Tertullian, Apology 39

I will now lay out the business of the Christian faction so that, having refuted the charges, I can show the virtues. We are a body formed by religious conscience, divine discipline, and the covenant of hope. We assemble as a congregation to approach God with prayers, as if with one hand, and this power pleases God. We also pray for emperors, their officials and authority, for the state of the world, for peace, and for the delay of the end. We are driven to rehearse the divine letters whenever the character of the present age demands warning or recognition. We nourish faith with holy words, lift hope, anchor confidence, and tighten discipline through the compulsions of precept; here too we find exhortations, castigations, and divine censure. Judgment is carried out with great weight, as if before certain ones in God's sight, and it serves as the highest prejudgment of the future judgment: if anyone so offends that he is cut off from the communion of prayer, assembly, and all holy fellowship. Proven elders preside, having earned this honor not by purchase but by testimony, for no affair of God is established by a price. Even if there is a money box, it is not funded by honorary fees as if religion were for sale; each person contributes a small monthly amount on a set day, or whenever he wishes, and only if he wishes and is able, for no one is compelled, but all give freely. These are like deposits of piety. From them, nothing is spent on feasts, drinking bouts, or wasteful gluttony, but on feeding and burying the needy, on boys and girls deprived of means and parents, on elderly household members, on shipwreck victims, on those in mines, on islands, or in prisons, provided they suffer for the sake of confessing God's sect. Yet this very practice of love brands us in the eyes of some. "See," they say, "how they love one another"—when they themselves hate one another; "and how they are ready to die for one another"—when they are more ready to kill one another. They also slander us for bearing the name of brothers, I think, only because among them every claim of blood kinship is simulated from pretense. We are your brothers too, by nature's right from one mother, though you are barely human because you are evil brothers. But how much worthier are those called and treated as brothers who have acknowledged one Father God, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who have been startled from one womb of ignorance into one light of truth. Perhaps we seem less legitimate because no tragedy of our brotherhood cries out, or because we are brothers by family substance, which among you nearly destroys brotherhood. Therefore we who are mingled in soul and spirit have no doubt about sharing our goods. All things are common among us, except wives. We dissolve the partnership in the very place where other men exercise it—men who not only usurp their friends' marriages but also obligingly provide their own wives to friends, following, I believe, the discipline of the greatest and wisest, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared their wives with friends—wives they had married for children and for begetting them elsewhere; I do not know whether unwillingly, for what did they care about chastity when husbands gave it away so easily? O example of Attic wisdom, O example of Roman gravity! The philosopher acts as pimp and censor. So why wonder if such great love is feasted? Even our dinners, infamous only to criminals, you brand as prodigal. The saying of Diogenes was spoken of us: "The Megarians dine as if they will die tomorrow, but build as if they will never die." But who sees a straw in another's eye more easily than a beam in his own? The air grows thick with so many tribes, curiae, and decuriae belching. A necessary creditor awaits the Salian feasts. Accountants tally the expenses of Herculean tables and pollutions. Cooks are selected for the Apaturian, Dionysian, and Attic mysteries. Sparteoli are kindled for the smoke of the Serapian dinner. Yet only the Christian triclinium is criticized. Our dinner shows its reason in its name: it is called by the Greek word for love. Whatever the cost, it is gain to spend in the name of piety, since we refresh all the needy—not as parasites among you who perform service for the glory of liberty under the authorization of the belly, fattening themselves on insults—but because the contemplation of the humble is greater before God. If the cause of the dinner is honest, judge the rest of its discipline as a religious duty: it admits nothing base, nothing immodest; no one reclines before prayer has been tasted to God; each eats as much as hunger takes, drinks as much as chastity finds useful. They are satisfied so as to remember even through the night that they must adore God; they speak as those who know the Lord is listening. After hand-washing and lamps, each is prompted to sing to God from the holy scriptures or his own talent, and thus it is proven how he has drunk. Then prayer dismisses the dinner. They depart not into crowds of the blue-clad, nor into classes of discourse, nor into eruptions of lust, but to the same care for modesty and chastity, as if they have not so much dined as disciplined. This Christian gathering is rightly called illicit only if it deserves condemnation on the same grounds as illicit gatherings—if anyone complains of it under the same title used against factions. Against whose ruin do we ever convene? We gather for this very reason: we are gathered even when dispersed; this unity is universal because it is also singular; we harm no one, we grieve no one. When the upright, the good, the pious, the chaste assemble, it is not to be called a faction, but a senate.