TERTULLIAN'S ADDRESS TO MARTYRS PART III

III. Granted now, blessed ones, that the prison is grievous even to Christians. We have been called to the military service of the living God since the moment when we responded to the words of the Sacrament.5 No soldier goes to a war equipped with luxuries, nor does he go forth to the battle-line from his bed-chamber, but from light and narrow tents wherein every hardship and roughness and uncomfortableness is to.be found. Even in peace soldiers are already learning by toil and hardships to endure warfare by marching under arms, by manœuvring over the plain, by working in the trenches, by |p56 closing files so as to form the "testudo."6 Their occupations are all severe, lest body and mind should quake at passing from shade to sun, and from sun to cold weather, from vest to leather cuirass, from silence to clamour, from repose to tumult. Similarly do ye, blessed ones, account whatever hardships ye experi­ence as a drill of mind and body. You are about to undergo a good contest (1 Tim. vi. 12; 2 Tim. ii. 4 f.; iv. 8) wherein the living God is the President,7 the Holy Spirit is the Trainer, the wreath is that of eternity, the prize (1 Cor. ix. 24; Phil. 14), angelic being, the citizenship in the heavens (Phil. iii. 20), the glory unto ages of ages. Therefore your Master, Christ Jesus, Who anointed you with the Spirit, and hath brought you forth to this wrestling-ground, hath willed before the day of contest to set you apart from a less restrained condition unto a sterner training, that your powers may be strengthened within you. For as everybody knows, athletes are separated for a stricter training, that they may have opportunity to build up their strength. They are kept from luxury, from more agreeable kinds of food, from pleasanter kinds of drink. They are under restraint, they are racked, they are worn out with fatigue; and the more they toil in these exercises the better hope have they of victory. And they, says the Apostle, that they may obtain a corruptible wreath (I Cor. ix. 25). Let |p57 us, who are destined to obtain an eternal one, interpret our prison as a wrestling-school,8 so that, as persons well drilled in all kinds of hardships, we may be presented at the stadium of the judgment-seat: for virtue is built up by hardness but destroyed by softness.