Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Arnobius/Adversus Gentes/Book VI/Chapter I

by Arnobius

Book VI.

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1. Having shown briefly how impious and infamous are the opinions which you have formed about your gods, we have now to^[1] speak of their temples, their images also, and sacrifices, and of the other things which are^[2] united and closely related to them. For you are here in the habit of fastening upon us a very serious charge of impiety because we do not rear temples for the ceremonies of worship, do not set up statues and images^[3] of any god, do not build altars,^[4] do not offer the blood of creatures slain in sacrifices, incense,^[5] nor sacrificial meal, and finally, do not bring wine flowing in libations from sacred bowls; which, indeed, we neglect to build and do, not as though we cherish impious and wicked dispositions, or have conceived any madly desperate feeling of contempt for the gods, but because we think and believe that they^[6]—if only they are true gods, and are called by this exalted name^[7]—either scorn such honours, if they give way to scorn, or endure them with anger, if they are roused by feelings of rage.

Footnotes

1. Lit., “it remains that we.”
2. Lit., “series which is,” etc.
3. Singular. [But costly churches were built about this time.]
4. Non altaria, non aras, i.e., neither to the superior nor inferior deities. Cf. Virgil, Ecl., v. 66.
5. [It is not with any aversion to incense that I note its absence, so frequently attested, from primitive rites of the Church.]
6. The earlier edd. prefix d to the ms. eos—“that the gods,” etc.
7. Lit., “endowed with the eminence of this name.”