“Apollonius to the Monopolists of Corn in Aspendos, greeting: The Earth is the common mother of all, for she is just.[53] You are unjust, for you have made her the mother of _yourselves only_. If you will not cease from acting thus, I will not suffer you to remain upon her.”
Philostratus assures us that “intimidated by these indignant words they filled the market with grain, and the city recovered from its distress.”
The earliest of the Latin Fathers extant is, also, one of the most esteemed by the Church,[54] notwithstanding the well-known heterodoxy of his later life, as the first Apologist of Christianity in the Western and Latin world. He was a native of Carthage, the son of an officer holding an important post under the imperial government. The facts of his life known to us are very few, nor is it ascertained at what period he became a convert to the new religion, or when he was ordained as _presbyter_. The ill-treatment to which he was subjected by his clerical brethren at Rome induced him, it seems, to throw in his lot with the Montanist sect, in whose defence he wrote several books. He lived to an advanced age.
Of his numerous works the best known (by name at least) is his _Apologeticus_ (“An Apology for Christianity”). Amongst his other treatises we may enumerate _De Spectaculis_ (“On Shows”), _On Idolatry_, _On the Soldier’s Crown_ (in which Tertullian raises the question of the lawfulness of the “violent and sanguinary occupation” of the soldier, but rather, however, for the reason of the circumstances of the pagan ceremonial), _On Monogamy_, _On the Dress of Women_ (upon the extravagance of which the “Old Fathers” were eloquently denunciative), _Address to his Wife_. The treatise which here concerns us is his _De Jejuniis Adversus Psychicos_.[55]
Tertullian sets himself to expose the subterfuge of a large proportion of the professing Christians in his day who appealed to the pretended authority of Christ and his Apostles for the lawfulness of flesh-eating. Especially does he refute the (supposed) defence of kreophagy in I. _Tim._ iv., 3.[56] As to the celebrated verse in _Genesis_ which solemnly enjoins the vegetable diet, the opponents of abstinence allege the permission afterwards given to the “post-diluvians.”