allusion to the former sentence, and to such passages as Ps. cxxxvii. 4 (in the LXX. it is cxxxvi. 4).