We believe that this, by God's favor, pertains both to our reward and to the salvation of the people: that the Christian people, having abandoned the worship of idols, ought purely to serve God, to whom we have promised an undivided faith, insofar as He shall deign to inspire.
And because it is necessary that the common people, who do not keep the precept of the priest as they ought, be corrected also by our command, we have decreed that this charter be sent generally throughout all places, charging that whoever, when admonished, do not at once cast away the images set up in the fields wherever they are, or the idols dedicated to demons by men, or who hinder the priests destroying these, shall not depart otherwise—after sureties have been given—save by being presented before our eyes. In what manner the injury done to God shall be avenged upon the sacrilegious is for us to determine.
And because our faith is such that whatever is announced from the Gospel, the prophets, or the Apostle—the word being made from the altar by the priest, insofar as God grants understanding—there has come to us a complaint that many sacrileges are being committed among the people, whereby God is offended and the people through sin turn aside to death: namely, sleepless nights spent in drunkenness, buffoonery, and songs, even on the holy days themselves—Easter, the Lord's Nativity, and the other festivals—and on the coming of the Lord's Day, women dancers wandering about the villages. All these things, whereby God is known to be offended, we in no way permit to be done.
Whoever, after the admonition of the priests or our precept, shall presume to perpetrate these sacrileges: if he is a servile person, we order that he receive a hundred strokes of the lash; but if he is free-born, or perchance a person of higher rank, he is worthy of strict confinement. These, moreover, are to be brought to penitence, so that they who despise to hear the words that are wholesome and that recall them from the peril of death, may at least be brought back by the torments of the body to desiring the soundness of mind.