For if one is baptized according to the teaching of the Son of God, "in the name of the Son and the Holy Spirit," it is for this reason, that the three are one God; arguing that any of the three is less than the other is to argue that he is not God. Therefore the herd of such bulls among the cows of the people now shuts out those who have proved themselves worth their weight in silver, since some of our countrymen, stirred by the debate with the Greeks, have published splendid books on the office of the Holy Spirit. However, since God places stumbling-block before those who sin voluntarily, their land has spewed forth its own inhabitants, since they were first deprived of the awareness of true belief, and rightly and justly they have been dispossessed of all earthly possessions. For since they fell away from faith in the Trinity, like those who fall in the mud and get muddier, little by little they have come to the final degradation of having taken paganism upon themselves; as the punishment for their sin proceeded, foreigners attacked them, and they lost the soil of their native land. Even those who managed to remain in their native land must pay tribute to foreigners. The most splendidly noble cities, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Nicea,[65] and the provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Greece, the seed-beds of the new grace, have 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.