Tertullian, Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting 7

The scorpion still strikes, accusing God of murder. I recoil completely at the filthy state of blasphemy stinking from a heretic's mouth. Yet I will embrace such a God with the confidence of reason, the very reason by which He Himself declared Himself more than a murderer through the person of His Wisdom, speaking in Solomon's voice: 'Wisdom has slain her sons' (Proverbs 8:36). Wisdom is wisdom; she slew wisely, since she sent them into life, and rationally, since she sent them into glory. What genius for parricide! What artistry of crime! What an argument for cruelty: it kills precisely so that the one it kills may not die! So what follows? Wisdom is sung in exits with hymns, for the exits of martyrs are sung too. Wisdom performs constancy in the streets, for she slays her sons well. Trusting in the highest walls, she speaks, for here, according to Isaiah, she cries out: 'I am of God' (Isaiah 44:6); and here she shouts: 'In the name of Jacob'; and another writes: 'In the name of Israel.' What a good mother! I wish to be reduced to her sons, so that she might kill me. I wish to be killed, so that I might become a son. Does she only slay her sons, or does she also torment them? For I hear God saying elsewhere: 'I will refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested.' Certainly through the torments of fire and punishments, through martyrdoms that test faith. The Apostle knows what kind of God he has described, when he writes: 'If God did not spare His own Son, but handed Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?' (Romans 8:32). You see how even His own firstborn and only-begotten Son divine Wisdom slew; surely so that He might live, and bring others back into life. I can say with God's Wisdom: Christ is the one who handed Himself over for our sins. Now Wisdom has slain herself as well. Words do not merely sound; they carry meaning. They are not to be heard only with the ears, but with the mind. The one who does not understand believes in a cruel God. Yet even for the one who does not understand, a sentence stands that restrains the rashness of understanding otherwise. For 'who has known the mind of God? Or who has been His counselor, to instruct Him? Or who has shown Him the way of understanding?' But indeed, it was permitted in the world to appease the Diana of the Scythians, the Mercury of the Gauls, the Saturn of the Africans, with human victims. And in Latium, to this very day, human blood is tasted by Jupiter in the middle of the city; no one retracts it, nor fails to presume some reason for it, or the inestimable will of their god. If our God had also demanded martyrdoms in the name of His own victim, who would have reproached Him for a funereal religion, mournful rites, a funeral pyre for an altar, a polluted priest? And would they not have considered blessed the one whom God had devoured?