"I announce to you the beginning of my pontificate, and consider it a token of the divine favour that I bear the same as your own august name. This is an assurance that, like as your own name is pre-eminent among all the nations in the world, so by my humble ministry the See of St. Peter, as always, may hold the Principate assigned to it by the Lord God in the whole Church. We therefore discharge a delegated office in the name of Christ."[70] After beseeching the emperor that the name of Acacius should be effaced, in which he is carrying out the judgment of his predecessor, Pope Felix, he mentions the full instructions given to his legates, in order that the emperor might plainly see how, in that matter, the sentence of the Apostolic See had not proceeded from pride, but rather had been extorted by zeal for God as the result of certain crimes. "This we declare to you, in virtue of our apostolic office, through special love for your empire, that, as is fitting, and the Holy Spirit orders, obedience be yielded to our warning, that every blessing may follow your government. Let not your piety despise my frequent suggestion, having before your eyes the words of our Lord, 'He who hears you, hears Me: and he who despises you, despises Me: and he who despises Me, despises Him who sent Me'. In which the Apostle agrees with our Saviour, saying, 'He who despises these things, despises not man but God, who has given us His Holy Spirit'. Your breast is the sanctuary of public happiness, that through your excellency, whom God has ordered to rule on earth as His Vicar, not the resistance of hard pride be offered to the evangelic and apostolic commands, but an obedience which carries safety with it." The Pope, then, standing alone in the world, and locally the subject of Theodorick the Goth, makes the position of the Roman emperor in the world, and the Pope in the Church, parallel to each other. Both are divine legations. The Pope, speaking on divine things, claims obedience as uttering the will of the Holy Spirit, which Pope Anastasius asserts, just as Pope Clement I., five hundred years before, had asserted it, in the first pastoral letter which we possess. He, living on sufferance in Rome, asserts it to the despotic ruler of an immense empire, throned at Constantinople, in reference to a bishop of Constantinople, whose name he requires the emperor to erase from the sacred records of the Church as a condition of communion with the Apostolic See.