Lactantius — Divine Institutes 5.13

But since our number is always increased from the worshipers of the gods, and is never lessened even in the persecution itself — because humans can sin and be defiled by sacrifice, but cannot be turned away from God: for truth is strong by its own force — who at last is so senseless and so blind that he does not see on which side wisdom is? But they are blinded by malice and fury, that they may not see, and they think those foolish who, though they have it in their power to avoid punishments, prefer nonetheless to be tortured and to die, though from this very fact they could perceive that that is not folly into which so many thousands of humans throughout the whole world agree with one and the same mind. If women slip by the weakness of their sex — for sometimes they call this a womanish or old-womanish superstition — men at least are wise. If boys and youths are improvident by age, the mature and the old at least have stable judgment. If one city is mad, the rest beyond number cannot be foolish. If one province or one nation lacks prudence, all the others must have understanding of what is right. But when from the rising of the sun even to its setting the divine law has been taken up, and every sex, every age and people and region serves God with one and equal minds, and there is the same patience everywhere, the same contempt of death, they ought to have understood that there is something of reason in that matter which is defended not without cause even unto death, something of foundation and solidity which not only does not dissolve that religion by injuries and vexation, but always increases it and makes it firmer.

For in this too their malice is convicted: that they think they have overturned God's religion from the foundation if they have defiled humans, though both it is allowed to make satisfaction to God, and there is no worshiper of God so bad that, when opportunity is given, he does not return to appeasing God, and indeed with greater devotion. For conscience of sin and fear of punishment makes one more religious, and the faith that penitence puts back is always much firmer. If therefore they themselves, when they think the gods angry at them, still believe them to be appeased by gifts and sacrifices and incense, why at last do they think our God so harsh, so implacable, that he who has poured a libation to their gods under compulsion and unwillingly should seem already unable to be a Christian? Unless perhaps they think that those once contaminated will transfer their mind so that they begin of their own will to do what they did through torments. Who would willingly take up that service which began from injury? Who, when he sees the scars of his sides, would not rather hate the gods for whose sake he bears everlasting marks of punishments and brands pressed into his flesh? So it happens that when peace is given from heaven, both all who fled return and another new people is added because of the miracle of virtue. For when the crowd sees humans torn by various kinds of torments and, among worn-out executioners, holding an unconquered patience, they judge — which is the fact — that neither the consent of so many nor the perseverance of those dying is empty, nor that patience itself can overcome such great tortures without God. Robbers and men of strong body cannot endure lacerations of that kind: they cry out and give groans, for they are conquered by pain, because inspired patience is absent from them. But ours — to say nothing of men — boys and weak women silently conquer their torturers, and not even fire can wring a groan from them.

This is true virtue, which the philosophers too, glorying, toss about not in deed but in empty words, discoursing that nothing so befits the gravity and constancy of a wise man as that he cannot be driven by any terrors from his opinion and purpose, but that it is worth so much to be tortured and to die, lest he betray faith, lest he depart from duty, lest, subdued by fear of death or bitter pain, he do anything unjust — unless perhaps Flaccus seems to them to rave in his lyrics when he says that the just man, tenacious of purpose, is not shaken in solid mind by the citizens' heat ordering what is crooked, nor by the face of the pressing tyrant. Nothing truer can be said, if this is referred to those who refuse no tortures, no death, lest they decline from faith and justice, who do not tremble at tyrannical orders or the swords of governors so as not to defend with constant mind true and solid freedom, which in this alone is to be guarded by the wise. For who is so insolent, so lifted up, that he forbids me to lift my eyes to heaven, that he lays on me the necessity either of worshiping what I do not will or of not worshiping what I will? What further is left to us, if even this which ought to be done by will alien lust wrings out? No one will accomplish that, if we have any virtue for despising death and pain. If we hold that constancy, why are we judged fools for doing the things the philosophers praise? Rightly therefore Seneca, objecting incongruity to humans, says: the highest virtue seems to them a great mind, and yet the same people hold him who despises death for a madman — which is certainly of the highest perversity. But these worshipers of empty religions object that by the same folly by which they do not understand the true God: whom the Erythraean Sibyl calls deaf and senseless, who neither hear divine things nor perceive them, but fear and adore earth imagined by their own fingers.