dy, carnal strife on the incarnation of the Word goes
on irreverently. Even the indivisible Trinity is divided at the
street corners and quarrelled over, so that there are already as
many errors as there are teachers, as many scandals as lecture
rooms, as many blasphemies as public squares.

Furthermore, if recourse is had to the courts which are
established by Common Law, either those set up by us, or by the
regular judges which we are bound to recognize, there is
presented by venal men the tangled forest of the Decretals, under
the pretext, as it were, of the sacred memory of Pope Alexander,
and the more ancient sacred Canons are thrown away, rejected, and
spewed out.

This confusion being made in the very centre of the wholesome
regulations made by the Councils of the holy fathers, they impose
upon their councils no method and on their business no restraint,
those letters having prevailing weight, which, it may be, lawyers
have forged and engrossed for pay in their own offices or
chambers. A new volume, got together from these sources, is both
read regularly in the schools and is exposed for sale in the
market with the approval of the crowd of notaries, who rejoice
that both their labor is lessened and their pay increased in
engrossing these suspicious works.

Two woes have been set forth, and lo, a third woe remains! The
Faculties called liberal [i.e., free] have lost their old time
liberty, and are devoted to a slavery so complete that
long-haired youths shamelessly possess themselves of the offices
in these Faculties, and beardless boys sit in the seat of the
Elders, and those who do not yet know how to be pupils strive to
be named Doctors. And they themselves compile their own
summaries, reeking and wet with [their own] further drivellings,
and not even seasoned with the salt of the philosophers.
Neglecting the rules of the Arts and throwing away the standard
works of the Makers of the Arts, they catch in their sophisms, as
in spiders' webs, the midges of their empty trifling phrases.
Philosophy cries out that her garments are rent and torn asunder;
she modestly covers her nakedness with certain carefully prepared
remnants [but] she is neither consulted by the good man nor does
she console the good woman.

These things, O