2

¹ Many things, then, as I have said, the Latins seem to do wrong in: offering the unleavened bread, fasting on the Sabbath, and not numbering the fast before the Passion as we do; dissolving the marriages of their clergy while permitting those of the laity indiscriminately, without restraint. And—if you are not about to laugh—they shave their beards, the laity and the sacred orders alike; men whose hands flash with gold rings, and who wear the priestly vestment woven of silk thread and dyed many colors; their ascetics eat meat, and when they ought to bow down and worship the Lord, they cleave to the ground instead. In this much, at any rate, they all go wrong alike. You would also see among them the sikaranoi[1] gorging on strangled meat—and you would abhor the Roman Church for teaching such things.

² Perhaps some one of the very faithful, more fervent and zealous for Orthodoxy, rising up against us, might charge us with ignorance and poor judgment in divine things, or with coldness and betrayal of our own cause—and he himself would list still more charges than these. But of these I judge that some need no correction at all, and others only a moderate one: the sort that, if someone could bring it about, would confer some small benefit on the Church, but if not, should not even be counted among our losses.

³ But what seems to me, above all, to make communion with the Latins a harsh thing for right-thinking people—and which, left unaddressed, does great harm to the inheritance the Son received among the nations—this I will show you, and refute so far as I am able. And if we do not find the discourse growing too long, we will look briefly at some of the other matters too.