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

by Arnobius

14. We would here, as if all nations on the earth were present, make one speech, and pour into the ears of them all, words which should be heard in common:^[1] Why, pray, is this, O men! that of your own accord you cheat and deceive yourselves by voluntary blindness? Dispel the darkness now, and, returning to the light of the mind, look more closely and see what that is which is going on, if only you retain your right,^[2] and are not beyond the reach^[3] of the reason and prudence given to you.^[4] Those images which fill you with terror, and which you adore prostrate upon the ground^[5] in all the temples, are bones, stones, brass, silver, gold, clay, wood taken from a tree, or glue mixed with gypsum. Having been heaped together, it may be, from a harlot’s gauds or from a woman’s^[6] ornaments, from camels’ bones or from the tooth of the Indian beast,^[7] from cooking-pots and little jars, from candlesticks and lamps, or from other less cleanly vessels, and having been melted down, they were cast into these shapes and came out into the forms which you see, baked in potters’ furnaces, produced by anvils and hammers, scraped with the silversmith’s, and filed down with ordinary files, cleft and hewn with saws, with augers,^[8] with axes, dug and hollowed out by the turning of borers, and smoothed with planes. Is not this, then, an error? Is it not, to speak accurately, folly to believe that a god which you yourself made with care, to kneel down trembling in supplication to that which has been formed by you, and while you know, and are assured that it is the product^[9] of the labour of your hands,^[10]—to cast yourself down upon your face, beg aid suppliantly, and, in adversity and time of distress, ask it to succour^[11] you with gracious and divine favour?

Footnotes

1. [Isa. xl. 18–20; xliv. 9–20; xlvi. 5–8.]
2. i.e., the faculty of discernment, which is properly man’s.
3. Lit., “are in the limits of.”
4. The ms. reads his—“these”, emended, as above, vobis in the margin of Ursinus, Elm., and LB.
5. Lit., “and humble.”
6. i.e., a respectable woman.
7. i.e., the elephant’s tusk.
8. So Salmasius, followed by Orelli, Hild., and Oehler, reading furfuraculis, and LB., reading perforaculis for the ms. furfure aculeis.
9. So the margin of Ursinus, Meursius (according to Orelli), Hild., and Oehler, reading part-u-m for the ms. -e-—“is a part of your labour,” etc.
10. Lit., “of thy work and fingers.”
11. So the ms., both Roman edd., Elm., and Orelli, reading numinis favore, for which LB. reads favorem—“the favour of the propitious deity to succour.” [Isaiah’s argument reproduced.]