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.