Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK III, ARGUMENT. Is the two preceding books, Arnobius endeavoured to repel the objections raised against Christianity; but already, he says, it had found able defenders, though strong enough in its own might to need none (1); and therefore, having replied to the charge of neglecting the worship of the gods, by asserting that in worshipping the Supreme God, the Creator of the universe, any other gods, if there are such, receive honour, inasmuch as they are sprung from him (2, 3), he goes on to attack heathenism itself, pointing out that the other gods cannot be proved to exist, their names and number being alike unknown (4, 5). These gods, moreover, are spoken of as male and female, but the divine cannot be liable to such distinctions, as Cicero showed (6); whom it would be well, therefore, for the heathen to refute, instead of merely raising an unreasoning clamour against his writings (7). The use by Christians of a masculine term to denote the Deity, is merely a necessity of speech; but the heathen expressly attributed sex to their deities (8), who would therefore, being immortal, be innumerable; or if the gods did not beget children, why had they sex (9) ? Arnobius then inveighs against this opinion as degrading and dishonouring the gods (10), and says that it is far more likely that they would afflict men to punish such insults, than to take vengeance on Christians, who did them no dishonour (11). He then goes on to speak of bodily form, denying that it is attributed to the Deity by Christians (12), while the heathen boldly asserted that their gods had human bodies, which, Arnobius shows, makes it necessary to ascribe to some gods the basest offices (13-15). It might, however, be said that the gods were not really supposed to have such bodies, but were so spoken of o…
