In the last years of this emperor, the churches of the eastern empire were involved in the greatest disorders and sufferings. He had thrown aside altogether the mask of Catholic: he filled the patriarchal sees with the fiercest heretics. Flavian was driven from Antioch, Elias from Jerusalem. Timotheus, a man of bad character, had been put by him into the see of Constantinople. In this extremity of misery and confusion, the eastern Church addressed Pope Symmachus in 512.[93] "We venture to address you, not for the loss of one sheep or one drachma, but for the salvation of three parts of the world, redeemed not by corruptible silver or gold, but by the precious blood of the Lamb of God, as the blessed prince of the glorious Apostles taught, whose chair the Good Shepherd, Christ, has entrusted to your beatitude. Therefore, as an affectionate father for his children, seeing with spiritual eyes how we are perishing in the prevarication of our father Acacius, delay not, sleep not, but hasten to deliver us, since not in binding only but in loosing those long bound the power has been given to thee; for you know the mind of Christ who are daily taught by your sacred teacher Peter to feed Christ's sheep entrusted to you through the whole habitable world, collected not by force, but by choice, and with the great doctor Paul cry to us your subjects 'not because we exercise dominion over your faith, but we are helpers in your joy'. 'Hasten then to help that east from which the Saviour sent to you the two great lights of day, Peter and Paul, to illuminate the whole world.'" They call upon him as the true physician; they disclose to him the ulcerous sores with which the whole body of the eastern Church is covered; and they finish by directing to him a confession of faith, rejecting the two opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. They remind him of the holy Pope Leo, now among the saints, and conjure him to save them now in their souls as Leo saved bodies from Attila.