this law when he prophesied that the demons and the spirits of the rebellious angels would turn to idolatry every element and property of the universe, everything which heaven and sea and earth contain, to be consecrated as a god against God.9 So it is that human error worships everything but the very Creator of everything. Their images are idols, the consecration of images is idolatry. Whatever sin idolatry commits must be put down to all the makers of all the idols.

Enoch, for instance, threatens idol-worshippers and idol makers alike, and predicts their damnation. And again: "I swear unto you, ye sinners, that the gloom of destruction is made ready for the day of blood. Ye that serve stones and that make images of gold and silver and wood and stone and clay, and that serve phantoms and demons and infamous spirits and every error not according to knowledge, ye shall find no help in them." 10 Isaiah says: "Ye are witnesses, whether there be a God beside me. And there were not any then. They that fashion and carve are all of them vanity, doing what they lust; which shall not profit them." Continuing, the whole passage testifies against the makers as much as the worshippers, ending with the words: "Know that their heart is ashes, and they do err, and no man can deliver his own soul." David also includes the makers, saying: "Let them that make them be like unto them." 11 Need I, with my poor memory, suggest anything more? Need I quote more from Scripture? When the Holy Spirit has spoken, 12 that is surely enough, and we have no need to discuss further whether the Lord has first cursed and condemned the makers of those idols whose worshippers he curses and condemns.

5. Of course I shall reply with all care to the excuses of such craftsmen, men who should never be admitted into the house of God by anyone who knows the Christian rule of life. The words they so often put forward, "I have nothing else to live by", can be retorted immediately and sharply: "You can live then? If you are living on your own terms, why do you come to God?" Then there is the argument which they 9 Tertullian argues that Enoch is scripture in Cult. Fem., I, 3, and quotes or alludes to him in Apol., 22; Cult. Fem., I, 2; II, 10; Idol., 4, 9, 15; Res. Carn. 32; Virg. Vel., 7. The first passage here is Enoch 19:1. 10 Enoch 99:6, 7. For the text, R. H. Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford, 1913, II, 270, and id., The Book of Enoch, Oxford, 1912. It seems to be Tertullian himself who introduces "makers." 11 Isa. 44:8-9, 20; Ps. 115:8.

12 In Scripture, therefore no proof of Montanism.

impudently produce from the Bible itself. The Apostle said (so they argue): "Let each man continue as he was found." 13 On that interpretation we can all continue in our sins. We were all without exception sinners when we were found. Christ came down for no other reason than to set sinners free. Again, they say the Apostle taught that, after his own example, every man should work with his own hands for his living.14 If all hands can plead this instruction, the thieves at the baths live by their hands, I suppose, and burglars get their living with their hands, and forgers produce their false documents with their hands (not their feet!), while the actors in the pantomime toil for their living with their hands and every limb in their bodies besides. If we are not to exclude the crafts which God's discipline does not admit, we shall have to throw the Church open to everyone who supports himself by his hands and his own work. 15

An objection is raised against my affirmation that likenesses are forbidden. Why then did Moses in the desert make the likeness of a serpent from brass? 16 My answer is that figures which were designed for some hidden purpose, not to set the law aside, but to be types,17 are in a separate category. Otherwise, if we understand them to be against the Law, are we not ascribing inconstancy to God, like the Marcionites who destroy his deity by making him mutable on the ground that he orders in one place what he forbids in another? 18 If anyone refuses to see that the effigy of a brazen serpent, shaped like one who is hung, displayed a figure of the Lord's cross which was to free us from the serpents (that is, from the devil's angels) in that it hangs the devil (the serpent) dead by its means or you may accept any other explanation of the figure which has been

13 I. Cor. 7:20.

14 I Thess. 4:11.

15 In the Egyptian Church Order actors are not accepted as Christians unless they give up their profession; so also pantomimi in the canons of C. Elvira. For further detail see Brightman in Swete, Essays on the Early History of the Church and the Ministry, pp. 320-330.

16 This argument appears also in Adv. Marc., III, 18=Adv. Jud., 10, and in Adv. Marc., II, 22. The brazen serpent as a type of the cross occurs already in the Epistle of Barnabas, c. 12.

17 Ad exemplarium causae suae. Figure in this passage is figura.

18 Marcion rejected the God of the Old Testament because of the difference of character between him and the Father of Jesus, but also because within the Old Testament he contradicts himself. True Deity is impassible and immutable. Marcion took the text literally, and without any sense of progressive revelation; the Church interpreted it allegorically, when necessary, and with a sense of history moving towards Christ.

revealed 19 to better men than I, provided you remember the Apostle's declaration that whatever happened to the People then was by way of figure. 20 Fortunately it was one and the same God who both, in the Law, forbade the making of a likeness, and also, by an extraordinary command, enjoined the likeness of the serpent. If you pay heed to this same God, you have his law, "Thou shalt not make a likeness." If you are thinking of the subsequent command to make a likeness, take Moses as your model and do not make any likeness contrary to the Law unless God gives you also a direct command.

6. Suppose there were no law of God forbidding us to make idols, and no word of the Holy Spirit 21 threatening their manufacturers no less than their worshippers, even so, a Christian who understood his baptismal profession 22 would see for himself that such crafts are at odds with the faith. How have we renounced the devil and his angels if we are making them? What sort of divorce have we declared when we go on living, if not with them, then on them? Have we really broken away from them, as we undertook to do, if we are still tied to them by gratitude for our maintenance? Can your tongue deny what your hand confesses, your words demolish what your work constructs? Can you proclaim the one God while you fabricate many, the true God while you make false ones? "I make them," (someone is saying) "but I do not worship them." As if what frightens him off worshipping them were not the very thing that should have kept him off making them, fear of God's wrath, in both cases! But you do worship when you make them such as can be worshipped. You worship them, not with the breath of some cheap smoke, but with the breath of your own spirit, not at the cost of some beast's soul, but your own. You sacrifice your talents to them, pour out your sweat to them, light for them the candle of your skill. You are more than a priest to them, since it is through you that they have a priest. Your diligence is their deity. If you yourself deny that you worship what you make, they at least do not deny it, they for whom you kill the fatter and larger and more golden 23 victim, your own salvation, every day.

19 A touch of Montanism? Not necessarily.

20 I Cor. 10:11.

21 Cf. n. 12. Again, it does not seem that lex and spiritus are contrasted. 22 Sacramentum nostrum, oath of allegiance in the sacrament of baptism. Note the ancient formula following, several times mentioned by Tertullian.

23 Auratiorem, cf. Pliny, Nat. Hist., XXXIII, 3; Verg., Aen., V, 366; IX, 627.

7. On this score a zealous faith will raise its voice, lamenting that the Christian comes into church from the idols, comes from the enemy workshop into the house of God, raises to God the Father hands that have mothered idols, adores with hands which outside are adored in opposition to God, touches the Body of the Lord with hands which give the demons their bodies. And worse. Small matter, maybe, if they receive from other hands something to contaminate. But they hand to others what they have contaminated, for idol-makers are accepted into the ranks of the clergy. For shame! The Jews laid their hand upon Christ once only, these men harass his Body every day. Off with those hands! Now let them mark how the words of Scripture fit them: "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.” 24 What hands are more fit to be cut off than those which offend the Body of the Lord?

8. Crafts of many other kinds, while they may not involve the manufacture of idols, are equally blameworthy when they provide the idols with the indispensable instruments of their power. If you furnish a temple, an altar, a shrine, if you work the gilding, fashion the emblems or even make a niche, decorating is as bad as building. To confer authority in that way is a greater service than to give form.

If the necessity of maintaining oneself is pressed to such an extent, there are other kinds of handicraft to provide a living, without departing from Christian discipline by making idols. The plasterer knows how to mend roofs, lay on stuccoes, polish a cistern, trace mouldings and pattern walls with a variety of decorations other than images. The painter, the marbler, the bronze-worker, any sculptor, can easily extend his scope. Anyone who can paint a picture can daub a sideboard. Anyone who can carve a Mars from a plank can quickly knock up a cupboard. Every craft is the mother of another, or near akin; none is entirely independent. There are as many branches of the arts as there are human desires. You object that the profits and the price of your work are different? Yes, but there is a corresponding difference in the labour. The smaller profits are balanced by the continual employment. How many walls want pictures? How many temples and shrines are built for the idols? But houses and mansions and baths and blocks of flats are always in demand. Shoes and slippers you can gild every day, but rarely a Mercury or a Serapis. That should yield ample profit for the handicrafts. Extravagance and 24 Matt. 18:8.

ostentation are more common than all religion. Ostentation will require more plates and cups than religion, extravagance gets through more wreaths than ceremonial.

So we encourage men to practise the kind of craft which does not touch idols or what belongs to idols. But since many things are common to men and idols, we must also take care that no one asks anything at our hands for the use of an idol without our knowledge. If we allow it and do not take the normal precautions, we shall not, I think, be clear of the infection of idolatry when our hands, with our knowledge, are caught in attendance upon demons or ministering to their glory and their needs.

9. Among the arts and crafts we notice some occupations which are intrinsically idolatrous. I ought not to have to speak about astrology; but I will say a few words about it, since someone has recently appealed in defence of his persistence in that profession. I do not allege that he is honouring the idols when he writes their names on the heavens, or when he assigns the whole power of God to them, in that men are led to think they need not call upon God, on the assumption that we are driven by the immutable will of the stars. I have only one proposition to make. The angels who deserted God in their love of women were also the inventors of this curious art, and God condemned them on that account as well. God's insistent sentence has reached even to the earth, and men bear witness to it without knowing what they are doing. The astrologers are being expelled like their angels. Rome and Italy are forbidden to the astrologers, as heaven is to their angels. Pupils and masters suffer the same penalty of exile.25

But the Magi came from the East, you say. 26 We know that magic and astrology are connected. So it was interpreters of the stars who first proclaimed the birth of Christ and were the first to bring him presents. I suppose that put Christ under an obligation to them! Well, does it follow that the religion of those Magi will protect the astrologers now? Today, no doubt, their lore is of Christ. It is the stars of Christ that they observe and predict, not the stars of Saturn or Mars or any other of the 25 The Egyptian Church Order rejects magicians and star-gazers as catechumens, unless they desist. The idea that the fallen angels of Gen. 6 invented astrology is a patristic commonplace. There is probably reference to Enoch 6 as well as Gen. 6, and, in "God's sentence," etc., to Enoch 14:5: "the decree has gone forth to bind you." For the expulsion from Rome see, for example, Tacitus, Annals, II, 31.

26 Matt. 2:1-12.