Tertullian

“ I suppose it is as despisers of your gods that we call down on us these strokes of theirs. As we have remarked already, [6] three hundred years have not yet passed in our existence; but what vast scourges before that time fell on all the world, on its various cities and provinces! what terrible wars, both foreign and domestic! what pestilences, famines, conflagrations, yawnings, and quakings of the earth has history recorded! [7] Where were the Christians, then, when the Roman state furnished so many chronicles of its disasters? ”

“ Indeed, I feel no astonishment; and therefore, as it is necessary for my subject, I will enumerate some instances, that you may feel the astonishment by the enumeration of the folly into which you fall, when you insist on our being the causes of every public calamity or injury. ”

“ If you do not care to peruse and reflect upon these testimonies of history, the record of which affects you differently from us, [8] in order especially that you may not have to tax your gods with extreme injustice, since they injure even their worshippers on account of their despisers, do you not then prove yourselves to be also in the wrong, when you hold them to be gods, who make no distinction between the deserts of yourselves and profane persons? ”