Against Celsus 1.5

Setting out the teaching about idolatry as peculiar to those who follow the Word, he even adds support for it, saying that for this reason they do not regard gods made with hands as gods, since it is not reasonable that things made by the most worthless craftsmen, of wicked character, often fashioned by unjust men, should be gods. In what follows, then, wanting to make it common property, as though it were not first discovered by this teaching, he quotes a saying of Heraclitus: "Those who approach lifeless things as gods act as if one were to hold conversation with houses." About this too we must say that, as with the rest of moral teaching, notions were sown in human beings from which Heraclitus, and any other Greek or barbarian, thought of establishing this. For he mentions the Persians too as thinking so, citing Herodotus who records it. We will add ourselves that Zeno of Citium too says in his Republic: "There will be no need to build temples; for no temple ought to be thought of great worth or holy, since it is the work of builders and mechanics." It is clear, then, that on this doctrine too what must be done has been written "in the hearts" of human beings by the letters of God.