lost their internal strength at the roots, while the aborted[66] Italians, French, and English, have flourished. I am silent about the fact that so many abuses have become customary in those worthless churches, that in many of these regions no one is made a priest unless he has chosen a wife, so that the apostle's statement that a man who is to be chosen should have only one wife be observed. That this statement does not concern a man who has and uses a wife, but does concern man who had a wife and sent her away, is confirmed by the authority of the Western church. I am also silent about the fact that, against Latin custom, people of the Christian faith, regardless of whether they are men or women, are bought and sold like brute animals. To add to the cruelty, they are sent far from their native country to be sold as slaves to pagans. Finally, worse than all these, it appears that imperial law among them generally sanctions young girls (a freedom permitted everywhere as though to be just) being taken to become prostitutes. An example: if a man has three or four daughters, one of them is put in a house of prostitution; some part of the smelly lucre derived from the suffering of these unhappy women goes to the wretched emperor's treasury, while part goes to support the woman who earned it in such a base way. Hear how the clamor ascends mightily to the ears of the Lord of Hosts.[67] Moreover, the priests who are in charge of celebrating the divine sacraments prepare the Lord's body after they have eaten, as I have heard, and offer it to be eaten by anyone who is fasting. While they wander in these and similar paths of evil, and while they "follow their own devices,"[68] God has set up over them a new law-giver, "so that the people may know that they are mortal."[69] And since they, more wanton than the beasts of the field, have knowingly transgressed the limits set by their fathers, they have become objects of opprobrium. But just let me tell something about the authority upon which the nations of the East rely when they decide to abandon the Christian religion to return to paganism.