“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children fresh from baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen, point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs, castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of idle words. “O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church’s commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military, ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs. Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly, shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be, you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the sacred mysteries, nor even to participate in them without the priest. Let each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor, do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends. Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross, they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes, thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace? Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the