CRIME AND DELINQUENCY: Christ taught: “You must love your neighbor as yourself.”​—Matthew 22:39.

What normal person wants to be robbed, beaten or murdered? On this basis no genuine Christian can commit such crimes against his fellowman, for Christ said: “All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must likewise do to them.”​—Matthew 7:12.

The apostle Peter was specific in his counsel: “Let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer.”​—1 Peter 4:15.

What does Tertullian have to say about Christian conduct in his day? “In your long lists of those accused of many and various atrocities, has any assassin, any cutpurse [pickpocket], any man guilty of . . . seduction, or stealing bathers’ clothes, [had] his name entered as being a Christian? . . . It is always with your folk the prison is steaming . . . You find no Christian there, except simply as being such; or if one is there as something else, a Christian he is no longer.”

SEXUAL MORALITY: Christianity’s founder declared: “From inside, out of the heart of men, injurious reasonings issue forth: fornications, . . . adulteries, . . . loose conduct. . . . All these wicked things . . . defile a man.”​—Mark 7:21, 22.

The Christian missionary Paul agrees that such things defile one, for he writes: “Neither fornicators, . . . nor adulterers, nor men kept for unnatural purposes, nor men who lie with men . . . will inherit God’s kingdom.”​—1 Corinthians 6:9, 10.

Now let us turn again to the second-century Christian practices: “We are so far from practising promiscuous intercourse, that it is not lawful among us to indulge even a lustful look.” (Athenagoras) “The Christian confines himself to the female sex. . . . The Christian husband has nothing to do with any but his own wife.” (Tertullian)