Tertullian, Apology 39

I will now take up the affairs of the Christian sect, so that after refuting the charges against us I may display what is good. We are a body knit together by conscience, religion, divine discipline, and the covenant of our hope. We assemble as a congregation to address God in prayer with united voices, as though with a single voice. This power is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and authorities, for the condition of the world, for peace, and for a delay of the end. We are driven to revisit the divine writings, whether the quality of the present times demands warning or recognition. Surely we feed our faith with holy words, lift up our hope, fix our confidence, and tighten the discipline of the precepts even under compulsion; there we also have exhortations, castigations, and divine censure. For judgment is carried out with great weight, as before the very gaze of God, and it serves as a prejudgment of the final judgment, if anyone has so offended that he is excluded from the communion of prayer, assembly, and all holy intercourse. Approved elders preside, having won this honor not by payment but by testimony; for nothing that belongs to God is purchased with a price. Even if there is a kind of treasury, it is not collected from an honorary sum as though religion were being redeemed; rather each person contributes a small monthly amount on a fixed day, or whenever he wishes, and only if he wishes and is able, for no one is compelled but all give freely. These are, as it were, deposits of piety. For from them nothing is spent on banquets or drinking bouts or useless waste, but on feeding and burying the needy, on orphan boys and girls destitute of property and parents, on aged members of our household, on shipwreck victims, on those in mines, on those exiled to islands, or in custody — provided they have become disciples of the confession of God's sect for that very reason. Yet this very practice of love earns us a bad reputation with some people. 'Look,' they say, 'how they love one another' — while they themselves hate one another; 'and how they are ready to die for one another' — while they themselves are more ready to kill one another. Moreover, they slander us precisely because we are called brothers; I suspect for no other reason than that among them every claim of blood kinship is feigned out of mere affectation. We are your brothers too, by the law of nature from a single mother, even though you are hardly human because you are evil brothers. But how much more worthily are those called and regarded brothers who have acknowledged one God as Father, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who have been born from one womb of ignorance into one light of truth. Perhaps we are thought less legitimate because no tragedy cries out over our brotherhood, or because we are brothers by a family substance that among you almost destroys brotherhood. Therefore those who are mingled in soul and spirit entertain no doubt about sharing possessions. All things are common among us except wives. In that one point we dissolve the partnership, which is the only partnership other people practice — people who not only usurp the marriages of friends but even obligingly lend their own wives to friends, following, I suppose, the discipline of the greatest and wisest men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with friends the wives they had married for the sake of children and for begetting them elsewhere, I do not know whether the wives were willing; for why would they care about chastity when husbands gave it away so easily? O example of Attic wisdom, O Roman gravity! The philosopher acts as a pimp and a censor. What wonder, then, that such great love is practiced among us? Even our dinners — apart from those infamous for crime — you brand as prodigal. Of us it was said, surely, that we feast as if we would die tomorrow, yet build as if we would never die. But who sees a straw in another's eye more easily than a beam in his own? The air grows sour with the belching of so many tribes, curiae, and decuriae. A necessary creditor will be required for the expenses of the Salian feasts. The accountants calculate the costs of the Herculanean tables and pollucta. The choice of cooks is announced for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, and the Attic mysteries. Spartan broths are stirred up by the smoke of the Serapian dinner. Yet only the Christian dining-room comes under scrutiny. Our dinner, by its very name, shows its rationale: it is called by the Greek word for love. Whatever the cost, it is gain to spend in the name of piety, because we relieve every needy person with this refreshment — not as parasites who fawn for the glory of serving liberty under the belly's authority amid insults and fattening, but as those for whom the contemplation of the moderate is greater before God. If the cause of the dinner is honorable, judge the rest of the order of discipline, which belongs to the office of religion: it admits nothing base, nothing immodest; we do not recline before prayer to God has been tasted; we eat only as much as the hungry can take; we drink only as much as is useful for the chaste. Thus they are satisfied in such a way that they remember they must worship God even through the night; thus they converse as those who know the Lord is listening. After the hand-washing and the lights, each is invited to sing to God from the holy scriptures or from his own gift; and so it is proved how he has drunk. Prayer brings the dinner to an end. From there they depart not into crowds of the lewd, nor into classes of dissolute talk, nor into outbreaks of lasciviousness, but to the same care for modesty and chastity, as those who have not so much dined as disciplined themselves. This gathering of Christians is rightly deemed illicit only if it is to be condemned on the same grounds as illicit gatherings; if anyone complains of it under the same title as a complaint against factions. For whose destruction do we ever assemble? We are gathered for this — which we are also when dispersed; we are a whole — which we are also as individuals; we harm no one, we grieve no one. When the upright, the good, the pious, and the chaste come together, it is not to be called a faction, but a curia.