whether or no they were guilty of them: "Three things are alleged
against us: Atheism, Thyestean feasts, OEdipodean intercourse," says
Athenagoras ("Apology," ch. iii). Justin Martyr refers to the same
charges ("2nd Apology," ch. xii). "Monsters of wickedness, we are
accused of observing a holy rite, in which we kill a little child and
then eat it, in which after the feast we practise incest.... Come,
plunge your knife into the babe, enemy of none, accused of none, child
of all; or if that is another's work, simply take your place beside a
human being dying before he has really lived, await the departure of the
lately-given soul, receive the fresh young blood, saturate your bread
with it, freely partake" ("Apology," Tertullian, secs. 7, 8). Tertullian
pleads earnestly that these accusations were false: "if you cannot do
it, you ought not to believe it of others. For a Christian is a man as
well as you" (Ibid). Yet, when Tertullian became a Montanist, he
declared that these very crimes _were_ committed at the Agapae, so that
he spoke falsely either in the one case or in the other. "It was
sometimes faintly insinuated, and sometimes boldly asserted, that the
same bloody sacrifices and the same incestuous festivals, which were so
falsely ascribed to the orthodox believers, were in reality celebrated
by the Marcionites, by the Carpocratians, and by several other sects of
the Gnostics.... Accusations of a similar kind were retorted upon the
Church by the schismatics who had departed from its communion; and it
was confessed on all sides that the most scandalous licentiousness of
manners prevailed among great numbers of those who affected the name of
Christians. A Pagan magistrate, who possessed neither leisure nor
abilities to discern the almost imperceptible line which divides the
orthodox faith from heretical depravity, might easily have imagined that
their mutual animosity had extorted the discovery of their common guilt"
("Decline and Fall," Gibbon, vol. ii., pp. 204, 205). It was fortunate,
the historian concludes, that some of the magistrates reported that they