Praeparatio Evangelica (The Preparation of the Gospel)

Now by the Greek theology I mean the popular and more mythical theology, which also prevailed much earlier among the Phoenicians and Egyptians and the other nations of whom mention was made in our preceding books; and the character of this has been proved to be something of the kind which has been already made manifest by the words quoted from the Greek historians themselves. And this character we have with good reason set before our readers in the beginning of this our Preparation for the Gospel for their judgement and decision, that both we and those who as yet have no experience of this subject, may learn for ourselves what we were long ago, and from what sort of forefathers we have sprung, by how great evils we were previously fettered, and in how great a stupor of impiety and ignorance of God our souls were buried, and then were favoured with an uprising and deliverance from all these evils at once by the sole teaching of the Gospel, provided for us in no other way than by the manifestation of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who is God.

For not in a mere part of the earth, nor in a corner of the land of one nation, but throughout the whole inhabited world, where the power of the most superstitious delusion especially prevailed, He, like a sun of intelligent and rational souls, spread abroad the beams of His own light: He translated us all, of every race of mankind, barbarians and Greeks alike, as it were from a terrible darkness and most gloomy and obscure night of superstitious error into the bright and shining day of the true worship of God the King of all.

Certainly the statements that have been already quoted have plainly taught us, that those who in cities and villages have been excited about this delusion of many gods were all universally serving and worshipping images of the dead, and statues of men who have long since passed away. For the men of old, because of the extreme savageness of their life at that time made no account of God the Creator of all, nor paid any heed to the divine judgement which takes vengeance on wrong doing, but cast themselves headlong into every kind of profanity.

For at that time there were no laws yet established for the guidance of life, no civilized government set in order among men, but they led a loose and wandering life like that of the beasts: and some of them, like irrational animals, cared for nothing beyond the filling of their belly, and among these the first kind of atheism found a home; but others, being in some small degree stirred by natural instincts, conceived that God, and God's power, was some good and salutary thing, and because they wished to find Him, they raised their souls aloft to heaven, and there stopping short in thought, and being astonished at the various beauties of the luminaries which gave and received light in heaven, declared that these were gods.

But a third and different class cast themselves down upon earth, and seeing those who had been thought to excel their contemporaries in wisdom, or had become masters of the multitude by strength of body and power of government, such as giants or tyrants, or even sorcerers and quacks, who after some falling off from holier ways had devised their evil arts of sorcery, or others who had been the authors of some common benefit to human life,—to these, both while yet living and after death, they gave the title of gods. And from this cause the houses of their gods are mentioned as being tombs of the dead, as Clement relates in his Exhortation to the Greeks, bringing forward Greeks themselves as witnesses of his statement. Listen then again, if it please you, to what he writes in the following style: