And you are not ashamed, miserable people, like the Chaldeans, to worship lifeless stumps of wood, the creation of human hands, destroyed by fire?! By turning a stone or wood, you proclaim these objects gods! Then, taking the most beautiful farm bull or some other plausible animal, you sacrifice it to your dead stump. Oh, you are mad! For in this case the sacrifice is more worthy of your divinity, for the first is a living being, the creation of God, while the second is a lifeless piece of wood, the creation of man. How much more intelligent than you, a creature endowed with reason! For an animal recognizes the man who feeds it, but you have not known God, Who created you out of nothing, Who gives you life and protects you. You recognize as God a thing that was recently struck with iron or melted by fire. Having gilded or silvered this thing, you place it on an elevated place, then prostrate yourself before it, thus worshipping not God, but the creation of your own hands, lifeless, soulless pieces of wood. Your idols cannot even be called dead, because they are called creatures that had life, but lost it. Your idols never had life.

What could so exalt idols in your eyes? Could it be the fire, hammer, or axe with which they were made? It is even difficult to find a worthy name for those who do such stupidity, such madness! For you know that your stone and clay gods crumble and crumble, the wooden ones rot, the iron ones rust, the gold and silver ones melt. Your gods are even for sale: some are more expensive, others cheaper. But their value is not the same, not because some of them are more powerful than others, but depends solely on the value of the material of which they are made. How is it possible to sell or buy gods? How can the gods be so lifeless, motionless?! Or do you not see that when they are seated, they never sit down, and those who are seated never get up. Be ashamed, madman! Being so far from the truth, wallowing in deceit, you would at least silently praise and glorify these stumps, the creation of your hands, to which you have given the name of gods.

Come to your senses, miserable man! Understand that you are older than the god you made. How mad it is to think that as a man you can create gods! How could people come up with such a ridiculous, audacious idea! Understand, then, that you do not make God, but only the likeness of a man or an animal, because inside they have nothing resembling a man or an animal, for they have no tongue, larynx, brain, or any entrails at all. So that your gods do not resemble either the human body or the bodies of animals, but are objects that are completely useless and do not express anything. And it is these things that you worship and serve! If there were no blacksmithing, carpentry, and stone-carving trade, there would be no gods of yours; if the watchmen had not looked after your gods, you would have lost them; In the populous city of madmen, where the same god is worshipped by many, there is less guard over such a god. Moreover, if your god is made of gold or silver, then he is diligently watched; but if it is made of stone, clay, or some other cheap material, then you think it protects itself. So it turns out that the clay god is more powerful than the golden one.

Are you not, then, worthy to be ridiculed as foolish and blind? But one should rather feel sorry for you than laugh at you. Your actions are guided not by piety, but by stupidity and vice. Some of you, loving war, made a wooden image of a warrior and called him Ares; others, under the influence of a shameful passion for feminine beauty, reproduced the image of Aphrodite, adoring, therefore, passion in her person; others, out of love for wine, made an idol, which they called Dionysus. Likewise, the rest of you, being attracted to all evil, have set up idols of their passions, so that they call their vices gods. For this reason before the altars of your gods there are various voluptuous dances, the sounds of the same songs are heard, and all impure feelings and desires are born there. Who can properly express all the vileness of all this? And no one will defile his mouth with stories of such things. We know all this, but we are silent.

So these are the objects of your adoration, Theudas. And you urge me to worship, revere and adore them as well. Such a desire of yours expresses the depth of madness and evil that reign in your soul. But let it be done by all like you, including yourself. But I will serve and worship my God, and I will dedicate myself wholly to Him, the Creator and Provider of all, through our Lord Jesus Christ, our joy and hope, through Whom we have access to the Father of lights in the Holy Spirit. Spirit; by Whose blood our sins were atoned for. For if He had not suffered in the flesh and in the form of man for us, His servants, then we would not have been worthy of adoption. His flesh was crucified on the Cross, then placed in the tomb, where it remained for three days; at the same time He descended into hell and freed from there the souls trampled upon by sin, languishing in the power of a terrible ruler. What has He done with all this that you mock Him? Do you not see how many useless and useless places the sun sends its beneficial rays? Should he be laughed at for that? Does it not by its rays dry up and evaporate all that is worthless and rotten, dispel darkness, while remaining unharmed and inaccessible to the darkness and filth it destroys? Or take fire. Taking black iron, it makes it bright, shiny, soft. But does he himself assume any properties or former qualities of iron?

Christ, revolving in the midst of the passions, remained alien to them and unites in Himself two natures: with His human nature He is crucified on the Cross, while with His Divine nature He eclipses the sun, shakes the earth and resurrects from the graves the bodies of many of the dead; By human nature He dies, but by Divine nature He resurrects the dead and crushes hell. That is why the Prophet exclaims: "Hell under hell has been moved for Thy sake, that it might meet Thee at Thy entrance" (Isaiah 14:9). Thinking to meet only man and meeting God, he suddenly became empty and crushed. The Lord is resurrected and ascends to heaven, which He did not abandon as God. In all this way He has exalted our humiliated, insignificant race, immersed in the darkness of ignorance, and placed it on the throne of immortal and resplendent glory.

Again, what has the Son and Word of God done in all this that you are not ashamed to blaspheme Him? In your opinion, what is better: to confess and revere such a God, good and loving to mankind, who prescribes peace, righteousness, temperance, purity of body and soul, mercy, faith, Who Himself is Good, Love and Truth, or your gods, the personification of evil passions, evil deeds, shameful by their very names? Woe to you, the most insane of the foolish, the sons of perdition, the heirs of darkness! Blessed am I, and all Christians who confess and serve the good and loving God! Though they will suffer a little in this world, they will enjoy the immortal fruit of reward in the realm of divine and infinite bliss."

Then Theudas said to him: "But you will not deny that many great and wise teachers, worthy of wonder because of their wisdom and virtue, have prescribed our faith, and all the kings and the mighty of this world in general have accepted it as beautiful and unshakable. The faith of the Galileans was accepted by a few insignificant, ignorant fishermen and tillers of the soil, and it was preached by the same uneducated people, of whom there were no more than twelve. How can one prefer the faith of a few, insignificant and uneducated people to the faith of many, great, noble and wise people? What proof is there that the former are right and the latter are wrong?"

To this the prince answered: "You, Theudas, are truly like an ass who, listening to the sounds of words, does not understand their meaning, or an adder that stops his ears so as not to hear the sounds of a charming song. The Prophet spoke well of thee and the like: Can an Ethiopian change his skin, and a leopard his spots? In the same way, can you also do good, if you are accustomed to do evil? (Jeremiah 13:23). You blind madman! How is it that the power of truth does not bring you to your senses? It is the fact that the majority praises and marvels at the wisdom of your false faith, that many kings confess it, while the teaching of the Gospel is exalted by a few and ignorant people, that testifies to the power of our grace-filled faith and to the impotence of your pernicious faith: since, in spite of the fact that your faith has wise defenders and powerful confessors, it nevertheless powerless and dark.

The teaching of our faith, having no support from people, has shone brighter than the sun and rules over the whole world. If it had been expounded by orators and philosophers, if it had been confessed by kings and other powerful people of this world, then you would have said that everything in it is the fruit of human strength. But since St. The Gospel, set forth by poor and insignificant fishermen, as you yourself say, nevertheless dominates the world, and in spite of all persecutions: their sound goes forth throughout all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world (Psalm 18:5), what will you call it, if not a mighty force that affirms the salvation of men? What better proof do you need, madman, that the followers of your faith are wrong, and the followers of ours are right?

For if all your teaching were not idle talk and falsehood, then, having such support in men, it would not diminish and weaken in its followers. I saw a formidable wicked man, expanding like a rooted, many-branched tree; but he has passed away, and behold, he is gone; I seek it, and find it not (Psalm 36:35,36). These words of the Prophet apply to you, the adherents of idolatry, for soon, soon the time will come when not one of you will be any more. You will disappear from the face of the earth, as smoke disappears in the air; you are exhausted, as wax melts at the proximity of fire. And about the teaching of the Gospel the Lord says: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away" (Matt. 24:35). The Psalmist exclaims: In the beginning Thou (the Lord) founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They will perish, but Thou shalt remain; but all of them will be worn out like a garment, and like a garment Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed. But Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not end (Psalm 101:26,28).

And the divine heralds of Christ's coming, the wise fishermen who plucked all out of the depths of falsehood, of whom thou speakest with such contempt, thou insignificant slave of sin, shone forth in the world like the sun, bestowing sight upon the blind, hearing to the deaf, free walk to the lame, and life to the dead. Their very shadows healed all human sufferings. Evil spirits, whom you fear as gods, they not only expelled from people, but also from the universe in general by the power of the sign of the Cross, which they pointed to as an omnipotent means, rejecting all divination. Thus, the Apostles, healing every human ailment by the power of Christ, restoring what has been destroyed, naturally serve as an object of wonder for all well-meaning people, as messengers of truth. What can you say now about your wise men and orators, whom the Lord, with all their wisdom, has convicted of foolishness? What can you say about the adherents of the devil? What did they do and leave for people worthy of attention? What can be said of them, except for their short-sightedness, stupidity, and a certain art of hiding under the outward brilliance of speech all the dirt of their shameful faith?

The original culprits of the appearance of idols were not mistaken, like the idolaters of today, but people gradually came to this degree of error. It is said that Seruch was the first to put up various images, which later gave rise to idolatry. Namely, he was in the habit of erecting statues or memorial pillars in honour of men of bravery, or of any other good qualities and deeds worthy of attention. These monuments were of the same character under his contemporaries. But later generations, not understanding their true purpose, forgetting that they were erected only as the memory of men who had done something praiseworthy, began to look upon these statues as images of their gods, making sacrifices and libations before them, thus adoring mortals like themselves.

Later, the view of this was even more distorted: when people made sacrifices in front of wooden statues, they thought that these statues were inhabited by spirits who appropriated to themselves the honor given by people and the sacrifices they offered. Such a view was inspired in them by evil spirits, the beginning and source of all evil. Since they try in every way to attract people who do not have the proper faith and knowledge of the true God, to consider themselves gods for two reasons: first, because of their inherent vanity, this name and the worship associated with it flatter; Secondly, they seek by this that those whom they have deceived may be cast into the eternal fire prepared for them, wherefore they have taught men all iniquity and all shameful things.