One of the prophets rightly spoke of this relation to those who had fallen into negligence: Be gathered again and tied back together, you undisciplined nation, before you become like the flower that passes away. A disciple can also be said to attach himself to a teacher in terms of a love of study, and we too can attach ourselves to one another not in one fashion only but in many. In short, when someone assists another in a task, should we not consider that he has been conjoined by will to the one who receives his assistance? It seems to us that this is exactly what these innovators mean by conjunction. You must have heard how they stupidly maintain that God the Word assumed a man, as if he were a different Son to himself, and then proposed him as a kind of assistant to his designs so that he underwent the trial and death, came to life again, rose up to heaven, and even sat upon the throne of the ineffable Godhead? With arguments such as these have they not completely and utterly proven that this man is altogether different from the true and natural son?

Struggle, my beloved, for the time is near and the days have been shortened. There is no father who instructs his children, there is no child who obeys his father; good virgins are no longer; the holy fathers have died on all sides; the mothers and the widows are no longer, and we have become like orphans; the humble are crushed underfoot; and blows are showered upon the head of the poor. Therefore there is little to hold back the wrath of God from grieving us, with no one to console us. All this has befallen us because we have not practiced mortification.

And neither will you believe that it was foretold that these nations would come to some place of God, as it has been said, To you the Gentiles shall come from the ends of the earth.^[1] Understand, if you can, that it is to the God of the Christians, who is supreme and the true God, that the people of these nations come, not by walking but by believing. For this same announcement has been made in these words by another prophet: The Lord shall be terrible upon them and shall consume all the gods of the earth, and they shall adore him every man from his place, all the islands of the Gentiles. One says, To you the Gentiles shall come from the ends of the earth; the other, They shall adore him every man from his own place. Therefore they will not be required to withdraw from their own place in coming to him, because they will find him in whom they believe in their own hearts.

Let us, however, speak also of the churches as islands. Moreover, Scripture says in another place, Many islands are converted to me.^[1] Would you know that churches are called islands? The prophet Isaiah says in the name of the Lord, Speak to the inhabitants of this isle.^[2] Let the many isles be glad. Even as islands have been set in the midst of the sea, churches have been established in the midst of this world, and they are beaten and buffeted by different waves of persecution. Truly these islands are lashed by waves every day, but they are not submerged. They are in the midst of the sea, to be sure, but they have Christ as their foundation, Christ who cannot be moved.

For a long time . . . the demons kept silent in their own temples concerning the things that would come to pass, although because of the utterances of the prophets they could not have been unaware of them. When, later, the events began to draw near, they wished, as it were, to foretell them, so that they might not be deemed ignorant and vanquished. Nevertheless, not to mention other instances for the present, long ago there had been foretold and recorded that which the prophet Zephaniah says: The Lord shall prevail against them and shall cast out all the gods of the Gentiles of the earth. And they shall adore him every man from his own place, all the islands of the Gentiles. Possibly those gods who were worshiped in the temples of the Gentiles did not believe that those events would occur to them and consequently did not wish them to be noised abroad through their own seers and diviners.

Despite all this, they still could not raise up a temple and restore the place in which they would be allowed to observe all these rituals according to the law. For the power of Christ, the power which founded the church, has also destroyed that place. The prophet foretold that Christ would come and that he would do these things, even though he would not come until after the captivity.

Some from the circle of your friendship go out with a made-up face; they wear a bandeau around their face; they put this black thing over their eyes under pretext of illness; they have numberless rings attached to their handkerchief, and on their belt, fringes that flap behind them, like calves frisking about in an enclosure. Often they bathe quite naked without necessity; they wear soft shoes on their feet—she went out taking pride in the desires of her soul^[1]—they mince along in the assembly; they accost their friend with a boisterous laugh, like the noise of thorny twigs cracking under a cooking pot. They build themselves alcoves; they adopt customs of the crows and vultures of the world, making themselves comparable to them in their food: dead meat and rotted venison.