Minucius Felix — Octavius 35

And yet humans are warned by the books of the most learned and by poets’ songs of that fiery river and of the heat often circling from the Stygian marsh, prepared for eternal torments, known both by demons’ tips and from the prophets’ oracles, and so handed down. And therefore among them even king Jupiter himself swears religiously by the torrential banks and the black gulf: for knowing beforehand the punishment destined for himself with his worshippers he shudders. Nor is there any measure or end to the torments. There a wise fire burns limbs and remakes them, tears and feeds. As lightning-fires touch bodies and do not consume them, as the fires of Etna and Vesuvius and of burning lands everywhere blaze and are not spent: so that penal fire is not fed by the losses of those burning, but nourished by the uneaten mangling of bodies.

And that those who do not know God are deservedly tortured as impious and unjust, no one but a profane person debates, since it is no lesser crime to ignore the parent and lord of all than to injure him. And although ignorance of God suffices for punishment, just as knowledge profits for pardon, still if we Christians are compared with you, although in some things our discipline is lesser, we will nonetheless be found much better than you. For you forbid adulteries and commit them; we are born husbands to our wives alone: you punish crimes committed; among us even to think is to sin: you fear accomplices; we fear even conscience alone, without which we cannot be: finally the prison seethes from your number; no Christian is there unless either a defendant of his religion or a fugitive.