Tertullian, Apology 50

So you ask why we complain of your persecution when you yourselves are willing to suffer, since you ought to love those through whom you suffer exactly what you want. We do want to suffer, but the way a soldier faces war — nobody embraces battle gladly, because trembling and danger are unavoidable; yet he still fights with everything he has, and the man who complained about the fight ends up rejoicing in victory because he wins both glory and spoils. Our battle is the courtroom: you drag us before tribunals so that we must contend for the truth with our lives on the line. Victory means gaining what you fought for, and this victory carries a double prize — the glory of pleasing God and the spoil of eternal life. We are "covered over" only when we have won; therefore we conquer precisely when we are killed, and we escape precisely when we are covered. You mock us now as worthless kindling and half-axe men, because we are burned alive, bound to a stake and ringed with brushwood. That is what our victory looks like; that is our triumphal robe; in such a chariot we ride in triumph. Naturally we do not please the defeated; that is why we are written off as desperate and lost. But this very desperation and loss, in the cause of glory and fame, raises the banner of virtue. Mucius willingly left his right hand on the altar — oh, the loftiness of his soul! Empedocles threw himself entire into the fires of Aetna — oh, the strength of his mind! A founder of Carthage gave herself to the pyre as a second marriage — oh, the praise of her chastity! Regulus, rather than live while many enemies lived, endured the cross with his whole body — oh, the strong man, the victor even in captivity! Anaxarchus, pounded like a pestle, cried, "Pound, pound the shell of Anaxarchus; you are not pounding Anaxarchus" — oh, the philosopher's magnanimity, joking at his own death! I pass over those who bought praise with their own sword or a milder death. You yourselves crown the contests of torture. The Attic courtesan, after the executioner grew tired, finally spat her chewed-off tongue into the face of the raging tyrant so that she might spit out her voice as well and never betray the conspirators, even if she had wanted to when broken. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what philosophy offers, answered "contempt of death," and under the tyrant's whips he sealed that sentence with his life. The Spartan lash, made more bitter under the very eyes of cheering relatives, brings a house as much honor of endurance as it sheds blood. Oh, the glory that is permitted because it is human — to which neither lost presumption nor desperate persuasion is ascribed in its contempt for death and every kind of cruelty, for which it is permitted to suffer as much for fatherland, for land, for empire, for friendship as it is not permitted for God! And yet you cast statues, inscribe images, engrave titles for all these into eternity; as far as monuments can, you yourselves give the dead a kind of resurrection. The man who hopes for true resurrection from God if he suffers for God — he is insane. But go ahead, good Governors, you will look far better to the people if you slaughter Christians. Crucify, torture, condemn, grind us down: the proof of our innocence is your injustice. That is why God lets us suffer these things. For recently, by sentencing a Christian woman to a brothel instead of the lions, you confessed that a stain on purity counts as worse among us than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however refined, gain anything: it is an enticement to the sect. We multiply every time you mow us down: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you urge endurance of pain and death — Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, Seneca in On Providence, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus. Yet their words do not find as many disciples as Christians gain by teaching through deeds. That very obstinacy you reproach is the teacher. For who is not shaken by contemplating it into asking what lies inside the matter? Who, having asked, does not draw near, and having drawn near, does not long to suffer, so that he may redeem the whole grace of God, so that he may obtain all forgiveness from Him in exchange for his own blood? For in this work all sins are forgiven. That is why we give thanks for your sentences; it is an emulation of the divine and the human: when we are condemned by you, we are absolved by God.