Chapter XXX.—Argument:  The Story About Christians Drinking the Blood of an Infant that They Have Murdered, is a Barefaced Calumny.  But the Gentiles, Both Cruelly Expose Their Children Newly Born, and Before They are Born Destroy Them by a Cruel Abortion.  Christians are Neither Allowed to See Nor to Hear of Manslaughter.

“And now I should wish to meet him who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant.  Think you that it can be possible for so tender, so little a body to receive those fatal wounds; for any one to shed, pour forth, and drain that new blood of a youngling, and of a man scarcely come into existence?  No one can believe this, except one who can dare to do it.  And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; at another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death.  There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations,102    By medicaments and drinks. extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels, and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth.  And these things assuredly come down from the teaching of your gods.  For Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them.  With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some parts of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed.  Moreover, among the Tauri of Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or rather inhuman, sacrifices.  The Roman sacrificers buried living a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and criminal man.  I believe that he himself taught Catiline to conspire under a compact of blood, and Bellona to steep her sacred rites with a draught of human gore, and taught men to heal epilepsy with the blood of a man, that is, with a worse disease.  They also are not unlike to him who devour the wild beasts from the arena, besmeared and stained with blood, or fattened with the limbs or the entrails of men.  To us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide; and so much do we shrink from human blood, that we do not use the blood even of eatable animals in our food.

CAPUT XXX.

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ARGUMENTUM.---Impudentissimam quoque esse de potato a Christianis infantis a se occisi sanguine calumniam evincit Octavius. Ethnici vero, inquit, et pueros recens natos crudeliter exponunt et priusquam nascantur, crudeli necant abortu. Christianis homicidium nec videre fas, nec audire.

Illum jam velim convenire qui initiari nos dicit aut credit de caede infantis et sanguine. Putas posse fieri ut tam molle, tam parvulum corpus fata vulnerum capiat? ut quisquam illum rudem sanguinem novelli, et vixdum hominis caedat, fundat, exhauriat? Nemo hoc potest credere, nisi qui possit audere. Vos enim video procreatos filios nunc feris et avibus exponere, nunc adstrangulatos misero mortis genere elidere. 0333B Sunt quae in ipsis visceribus, medicaminibus et potis, 0334A originem futuri hominis exstinguant, et parricidium faciant antequam pariant. Et haec utique de deorum vestrorum disciplina descendunt; nam Saturnus filios suos non exposuit, sed voravit. Merito et ei in nonnullis Africae partibus a parentibus infantes immolabantur, blanditiis et osculo comprimente vagitum, ne flebilis hostia immoletur. Tauris etiam Ponticis et Aegyptio Busiridi ritus fuit hospites immolare, et Mercurio Gallos humanas vel inhumanas victimas caedere: Romani Graecum et Graecam, Gallum et Gallam, sacrificii viventes obruere; hodieque ab ab ipsis Latiaris Jupiter homicidio colitur; et, quod Saturni filio dignum est, mali et noxii hominis sanguine saginatur. Ipsum credo docuisse sanguinis foedere conjurare Catilinam, et Vellonam sacrum suum 0334B haustu humani cruoris imbuere; et comitialem morbum 0335A hominis sanguine, id est morbo graviore, sanare. Non dissimiles et qui de arena feras devorant illitas et infactas cruore, vel membris hominis et viscere saginatas. Nobis homicidium nec videre fas, nec audire; tantumque ab humano sanguine cavemus, ut nec edulium pecorum in cibis sanguinem noverimus.