“You write, ‘Ozias, the Jewish king, took out of the temple, after eight hundred years, the brazen serpent: so have I, after eight hundred years, expelled the idols from the churches’. Truly, Ozias was your brother, and had your self-conceit, and tyrannised over the priests of that day, just as you do. For holy David carried that serpent into the temple with the sacred ark. What was it but a brazen work consecrated by God for those who were then suffering from the bite of serpents: that an image might be shown to the people of the prime suggester of sin to the first creature formed by God, Adam and Eve, this was set up for the healing of sins. But you, as you boast, after eight hundred years, have cast out from the churches the blessing and consecration of the martyrs, and, as you fairly confessed at first, of set purpose and without necessity, and, lastly, by the subscription of your own hand, put upon your own head their curse. “Now we, as holding supreme and undoubted authority from St. Peter the chief, were minded to rebuke you, but since you have brought the curse upon yourself, keep it and share it with your advisers. See to what extent you have broken in upon the edification and good course of others. The charity of Christ knows this. When we enter a church ourselves and behold the picture of our Lord Jesus Christ’s wonderful deeds and of His holy Mother bearing in her arms and nursing our Lord and our God, and the angels standing round them and chanting the Holy, Holy, Holy, we do not leave that church without compunction. And, again, who is not touched with compunction and moved to tears when he beholds the baptismal vessels and the circle of priests surrounding, and the mystical supper, and the blind recovering their sight, and the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the leper and the paralytic, and the multitude reclining on the grass, the baskets and the remnants taken up, and the fragments, and the transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the Lord’s crucifixion, His burial, His resurrection, His holy ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who that beholds the history of Abraham, and the knife approaching the throat of his son, is not moved to compunction and tears? In a word, all the sufferings of our Lord. It were better for you, emperor, if the choice were offered you, to be called a heretic than the persecutor and destroyer of the histories, the pictures, the images, the sufferings of our Lord. Yet to be called a heretic would be thy misery and thy loss. Let me tell you the difference. The heretic is said to be known, when he is known only to few. The scandals he gives are dark, the thoughts perplexed and hard to discern. Those who enforce them and are destitute of humiliation soon fall by their own ignorance and confusion of mind. Their condemnation is not so great as yours. You have openly pursued things well observed and conspicuous as light. You have stripped naked the churches of God. As the