“May God cast his fear into your heart and bring you back to the truth after the evils which you have inflicted upon the world. Let me receive your letter announcing your conversion. May the God who came down from heaven, and entered into the womb of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, for the salvation of men, dwell in thy heart and cast out at once those who dwell in thee and have put in scandals; and may He bestow peace upon the Church of all Christians for ever and ever. Amen.” To this letter of Pope Gregory II. to Leo the Isaurian must be added a second, written at some time between the date of the first, in 727, and the date of the Pope’s death in 731. Indeed from some expressions in the second we may infer that it was sent very shortly after the first.(169) “We have received by our legate Rufinus the letter of your God-defended Majesty and Brotherhood in Christ. Indeed it is a burden to my life that you have not changed, but persist in the same evils—not having a Christian mind, nor being a follower and imitator of our holy and glorious wonder-working fathers and teachers. Indeed, foreign teachers I do not bring into the field, but those of your own city and country. Are there wiser than Gregory the wonder-worker, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the theologian, and Basil of Cappadocia, and John Chrysostom? not to speak of thousands upon thousands like to them of our holy fathers and teachers inspired by God. But you have rather followed your self-assurance, and the passions of your own heart, when you wrote, ‘I am priest as well as emperor’. This indeed, the emperors before you showed both in word and deed by planting and caring for the churches; in conjunction with the bishops seeking out the truth with the desire and zeal of orthodoxy. Such were the great Constantine, the great Theodosius, the great Valentinian, and Constantine the father of Justinian II., the man of the Sixth Council. Those emperors governed in the spirit of religion, assembling councils in unity of mind and purpose with the bishops, searching out truth of doctrine, and so establishing and adorning the holy churches. These are priests and emperors; they showed it by their action. But you from the time you took the empire have not kept to the end the boundaries set by the Fathers. You found the churches arrayed in embroidered robes, fringed with gold; you stripped off their ornaments and left them in nakedness. For what are our churches? Are they not things made with hands—stones, wood, straw, at best? But they were adorned by pictures and histories, portraying the wonders of the saints, the sufferings of our Lord, and of His holy and glorious Mother, and of the holy Apostles. On these histories and pictures men spend their substance.