do we act in regard to you, and we cannot do otherwise. And notwithstanding my promise to help you, and to comply with your request, I look on your doctrine as most harmful and low: low, because dishonorably and unjustly you devour the breast that nourishes you: take advantage of the blessings of the imperial order without sharing in its support, and yet trying to destroy it!"
"What you say would be just," said Pamphilius, "if we really lived as you think. But you do not know about our life, and you have formed a false conception of it. For you, with your habitual luxury, it is hard to imagine how little a man requires when he exists without superfluities. A man is so constituted that, when he is well, he can produce with his hands far more than he needs for the support of his life. Living in a community as we do, we are able by our labor to support without effort our children, and the aged and the sick and the feeble. You assert that we Christians arouse in the slave the desire to be the Cæsar; on the contrary, both by word and deed we fulfil one thing: patient submissiveness and work, the most humble work of all—the work of the working-man. We know nothing and we care nothing about affairs of state. We know one thing, but we know it beyond question,—that our well-being is only when the well-being of others is found, and we strive after this well-being; the well-being of all men is in their union."[1]
- ↑ Another long passage is here omitted: Pamphilius goes on to say that the union of men must be brought about by love, not violence. The violence of a brigand is as atrocious exactly as is that of troops against their enemies, or of the judge against the culprit, and Christians can have no part in either; their share consists in submitting to it without protest.
Julius interrupts him, and declares that while they are ready to be martyrs and eager to lay down their lives for the truth, in reality truth is not in them: they preach love, but the result of their preaching is savagery, retrogression to primitive conditions of murder, robbery, and every kind of violence.
Pamphilius denies that such is the case: murder, robbery, and violence existed long before Christianity, and men found no way of coping with them. When violence meets violence crimes are not checked, but are provoked, because feelings of anger and bitterness are aroused. In the mighty Roman Empire, where legislation has been raised to a science, and the laws are thoroughly studied and administered, and the office of judge
