either true or false, then what will they say about the Holy Spirit,
those who impiously argue, in accordance with the vestiges of the
Arian heresy, that He is less than the Father and the Son, and who
disagree, both in thought and in many of their actions, with the
ancient laws of the fathers, and with the holy ritual of the Western
Church, they have added this increment to their damnation: they claim
that God limps, having inflicted upon him an inequality of his own
nature. 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