See How They Love One Another

Tertullian addressed his Apology to the "Rulers of the Roman Empire" to answer the charges made against the Christians. In chapter 39 he describes how the church kept its treasure chest. Each member gave on the monthly day "if he likes", and "only if it be his pleasure, and only if he be able: for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary."

The gifts were not spent on feasts. They went "to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house", to those who had suffered shipwreck, and to Christians held in the mines, on the islands or in prison "for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church".

Then he reported what this care brought on the church (Apology 39).

"But it is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, for themselves are animated by mutual hatred; how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put to death."

The first words are the pagans' reproach, and the clauses after them are Tertullian's comment on the speakers.

Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, wrote a festal letter to his church as the feast drew near in a year of plague, and Eusebius kept it in his Church History 7.22.

Of his own people Dionysius wrote, "The most of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully" (7.22.7).

Of the pagans he wrote, "They deserted those who began to be sick, and fled from their dearest friends. And they cast them out into the streets when they were half dead, and left the dead like refuse, unburied" (7.22.10).

Plague reached Carthage in 252, and its bishop Cyprian wrote On the Mortality for his people.

He asked what the plague was testing, "whether they who are in health tend the sick; whether relations affectionately love their kindred; whether masters pity their languishing servants; whether physicians do not forsake the beseeching patients" (section 16).

His deacon Pontius records in his Life of Cyprian, which tells of Cyprian's death and so was written after it, that Cyprian gathered the people and taught "that there was nothing wonderful in our cherishing our own people only with the needed attentions of love". He said that a man would become perfect who did more than "the publican or the heathen" and "loved even his enemies", and he pointed to God, who gives sun and rain "not only to His people, but to aliens also" (Life of Cyprian 9).

The church shared out the work according to each one's standing, and those too poor to give money gave their labour. Pontius sums up the result: "Thus what is good was done in the liberality of overflowing works to all men, not to those only who are of the household of faith" (Life of Cyprian 10). Banishment followed, as Pontius tells it, and Cyprian was put to death at Carthage in 258.

In his oration on Basil, bishop of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus described the house Basil had built for the sick: "Go forth a little way from the city, and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety, the common treasury of the wealthy". There, he wrote, "disease is regarded in a religious light, and disaster is thought a blessing, and sympathy is put to the test" (Oration 43, section 63). Tillemont, as the introduction to the oration in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers reports, placed it soon after Gregory left Constantinople in June 381.

At the new city the sick who had been "driven away from their cities and homes" were "no longer the objects of hatred, instead of pity on account of their disease". Gregory says that Basil "saluted them as brethren".