To the Tsar, glorified by God, who had once been illustrious in orthodoxy, but who now, through our sins, has become the adversary of both. Those who have sense will understand how that your conscience is corrupt even beyond what is found among the infidels.... I have not allowed before my tongue to utter any of these things, but having suffered the bitterest persecution from you, and from the bitterness of my heart I shall speak to you a little. Why, O Tsar, have you struck down the mighty in Israel? Why have you delivered to various deaths the generals given to you by God, and why have you spilled their victorious, saintly blood in the temples of the Lord, at your royal banquets? Why have you stained the thresholds of the churches with the blood of the martyrs, and why have you contrived persecutions and death against those who have served you willingly and have laid down their lives for you, accusing good Christians of treason and magic and other unseemly things, and zealously endeavouring to change light into darkness and to call bitter what is sweet? Of what crime have they been guilty, O Tsar, and with what have they angered you, O Christian vicar? Had they not, through their bravery, destroyed haughty kingdoms, and made those subservient to you by whom our forefathers had been once enslaved? Have not the strong German cities been given to you by God, through their wise foresight? Is that the way you have rewarded us, poor men, by destroying us altogether? Do you, O Tsar, deem yourself to be immortal? Or are you carried away by an unheard-of heresy and imagine that you will not have to appear before the Supreme Judge, the godlike Jesus, who will judge the whole world, but especially cruel tormentors? He, my Christ, who sits on the throne of the cherubim, at the right of the Supreme Power upon high,--will be the judge between you and me. What evils and persecutions have I not suffered from you! And what misery and torment have you not caused me! And what mean calumnies have you not brought down on me! So many various miseries have befallen me that I cannot count them all to-day: my heart is still oppressed with sorrow on account of them. But I shall say this much: I have been deprived of everything, and through you I am exiled from God’s own country. I did not implore with gentle words, did not entreat you with tearful sobs, did not, through the clergy, beg for any favour from you, and you have repaid me good with evil, and my love with an irreconcilable hatred.