In the ardour of its attacks upon the heathen civilisation, the rising Puritanism of the Church bore hard upon the whole of culture. As against the theatre and the gladiatorial games, indeed, it occupied an unassailable position. There is a grim and characteristic humour in Tertullian's story of the Christian woman who went to the theatre and came back from it possessed with a devil, and the devil's crushing reply, _In meo eam inveni,_ to the expostulation of the exorcist; a nobler passion rings in his pleading against the butcheries of the amphitheatre, "Do you wish to see blood? Behold Christ's!" His declamations against worldly luxury and ornament in the sumptuous pages of the _De Cultu Feminarum_ are not more sweeping or less sincere than those of Horace or Juvenal; but the violent attack made on education and on literature itself in the _De Idololatria_ shows the growth of that persecuting spirit which, as it gathered material force, destroyed ancient art and literature wherever it found them, and which led Pope Gregory, four hundred years later, to burn the magnificent library founded by Augustus. _Nos sumus in quos decucurrerunt fines seculorum,_ "upon us the ends of the world are come," is the burden of Tertullian's impassioned argument. What were art and letters to those who waited, from moment to moment, for the glory of the Second Coming? Yet for ten years or more he continued to pour forth his own brilliant essays; and while the substance of his teaching becomes more and more harsh and vindictive, the force of his rhetoric, his command over irony and invective, the gorgeous richness of his vocabulary, remain as striking as ever. In the strange and often romantic psychology of the _De Anima,_ and in the singular clothes- philosophy of the _De Pallio,_ he appears as the precursor of Swedenborg and Teufelsdrückh. A remarkable passage in the former treatise, in which he speaks of the growing pressure of over-population in the Empire, against which wars, famines, and pestilences had become necessary if unwelcome remedies, may lead us to reconsider the theory, now largely accepted, that the Roman Empire decayed and perished for want of men. With the advance of years his growing antagonism to the Catholic Church is accompanied by a further hardening of his style. The savage Puritanism of the _De Monogamia_ and _De Ieiunio_ is couched in a scholastic diction where the tradition of culture is disappearing; and in the gloomy ferocity of the _De Pudicitia,_ probably the latest of his extant works, he comes to a final rupture alike with Catholicism and with humane letters.