On Saint Athanasius (two books)

You compel us, Constantius, to condemn in his absence our fellow priest, the religious Athanasius; but we are forbidden to do it by the divine law. With your royal authority you press the priests of the Lord far and wide to shed blood, not knowing that you have tried to take from our minds the laws of justice handed down to us from God. Or will you be able to assert that God has permitted a man to be condemned absent, unheard, and, what is most important, innocent? For how do you think God has permitted the unheard to be punished, when you see that Adam and Eve, the first of our race, were heard and then struck by the sentence of God? “And God called Adam and said to him: Adam, where are you? And he said: I heard your voice, Lord, in paradise, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself. And God said to him: Who told you that you are naked, unless you have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that of this alone you should not eat? And Adam said: The woman whom you gave, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. And God said to the woman: Why have you done this? And the woman said: The serpent persuaded me, and I ate.” Since, then, you observe that God gave this pattern of judging, since you gather from the sacred springs of the Scriptures that God, having called them out of their hiding and heard their confession, gave his sentence, what effrontery possessed and possesses you to give the servants of God a pattern of judging which did not come from the law of the Lord? Nor did you fear that we might say of you to God what was said of that fugitive angel, “The serpent persuaded me”: “The emperor Constantius led us astray; we believed him, thinking he was a man.” Could you not see that you can be struck by the same sentence of the angry God by which the serpent is seen to have been struck? To him it is said: “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle and above all the beasts of the earth that are upon the earth; on your breast and belly you shall crawl, and you shall eat earth all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall watch your head, and you shall watch his heel.” Ought you not to have remembered from this one sentence of the Lord that you too could incur God's offence as that angel incurred it, especially when you knew that your work too was the serpent's? Or, since that serpent was made from among the angels, did you think that you could not become a serpent from among men? Not at all. But I should like you to tell me what difference there is between your deed and that of this fugitive, apostate angel. If he led astray simple people by a lie, so do you, and you not simple people; if he enticed their minds to eat the fruit of the tree for the sake of advantage, so do you, since you claim that you do it for the sake of peace.

And since you have said that you undertook this work for the good of all Christians, from an inspection of your works it is given us to understand that you have imitated that serpent. Desiring that we become transgressors of God's commandments, you gave orders that a man absent and unheard must be condemned, and that a hearing must be refused to one who cries out that he can clear himself of the charge brought against him. Abel, a righteous man, is killed, and Cain receives sentence after being questioned; and you want a priest of the Lord punished unheard? “Abel,” it says, “became a shepherd of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the earth. And it came about after some days that Cain offered from the fruit of the earth a sacrifice to the Lord, and Abel too offered from the firstlings of his sheep; and God looked upon Abel and his gifts, but upon Cain and his sacrifices he did not look. And Cain was very sad, and his face fell. And the Lord God said to Cain: Why have you become sad, and why has your face fallen? Why did you not offer rightly? You have sinned; be still,” and so on; and further on: “Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go into the field. And it came about, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. And God said to Cain: Where is your brother? And he said: I do not know; am I my brother's keeper? And God said: Why have you done this? The voice of your brother's blood cries to me from the earth.” Was it not open to God to punish before he called Cain and questioned him? But he would not, giving us a pattern of how we should judge those entrusted to us, to us, I say, of whom he says through the prophet Jeremiah to the peoples dedicated to his majesty: “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline.” “Condemn,” you say, “a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” Why? So that we might deserve to be called no longer bishops but madmen and butchers. Do you not fear, I pray, when you command these things, the voice of the Lord saying to the most holy Noah: “As the green plants, I have given you all things. Only flesh with the blood of its life you shall not eat. For I will require your blood, the blood of your lives, from the hands of all the beasts; I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, for the blood of man his own shall be shed, for in the image of God I made man.” Do you not fear, I pray, when you see that you have become the killer of so many servants of God, that you still slaughter the innocent and force us to become partners in your murders? When his father-in-law Jethro asked Moses why he kept the people the whole day, he said: “The people come to me seeking judgment from God.” If, then, the judgment of the bishops of God must be so just that it may be said to be decided by the judgment of God, how did you order us to condemn a man unheard, when you have found that Moses said, “The people come to me seeking judgment from the Lord”? If the people flock to us in order to be judged according to God's law, why do you say, “Condemn an innocent man”? Since, then, this command you have issued does not come from the law of God but has plainly been established by the will of the devil, understand at last who you are.

Lot's wife was turned into salt because she failed to carry out what was commanded; and would no evil befall us, I suppose by your intervention, because you are king of the Roman empire, if we condemned a man weighed down with false charges? Holy Scripture says in Exodus: “Moses went up into the mountain of God, and God called him from the mountain, saying: Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and announce to the children of Israel: You yourselves have seen how much I did to the Egyptians, and I took you up as on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. And now, if you indeed hear my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be to me a people abundant above all nations; for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a most sacred kingdom and a holy nation.” How a holy nation, if we became killers of the innocent? How a kingdom most sacred to God, if we passed over his commands? Again God says: “You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.” You say, on the contrary: “Believe me when I tell falsehoods, and slaughter an innocent man.” God, warning us, says in Exodus: “You shall not believe an empty report; you shall not agree with the wicked to become an unjust witness; you shall not be with the many in malice. You shall not join with the many to turn aside with the crowd so as to pervert judgment, and you shall not pity the poor man in his judgment”; and further on: “You shall not pervert the judgment of the poor in his cause; you shall keep away from every wicked word; you shall not kill the innocent and the righteous; you shall not justify the ungodly for gifts; for gifts blind the eyes of those who see and corrupt righteous words.” To shut out these commands you compel the servants of God to pervert his judgment, trying even with gifts to corrupt our righteous conscience dedicated to God. “If you indeed hear my voice,” God says, “and do all that I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose your adversaries.” It is now for you to prove that God has commanded that the innocent be struck down, that the apostolic faith be abandoned and your faithlessness taken up. Why did you think that these things, which oppose the commands of the Lord, should be ordered done? For you remember that in Leviticus the Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: I am the Lord your God. According to the practices of the land of Egypt, in which you dwelt, you shall not do; and according to the practices of the land of the Canaanites, into which I will bring you, you shall not do there, and you shall not walk in their statutes. You shall do my judgments and keep my precepts and walk in them; I am the Lord your God. Keep all my precepts and all my judgments and do them; the man who does them shall live in them. I am the Lord your God.” If you can show that it is written in the commandments of the Lord that the righteous are to be punished at the instigation of the unrighteous, you will be able to see that you have acted and are acting rightly in everything. Show that it is written in the commandments of God that his worshippers, assailed by slanders, are to be put to death by us bishops at your bidding, you, the persecutor of his house.

Why were you led by your fellow Arians to carry out this malice? What cause compelled you, an emperor, to assail a man of God with slanders? Had you not read in Leviticus that God said: “Do not assail with a lie, nor slander each his neighbour”? And further on: “You shall not lie, nor slander your neighbour, and you shall not profane the name of the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God. You shall not harm your neighbour, and you shall fear the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God. You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not favour the person of the poor, nor shall you be awed by the person of the mighty; in righteousness you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not walk in deceit among your people. You shall not consent to the blood of your neighbour; I am the Lord your God. You shall not hate your brother in your mind; you shall surely rebuke your neighbour, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself; I am the Lord your God. Keep my law.” Remembering that these things are written, do you suppose that we will be respecters of your person? You asked for the death of an innocent man, and when you saw yourself despised, you set yourself to inflict every kind of punishment. God says: “Do not fear the face of the rich, and you shall honour the face of the elder, and you shall fear the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God.” And you thought that you could be feared and Athanasius dishonoured, whom God has commanded to be honoured? Had you not read that God said: “You shall do no injustice in judgment, in measure, in weight, and in scales; you shall weigh with a just balance”? Is it a just measure that you decided that an absent man should be put to death by us? If it is a just judgment that one who cries out to be heard should not be heard, that an absent man should be punished, then your charges against us before God will also be just, we who have rejected the commands of your rashness. In Deuteronomy the glorious Moses is found saying to the judges he had given the people: “Hear between your brothers, and judge justly between a man and his brother and his proselyte. You shall not respect persons in judgment; you shall judge the small and the great alike; you shall not take the person of a man into account, for the judgment is God's.” And you want your person to be respected, Constantius, I suppose because you live in royal loftiness; you desire greatly that the man whose blood you thirst for be slaughtered by us, the priests of the Lord. That is why we are detestable to you, because we pronounce judgment according to the will of God; that is why you thought you should stretch your butcher's right hand to the sword, as though you could overcome by the sword those whom you saw not hesitating to lose this present life for the sake of the Son of God, nor shuddering at death. The most holy Moses tells the children of Israel by the command of God: “See, the Lord your God has handed the land over before you; go up and possess it, as the Lord God of our fathers said to us. Do not fear nor be afraid.” If they were commanded to fear no one but God, they who bore the image of our calling, how much more is it fitting that we fear no one but God, we who long to obtain not the lands of the Canaanites, Jebusites, Girgashites and Amorites, but the heavenly kingdoms, the everlasting love of God? How could or can the strength of your empty dignity turn us from this purpose, when we have determined that no one is to be feared but God?

We are not Christians of the sort who said: “Because the Lord hated us he brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over into the hands of the Amorites and destroy us”; but we are of those who have said and say to God: “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are reckoned as sheep for the slaughter; but in all these things we overcome because of him who loved us.” We did not fear and do not fear your threats, we who know that nothing can resist God, lest we perish like those who hear from Moses: “Your brothers have turned away your heart, saying: The nation is great and very hard and stronger than you, and the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and we even saw the sons of the giants there.” We Christians do not fear your sword, we who are confident that, when you enemies of God's religion have been laid low, we will come to the banquet of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs. We, soldiers of God, do not fear the strength of your perishing kingdom. We are not of those sons of distrust who thought their enemies could do more than God, that we should be in awe of your fragile power. For if the Jews had not believed that the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites and their other enemies could do more than God, they would surely never have despised the voice of Moses saying: “Do not speak, nor be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who goes before your face, he will fight them together with you, according to all that he did for you in the land of Egypt and in this desert which you see, how the Lord your God cherished you, as a man cherishes his son, in all the way that you walk, until you came to this place, leading you in fire by night, showing you the road, so that you might walk in it, and in the cloud by day.” If after these saving warnings the children of Israel had not believed that those against whom they were waging war could do more than God, they would surely never have come to utter destruction. We know, then, that God is mighty to rescue us from your hands, as we make our way to the heavenly kingdom promised us. We cannot fear your cruelty, we above all who have chosen to be punished by you rather than by God.

You said: “Condemn Athanasius.” Whom were we to condemn, Constantius? Him, whom we see confessing the Son of God, as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs confessed him? Or you, who deny him, as your teacher Arius denied him, as Judas Iscariot and all the Jews denied him? God says to Moses: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them, for I am the Lord your God, a jealous God, repaying the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing mercy to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” And you, trampling on these divine commands, say: “Accept my idolatry, forsake God, kill Athanasius, my enemy, not God's, so that you may be found among those who hate God, on whom he has promised to repay to the third and fourth generation; take care not to be loved by God together with those for whose sake he says: showing mercy to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” You see, most prudent emperor, that what is evil seems good to you, and what is good, evil. Or will you deny the good, or will you deny that you take good things for evil and evil for good? If you deny it, answer: is it good or evil to condemn an innocent man? Is it good or evil to forsake God and go after idolatry? If you say evil, we will say to you: Why then do you do these things? Again Moses cries out in Deuteronomy, saying: “Keep the commandments of the Lord your God and the testimonies and ordinances, whatever he has commanded you, and you shall do what is pleasing and good before the Lord your God, that it may go well with you; and you shall enter and possess as an inheritance the good land which the Lord swore to your fathers.” And you have chosen these things as good, as pleasing to God: that idolatry be established, to the insult of his majesty, by the strength of your reign, and that those who have confessed themselves his worshippers be slaughtered. “Behold,” says Moses, “I have set before your sight today a blessing and a curse: a blessing, if you hear the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today.” Since, then, those are blessed who do not punish the innocent, and those keep the Lord's commandments who refuse to condemn a man unheard, how do you think yourself blessed, when by your work you prove that you are placed among the cursed? Or if you are not among the cursed, why do you spurn Moses when he says: “If there is found among you, in one of your cities which the Lord your God will give you, a man or a woman who has done evil before the Lord your God, so as to transgress his covenant, and they go and serve other gods and worship them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven”; and further on: “you shall bring out that man or that woman, and you shall stone them with stones, and they shall die. On the evidence of two or three witnesses he shall die; he shall not die on the evidence of one witness. And the hand of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And you shall remove the evil one from among yourselves.” If you are not running with the cursed, Constantius, why have you not obeyed Moses, the servant of God? Why, when he says that even an idolater dies only on two or three witnesses, did you not even want a hearing given to a man dedicated to God, and caused a hearing to be refused to the one to whom you have been entrusted by God, and whom, if you resist him when he defends what is just, you are ordered by the mouth of Moses to die the death? For so that the judgments of the priest may remain inviolate, he says: “Arise and go up to whatever place the Lord your God chooses to have his name called upon there. And speak to the priests, the Levites, or to the judge who is in office in those days, and they will inquire and declare the judgment to you, and you shall do according to every precept they declare to you, those who are in that place where the Lord your God has chosen to have his name called upon; and take great care. You shall do according to all that they have laid down for you; according to the law and according to the judgment they pronounce you shall do; you shall not turn aside from the word they declare to you; you shall do whatever they indicate to you; you shall not turn aside to the right or to the left. And any man who acts in pride, so as not to listen to the priests who stand to minister in the name of the Lord God, or to the judge who is in those days, that man shall die, and you shall remove the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear and fear and act ungodly no more.”

But you say: “In this place Moses, most devoted to God, mentioned the judge as well as the priests.” Prove that you have been made judge over us; prove that you were appointed emperor for this, to lead us by your arms to carry out every wish of your friend the devil. Since you cannot prove it, because you have been commanded not only not to lord it over bishops but to obey their decisions so far that, if you try to overturn their decrees, if you are caught in pride, you are ordered to die the death, how will you be able to say that you can judge bishops, when, unless you obey them, you have already, as far as God is concerned, been fined with the penalty of death? Since this is so, why do you, a profane man, take to yourself this authority of God's priests over God's household, when he allowed even the Jews of that time, while they remained in the law of God, to have judges only from their own race? “If you say,” says Moses, “I will set a ruler over me, like the other nations around me, you shall set over yourself as ruler whomever the Lord your God chooses. You shall set him over you from among your brothers; you may not set over you a foreigner, because he is not your brother.” And it goes on to say why he did not want a foreigner made ruler: lest he draw others to his sect. Therefore he says: “Lest you take us back to Egypt,” that is, to the worship of idols; like you, I say, who have usurped for yourself this authority which God did not give you. And even if he gave it and allowed it to be in your hands, in the first place you would have had to be a Christian, because it would be a crime for a foreigner to judge the servants of God, for an enemy of religion to judge the household of God. Then, if you had been a Christian and God had judged that you should become a partner of the priests in ruling his people, hear what he commanded you to be: “And when he sits in his rule, he shall write for himself this Deuteronomy in a book before the priests and the Levites, and it shall be with him, and you shall read it to him all the days of his life, so that they may learn to fear the Lord your God, to keep all these commandments and to do these ordinances, so that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers and he may not turn aside from the commandments to the right or to the left, so that he may continue long in his rule, he and his sons with him, among the children of Israel.” What do you have of this kind except everything contrary, except everything that attacks the house of God? First, you are a heretic; next, a persecutor of God's household; you have tried and are trying to slaughter Athanasius, like a man who does not remember that it is written: “If there is a man who hates his neighbour and lies in wait for him and rises against him and strikes him mortally so that he dies, and flees to one of these cities, the elders of that city shall send and take him from there and hand him over into the hands of those who seek the blood, and he shall die. Your eye shall not spare him, and you shall purge the blood of the innocent from among them, and it will go well with you”; and again: “One witness shall not stand to testify against a man for any iniquity or for any sin that is committed. At the mouth of two witnesses or of three every word shall stand. But if an unjust witness stands against a man, accusing him of iniquity, the two men between whom the dispute is shall stand before the Lord and before the priest and in the sight of the judge who is in those days; and the judges shall inquire diligently, and behold, if the unjust witness has testified wickedly, rising up against his brother, do to him as he wickedly meant to do to his brother, and you shall remove the wicked from among yourselves. And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall not again do this evil thing among you. Your eyes shall not spare him: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” Since you see that God has decreed these things about you, a murderer, tell me, I beg you, what else is it to say, “Condemn the man you know to be innocent, act against the commands of God,” than: “Tear out your hearts, take away your senses, slaughter your souls of your own accord; though you see that it is a pit, pretend that you are blind and throw yourselves headlong into the eternal abyss; plunge into that pit from which you see you cannot be rescued; take away life from yourselves, take up everlasting death”? What else is it to say, “Do what God has forbidden to be done,” than: “Be enemies to God, get the devil as your friend, take care not to attain paradise, nor indeed the kingdom of heaven which God has promised you if you keep his commandments; love the underworld, cherish the burning lake, long to be with all who are ever paying penalties, long to be called men of the devil”?

These are the rewards that your excellent counsels win; these are those fine things that bring forth everlasting death; these are what plunge a man already close to heaven down to the underworld. Did you not yet know what is written, that you asked us to do these evils? “There shall not be in your bag weight and weight, a greater and a less. There shall not be in your house measure and measure, a greater and a less. You shall have a true and just weight, and you shall have a true and just measure, that you may live many days and it may go well with you on the land which the Lord your God will give you as your lot; for everyone who does these things, everyone who does injustice, is an abomination to the Lord your God.” Since the sacred writings report that whoever does not keep whole weights and just measures is abominable, I suppose you thought we would be most acceptable if we pronounced judgment against him unjustly. Moses says: “Cursed is he who moves his neighbour's boundary marks.” We are forbidden to pull up our neighbour's boundary marks and move them from place to place, and you say, “Go beyond the boundaries of justice, you priests of God.” “Cursed,” says the Holy Spirit by the mouth of Moses, “is whoever perverts the judgment of the stranger, the orphan and the widow”; and you, making sport for yourself of our blood, said: “Punish a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” We have refused, Constantius, to be cursed with you; we rather long for you to be found blessed with us in the holy church. We do not listen to your voice, which provokes us to incur God's offence, but we listen to Moses, the servant of the Lord, who says: “And if you do not listen to the voice of the Lord your God, to keep and do all his commandments which I shall command you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. Cursed are you in the city, cursed are you in the field; cursed are your storehouses and what is left over; and cursed are the children of your womb and the fruit of your land, the herds of your oxen and the flocks of your sheep; cursed are you in your going. The Lord will send upon you weariness and affliction and anxiety in everything to which you put your hand, whatever you do, until he destroys you quickly because of the wickedness of your pursuits.” If it is not an evil pursuit to bring false charges, to persecute the worshippers of God, to bring idolatry into God's church, to slaughter with armed force those who believe in the only Son of God, then these curses will be able not to overtake you and those who run with you.

You called us together to slaughter a priest of God, to destroy the one through whom God has ordained that you should hear his commands. “And Moses wrote the words of this law in a book and gave it to the priests and Levites who carry the ark of the covenant of the Lord and to the elders of Israel. And Moses commanded them on that day, saying: After seven years, at the time of the year of release, at the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel comes together to appear before the Lord your God in the place which he chooses, you shall read this law before Israel in their hearing, when men and women and children and the proselyte who is in your cities have been called together into the assembly, so that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God and listen to do all the words of this law. And their children, who do not know, will hear and learn the Lord your God all the days that they live on the earth.” You persecute the one through whom the Lord commanded you to hear; and while he is still among the living you send your fellow heretic George as his successor, though, even if Athanasius had already been freed from the body, it would not have been lawful for you to send one; it was and is in the hand of God whom he would deign to appoint as bishop for his people, that is, through his servants, the catholic bishops. For no one could be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to govern the people of God except him whom God had chosen and on whom hands had been laid by catholic bishops; just as we find that when Moses died his successor Joshua the son of Nun was filled with the Holy Spirit. Holy Scripture says: “And Joshua the son of Nun was filled with the spirit of understanding, for Moses had laid his hand upon him; and the children of Israel listened to him and did as the Lord commanded Moses.” You see that you have gone against God's ordination by acting against God's will, that you have slaughtered yourself with the point of your own sword, since no one could be ordained unless Athanasius had died, and if Athanasius had died, a catholic ought to have been ordained by catholic bishops. Holy Scripture says that God said to Joshua the son of Nun: “Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land which I will give them. Every place on which you set the sole of your foot I will give you, as I said to Moses. From the desert and before Lebanon as far as the great river Euphrates and as far as the great sea, to the setting of the sun, shall be the borders of your territory. No man shall stand before you all the days of your life; and as I was with Moses, so I will be with you, and I will not forsake you nor despise you.” Can God be with his enemy George? Can he be gracious to one whom he did not ordain, whom he did not choose? George is such as Arius was, and as Valens and Ursacius are, or Eudoxius of Germanicia, to whom you sent me; for from thorns nothing but thorns can come. You can gather that this is so from George's own acts, by reading the protests of the Alexandrians; and though it pleases you that this blasphemer is a criminal (for he would not otherwise be so very dear to you, unless he were a criminal), yet I have set this down so that you may see your excellent work. Since, then, you know that God is not with George, but observe that he is with Athanasius, whom he appointed bishop for his people, you can at last recognize that you have tried to destroy God's ordination, that you have persecuted God in Athanasius. For you hear God say to Moses' successor: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you, and I will not forsake you nor despise you”; and see, in another place: “Be strong and act manfully, to keep and do as Moses my servant commanded you; and you shall not turn aside from it to the right or to the left, that you may understand in all that you do. And the book of this law shall not depart from your mouth, and you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may keep to do all that is written. Then I will direct your ways, and then you will understand. Behold, I have commanded you: be strong and act manfully; there is nothing for you to dread or fear, for the Lord your God is with you in every place.”

It remains now for you to prove whether what you and George are doing comes from God's commandments. For you hear God promise that he will be with Moses' successor as he was with Moses, provided he keeps what is written in the book of the law. If, then, you do not find it written that you should do these things, it will be for your fairness at last to observe that God is not with you Arians, but that the one who dwelt in Cain dwells in you. What cause drove you to do these things, Constantius, that, led by the power of your reign into such pride, you decided that the man whom God has chosen for himself in the honour of the priesthood should be killed? Had you not found it written in the first book of Kingdoms: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty man glory in his strength, nor the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, to know and understand God and to do judgment and righteousness in the midst of the earth”? Why did you pass over this, you who ought at all times to have done just judgment, and compel us to do injustice with you? You had decreed that a catholic be deposed by us and a heretic established; but when would men of sound mind have done that? For if Eli the priest heard what he suffered from the Lord because he had placed unworthy sons in the honour of the priesthood, what would we deserve to hear and suffer, if we condemned a catholic bishop, and that unheard, and allowed George, an Arian, to be made bishop for the Alexandrians? “And there came,” it says, “a man of God and said: Thus says the Lord: I plainly revealed myself to your father's house out of all the tribes of Israel for the priesthood to me, to go up to my sacrifice and burn incense and wear the ephod; and I gave in your father's house all the grain of the children of Israel for food. And why have you looked on my incense and my sacrifice with a shameless eye, and honoured your sons more than me, so as to bless them first in all the sacrifices of Israel before me? Therefore thus says the Lord of Israel: I said, Your house and your father's house shall go in before me for ever; and now it is not so. Thus says the Lord: Far be it from me; it shall not be so from me; for those who honour me I will honour, and he who despises me shall be brought to nothing. And behold, the days are coming, and I will destroy your seed and the seed of your father's house, and there shall not be an old man in my house in all your days; and I will destroy your man from my altar, so that his eyes fail and his soul wastes away; and all the multitude of your house that remains shall fall by the sword of men. And this shall be the sign to you, which shall come upon your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas: on one day they shall both die by the sword of men.” If he received this rebuke from God on account of his sons, what rebuke would we deserve to receive on account of you, Constantius? I believe it would have been said to us: “You honoured Constantius more than me,” as it was said to him that he had honoured his sons more than God. For what reason, you say? Because if we had done your commands, we would have been found to have despised the Lord's, since George, whom you had decided should be placed by us in the place of the man of God Athanasius, is a son of pestilence, as the sons of Eli were. Then, since God says, “He who honours me shall be honoured, and he who despises me shall be brought to nothing,” would we have honoured God if we had listened to your sacrilegious voice uttered against his divine commands? Or rather if, judging you to be nothing, we strove to obey only his sacred statutes? Meanwhile, rejoice, since you are dishonouring God; for you hear him say that all who despise him will come to nothing. Or will you deny that you dishonoured God by removing from their peoples the priests whom he ordained? Will you deny that you dishonoured the Lord when, against his decrees, you compelled his priests to condemn a man absent and unheard? Did you not dishonour God, then, when you took away the apostolic and evangelical tradition, and decreed that the idolatry which the devil built in Arius's heart should be held by all the worshippers of God?

Since this is so, it will now be for your prudence to weigh what it is expedient for you to do: whether to correct your errors here, obtain pardon for such great crimes, and decide to be found among the household of God; or, brought to nothing as the Lord promises those who despise him, to begin to pay for ever the penalties which those pay whose paths you have chosen to follow. And so that you may see fully what dangers await you because you dishonour the Godhead, hear what was said to Samuel too on account of the sons of Eli: “And the Lord said to Samuel: Behold, I am doing my words in Israel, and everyone who hears them, both his ears shall ring, on that day when I raise up against Eli all that I have spoken against his house; and I will accomplish what I foretold to him, for I am taking vengeance on his house for ever because of the iniquities of his sons, which I know, since his sons, despising the Lord, spoke evil, and he did not admonish them nor chastise them. And now I have so sworn to the house of Eli: the iniquity of the house of Eli shall not be atoned for with incense or with sacrifices for ever.” If these things were promised to Eli because of the sin of his sons, what is promised to you for your sacrilege? If these were promised to him for ever, what to you, who do such things? If God said that the sons of Eli had spoken ill of him, how much more does he say it of you, who have taken up the blasphemy of Arius in order to attack the faith which the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and all the martyrs held? We ask you, meanwhile, to repent of your deeds, considering at least what befell the sons of Eli who dishonoured God. “Eli,” says Scripture, “was very old, and his sons went on, and their way was evil before the Lord. And it came about in those days that the foreigners gathered for battle against Israel”; and further on: “And the battle turned, and the men of Israel fell before the foreigners, and about four thousand men were wounded in the battle line in the field. And the people came into the camp, and the elders of Israel said: Why has the Lord made us fail today before the foreigners? Let us take the ark of the Lord our God from Shiloh, and let it go out in our midst, and it will deliver us from the hands of our enemies. And the people sent to Shiloh, and they took from there the ark of the Lord, where he sat upon the cherubim; and both sons of Eli went with the ark of God, Hophni and Phinehas”; and further on: “They fought against them, and the men of Israel failed before the foreigners, and each fled to his tent; and there was a very great slaughter, and thirty thousand men of Israel fell. And the ark of God was taken, and both sons of Eli died”; and further on: “And a man came hurrying to Eli and said to him: I am the one who came from the camp, fleeing from the battle today. And Eli said: What has happened, my son? And the man answered and said: The men of Israel fled before the foreigners, and there was a great slaughter among the people, and both your sons are dead, and the ark of God has been taken. And it came about, when he heard that the ark of God was taken, that he fell backwards from his seat beside the gate, and his back was broken, and he died, for he was old and heavy; and he had judged Israel twenty years.” If these evils came in one day upon Eli, priest and judge of the Israelites, because he had not chastised his sons as was fitting, I have thought it right to put to you to consider at this point what you see will come upon you, the destroyer of God's religion. For you will not deny that you have said that it comes from God's will that we his servants are subjected to you our persecutors: “Unless our faith, that is, the one Lucifer calls Arian, were catholic, I would never have received power over all the peoples.” If so, then the faith of those foreigners who had captured the ark of God could also have been better than that of the worshippers of God.

You say that your faith, which we know to be heretical, has granted you this; but Maxentius, Nero and all those persecutors of the house of God also said that it was done by the power of their gods that we Christians came under their rule. Run through what happened to those who rejoiced that they had captured the ark of God, who said they had defeated the Israelites by the power of their gods, and you will find that you are one of those who have persecuted the house of God. “And the foreigners took the ark of God from Ebenezer and brought it into Ashdod. And the foreigners took the ark and brought it into the house of Dagon and set it beside Dagon. And the people of Ashdod rose early in the morning and went into the house of Dagon and looked; and behold, Dagon had fallen on his face before the ark of God. And they took Dagon and set him in his place. And the hand of the Lord was heavy upon the people of Ashdod and tormented them, and struck them in their houses, Ashdod and its territory. And it came about, when they rose before dawn, that Dagon had fallen on his face before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and the head of Dagon and both the soles of his feet had been cut off, each apart, and both the wrists of his hands had fallen on the threshold”; and further on: “And the hand of the Lord was heavy upon Ashdod, and he brought mice upon them, and there was a great confusion of death in the city. And the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, and said: The ark of the Lord God of Israel shall not stay with us, for his hand is hard upon us and upon Dagon our god. And they sent and called together the lords of the foreigners to them and said: What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel? And the men of Gath said: Let the ark of the God of Israel pass over to Gath. And it came about, after the ark of God had been moved, that the hand of the Lord came upon the city, and there was a very great disturbance; and he struck the men of the city from the least to the greatest, and mice swarmed among them in their seats, and the men of Gath made themselves seats of skin. And they sent the ark of God to Ashkelon. And it came about, when the ark of the God of Israel came into Ashkelon, that the people of Ashkelon cried out, saying: Why have you sent the ark of the God of Israel to us, to put us and our people to death? And they sent and called together the lords of the foreigners and said: Send back the ark of the God of Israel, and let it be returned to its place, and it will not put us and our people to death; for a heavy confusion has come upon the whole city, very heavy, since the ark of God came in there. And those who lived and did not die were struck in their seats, and the cry of the cities went up to heaven.” You see, Constantius, how our God allows his religion to be seen humbled by you foreigners, and humbled to the point at which even you persecutors of the true religion see that there is no other God besides our God.

But to return again to the case of Athanasius: did you not know that it is written in the first book of Kingdoms, “And Samuel judged the people of Israel in all holiness,” that you thought you should order an innocent man to be condemned by the priests of the Lord? You have read that Samuel judged the people of God in all holiness; and because we refuse to depart from this just way of judging, we suffer persecution from you. It is nothing new, since Saul persecuted the righteous Samuel because he told him the truth, though it was by him that he had been anointed king, through him that the Lord had raised him to such glory. Saul persecuted the prophet and priest of the Lord because he was not in his right mind; otherwise how would Saul, if sane, persecute one whom he knew to be the minister of God, full of the Spirit of God? He persecuted one whom he did not know to have groaned constantly for the salvation of his persecutor. Scripture says in the first book of Kingdoms that the Lord said to Samuel: “How long will you mourn over Saul? Behold, I am driving him out, so that he does not reign over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and come; I will send you to the house of Jesse in Bethlehem, for I have seen among the sons of Jesse a king for me. And Samuel said: How shall I go? Saul will hear and kill me.” He sought to destroy one whom he remembered had already in many ways proved to be a man of God. The man of God does not cease to beg pardon for his persecutor; the persecutor, on the contrary, made a son of pestilence, seeks his life. For Saul became so great a persecutor of Samuel the priest of the Lord that, when the Lord said, “Come, I will send you,” he said, “How shall I go? Saul will hear and kill me.” You see, Constantius, that when you withdraw from God you are reckoned not men but wild beasts, monsters and robbers. Or will you not be comparable to Saul in this, that you persecute Athanasius unjustly? For you so long to slaughter the innocent Athanasius as he longed to kill not only Samuel but David too; Saul, of course, threatened to kill those with whom he knew God to be. “And Saul saw,” says Scripture, “that the Lord was with David, and that all Israel loved him. And Saul was still more afraid of David. And Saul spoke to Jonathan his son and to all his servants, to kill David.” Answer, most shameless emperor: can one who has the Spirit of God do these things? At what time did Saul begin to do them? Surely when he was cursed and rejected through Samuel; for at that very time it is written that God departed from him and was with David. By this it is proved that you Arians, who persecute Athanasius, a man full of the Holy Spirit, are without the Spirit of God. “And David,” it says, “was wise in all his ways, and the Lord was with him, and all Israel and Judah loved David.” So that you may recognize that you are doing to Athanasius what Saul did to David, hear what is written: “And Jonathan the son of Saul loved David greatly, and Jonathan told David, saying: Saul seeks to kill you”; and further on: “And Jonathan spoke to his father, saying: Do not sin, O king, against your servant David, for he has not sinned against you, and his deeds are very good. And he put his life in his hands and killed the foreigner, and the Lord wrought salvation in Israel, and all Israel saw and rejoiced. Why then do you sin against innocent blood, to kill David without cause? And Saul heard the voice of Jonathan his son, and Saul swore, saying: As the Lord lives, he shall not die”; and further on: “And war broke out again, and David prevailed and fought the foreigners and struck them with a great slaughter, and they fled before David. And an evil spirit came upon Saul, and he was sleeping in his house, and there was a spear in his hand, and behold, David was playing with his hands. And Saul sought to strike David with the spear, and he struck, and David turned aside from before Saul; and he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and was saved. And it came about that night that Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, so that he might kill him in the morning. And David fled and was saved, and came to Samuel at Ramah and told him all that Saul had done”; and further on: “And Saul became very angry with Jonathan”; and further on: “and he said: Let this be; take the young man, for he is a son of death. And Jonathan answered his father: Why should he die? What has he done? And Saul raised his spear against Jonathan to kill him.” Whom would Saul spare who told him the truth, when he did not spare even his son? So you pass over the commandments of God and set up your own. In short, we do not wonder that, because it is said, “An absent man cannot be condemned,” you persecute the priests of the Lord, when we see that Saul persecuted in the same way those who served God. Scripture says: “And the king said: You shall surely die, Ahimelech, you and all your father's house”; and further on: “And the king said to the runners and those who stood by him: Bring them and kill the priests of the Lord, for their hand is with David, for they knew that David was fleeing and did not uncover my ear. And the king's servants would not put forth their hands against the priests of the Lord.”

What do you say, most fair king? If those servants of the king are reported to have refused to obey the king's order, if they are shown to have despised Saul's commands so as not to act against the commandments of God, would it have been fitting for us bishops to trample on the Lord's commands and fulfil yours, the commands of a sacrilegious murderer? That, then, is why you are pleased to persecute us: because we do not put your commands before the Lord's. Saul did the same, as holy Scripture proves, saying: “And Saul said to Doeg: Turn and fall upon the priests of the Lord. And Doeg the Syrian turned and himself put the priests of the Lord to death, and he killed that day three hundred and five men, all who wore the ephod; and Nob, the city of the priests, he struck with the edge of the sword, from man to suckling.” In the same way you have now tried and are trying to tear the bodies of those whom you see resisting your command because they are mindful of God's commands. We cannot wonder, then, that you persecute us, when we see that Saul, because they had not handed David the servant of the Lord into his hands, destroyed not only three hundred and five priests but the whole city as well. Saul persecuted David, though, when he was in David's power, David often pardoned him. “And it came about,” says Scripture, “when Saul had returned from pursuing the foreigners, that they told him, saying: Behold, David is in the desert of Engedi. And he took with him three thousand chosen men from all Israel and went to seek David and his men in front of the place where the deer are hunted. And he came to the flocks of sheep that were by the road, and there was a cave there, and Saul went in to relieve himself; and David and his men were sitting in the inner part of the cave. And David's men said to him: Behold, this is the day of which the Lord said, I will give your enemy into your hands, and you shall do to him what is pleasing in your eyes. And David arose and secretly cut off the edge of Saul's cloak. And it came about after this that David's heart struck him because he had cut off the edge of the cloak. And David said to his servants: Far be it from me, by the Lord, that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed, to lay my hand on him, for he is the Lord's anointed. And David persuaded his men with words and did not allow them to rise up and kill Saul. And Saul arose and went down to the road, and David went out after Saul, saying: My lord the king. And Saul looked behind him, and David bowed with his face to the ground and did obeisance to him. And David said to Saul: Why do you listen to the words of the people who say, Behold, David seeks your life? Behold, this day your eyes have seen how the Lord gave you today into my hands in the cave, and I would not kill you, and I spared you, and said: I will not lay my hand on my lord, for he is the Lord's anointed. I took the edge of your cloak in my hand; I cut off the fringe of your cloak and did not kill you. Know and see today that there is no malice or injustice in my hand, and I have not sinned against you, and you seek to take my life. May the Lord judge between me and you, and may he avenge me on you; but my hand shall not be upon you. As the ancient proverb says, From the wicked comes wickedness; but my hand shall not be upon you. After whom do you pursue? After a dead dog and after a single flea? May the Lord be judge and avenger between me and you; may the Lord see and judge my cause and justify me from your hand.” Such is the custom of the worshippers of God: to reserve everything to God, knowing that it is a great thing to be avenged by him.

Meanwhile, as I said above, see what Saul says when he is in his right mind, and how, when he becomes senseless, he thirsts for the blood of David, a righteous and innocent man: “And it came about,” it says, “when David had finished speaking these words to Saul, that Saul said: Is this your voice, my son David? And Saul cried out and wept. And he said to David: You are more righteous than I, for you have repaid me good, but I have repaid you evil. And you have told me today the good you have done me, how the Lord shut me up in your hands and you did not kill me. As if a man should find his friend and send him on a good way. And may the Lord repay you good for what you have done to me today. And now, behold, I know that you shall surely reign, and the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand. And now swear to me by the Lord that you will not root out my seed after me and will not destroy my name from my father's house. And David swore to Saul.” After this Saul surely ought to have changed; but still he does not cease to persecute, nor does David fail to spare him. “And Saul arose,” says Scripture, “and went down into the shady desert, and with him three thousand chosen men of Israel, to seek David”; and further on: “And David sent out spies and learned that Saul had come to Ziklag. And David arose secretly and went to the place where Saul was sleeping, and Abner the son of Ner, the commander of his army. And Saul was sleeping on splendid coverings, and the people were around him. And David spoke to Ahimelech the Hittite and to Abishai the son of Zeruiah, Joab's brother, saying: Who will go in with me into the camp to Saul? And Abishai said to David: I will go with you. And David and Abishai went in among the people by night, and behold, Saul was sleeping on costly coverings, and a splendid spear was fixed in the ground at his head, and Abner was sleeping around him. And Abishai said to David: The Lord has shut up your enemy in your hands today; and now I will kill him with the spear, fixing it once into the ground, and I will not do it twice. And David said to Abishai: You shall not touch him; for who will lay his hand on the Lord's anointed and be guiltless? And David said: As the Lord lives, unless the Lord strikes him, or his hour comes and he dies, or he goes down into battle and is added to his fathers, far be it from me, by the Lord, to lay my hand on the Lord's anointed. And now take the spear that is at his head and the jar of water, and let us go away. And David took the spear and the jar of water from his head, and they went away. And there was no one who saw, nor who knew, nor who was awake; for they were all asleep, because the fear of the Lord had fallen upon them. And David crossed over to the other side and stood on the top of a mountain far off, and there was a great distance between them. And David called to the people and to Abner, and spoke, saying: Will you not answer, Abner? And Abner answered and said: Who are you who call me? What is it? And David said to Abner: Are you not a man, and who is like you in Israel? Why have you not guarded your lord the king? For one of the people came in to destroy your lord the king. This thing you have done is not good. As the Lord lives, you are sons of death, who have not guarded your lord the king, the Lord's anointed. And now see where the king's spear is, and the jar of water that was at his head. And King Saul knew David's voice and said: Is this your voice, my son David? Your servant, my lord king. And David added: Why does my lord thus pursue after his servant? For what have I done wrong, and what malice is there in me? And now let my lord the king hear the words of his servant: if the Lord God is stirring you up against me, let him accept an offering of sacrifice; but if it is the sons of men, cursed are they before the Lord, for they have driven me out today so that I am not established in the inheritance of the Lord, saying, Go, serve other gods. And now let my blood not fall to the earth before the Lord, for the king of Israel has come out to seek a single flea, as an owl hunts in the mountains. And Saul said: I have sinned; come back, my son David, for I will do you no more harm, because my life was precious in your eyes this day, on which I have been made a fool and have been ignorant of very much. And David answered, saying: Behold the king's spear; let one of the young men come over and take it. And may the Lord repay each man his righteousness and his faithfulness, as the Lord gave you today into my hands and I would not lay my hand on the Lord's anointed. And behold, as your life was exalted this day in my eyes, so may my life be made great in the sight of the Lord, and may he take me and deliver me from all tribulations. And Saul said to David: Blessed are you, my son; you shall surely do and surely prevail.”

I have put this in so that you might at last infer that you persecute either Athanasius or us as unjustly, that you are goaded towards the destruction of your own salvation, that you are bringing upon yourself the perils of death before the Godhead, just as Saul brought them upon himself by what he did. If this is not so, tell us why you persecute us: surely because we do not shed innocent blood. Whom do you want us to imitate, you or David? Of David I find it written: “And David reigned over Israel, and he was doing judgment and righteousness among all his people”; but we see that you are an unjust judge, a killer of the worshippers of God. Why do you persecute us? Surely because we have refused to become apostates as you are, because we have refused to deny the only Son of God. The book of David speaks of the perfect Trinity and tells of the one Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and you are found to be an apostate. Whom, I say, shall I follow, you or David? Him, the worshipper of the Lord, the lover of mercy, or you, the man of sacrilege, the butcher? With what wisdom do you persecute Athanasius? I would wonder at your doing these things, if King Ahab had not persecuted Elijah and the other prophets of the Lord in the same way; I would wonder at your persecuting a man of God, if I did not see that you are Ahab in all things. In short, such things are said to you by us as were said to him by the household of God: “Do not worship Baal, do not serve idols, but God; serve the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, serve the God of Israel.” If you remember that Elijah and the other prophets of the Lord said such things to Ahab, the apostate king, observe that similar things are said to you by those to whom the Lord has given authority to teach: “Do not, Constantius, fight with the Arians against the house of God; do not bring the idolatry of Arius into the church; do not deny the only Son of God; cease persecuting the apostolic and evangelical faith.” Because we say this, we seem to be your enemies. So too those who told the king the truth were his enemies. Let us run through, in short, what arose and was done between Elijah the prophet of the Lord and Ahab your fellow apostate, and you will find that you are Ahab today. “As the Lord lives,” says Elijah, “before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by the word of my mouth.” When this was fulfilled, the senseless man surely ought to have recognized that the only truly almighty God was none other than the one whom Elijah served. What does Ahab do? He sees that there is no rain for three years and more, and he is the more given to idols, the more eager to kill Elijah. The prophet of God hears from the mouth of the sacrilegious Ahab: “Is it you, you who trouble Israel?” So you too say to Athanasius, or to us, that we are the ones overturning the people of God, when it is you who call Christians together to accept your heresy. But you hear from us what that worshipper of idolatry Ahab heard from the glorious Elijah: “We do not overturn the house of God; you overturn it, you and your father's house.” Or will you deny that you are thinking of nothing but to make us all your fellow apostates?

But to continue, as I had begun, with the acts of Elijah and Ahab: “And Elijah said: I do not trouble Israel, but you trouble it, you and your father's house, in that you forsake the Lord our God and go after Baal. And now send and gather to me all Israel to Mount Carmel, and the four hundred and fifty prophets of shame and the four hundred prophets of the groves, who eat and drink at Jezebel's table. And King Ahab sent to all Israel and gathered all the prophets to Mount Carmel. And Elijah came near to them all and said to them: How long will you go limping in your mind? If the Lord is God, go after him; but if Baal is, go after him. And the people did not answer him a word. And Elijah said to the people: I alone am left of the prophets of the Lord, and the prophets of this Baal are four hundred and fifty men, and the prophets of the groves four hundred. Let two oxen be given us, and let them choose one for themselves and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood and put no fire under it; and I will prepare the other ox and put no fire under it. And call on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of my God; and the God who answers us by fire, he shall be God. And all the people answered and said: The word Elijah has spoken is good. And Elijah said to the prophets of shame: Choose one bull for yourselves and prepare it first, since you are many, and call on the name of your gods, and put no fire under it. And they took the bull and prepared it, and called on the name of Baal from morning until evening, and said: Hear us, Baal, hear us. And there was no voice nor any hearing. And Elijah the Tishbite added, saying: Call out with a loud voice together, lest perhaps he is busy or asleep, and he will be roused. And they called him with a loud voice, and cut themselves after their custom with swords and razors until the blood poured out upon them, and they prophesied until midday had passed. And it came about, when it was the time to kindle the sacrifice, that Elijah the Tishbite spoke to the prophets, saying: Stand aside now, and I will make the burnt offering. And they stood aside and went away. And Elijah said to the people: Come near to me. And all the people came near to him, and Elijah took twelve stones according to the number of the tribes of Israel, as the Lord had said to him, Israel shall be your name. And he built the stones and restored the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down, and made a trench that would hold two measures of seed around the altar, and piled the split wood on the altar he had made, and cut up the burnt offering and laid it on the wood and piled it on the altar, and said: Bring me four jars of water and pour them on the burnt offering and on the wood. And he said: Bring it again; and they brought it again. And he said: Do it a third time; and they did it a third time. And the water ran round about the altar, and they filled the trench with water. And Elijah cried to heaven and said: Lord God of Abraham and Isaac and Israel, hear me, Lord, hear me today by fire, that all this people may know that you are the Lord God of Israel and I am your servant, and that for your sake I have done these works, and that you have turned the heart of this people back. And fire fell from the Lord out of heaven and consumed the burnt offerings and the wood and the water that was in the trench, and the fire licked up the stones and the earth. And all the people fell on their faces and said: Truly the Lord God, he is God. And Elijah said to the people: Seize the prophets of Baal; let none of them escape. And they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and killed them there. And he said to Ahab: Eat and drink, for there is the sound of the feet of rain. And Ahab went up to eat and drink. And Elijah went up to Carmel and bowed himself to the ground and put his face between his knees, and said to his servant: Go up and look towards the sea. And the servant looked and said: There is nothing. Go round seven times. And it came about at the seventh time, and behold, a little cloud like a man's footprint bringing water from the sea. And Elijah said to him: Go up and say to Ahab: Harness your chariot and go up, lest the rain overtake you. And it came about here and there that the sky grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain. And Ahab wept and went to Jezreel; and the hand of the Lord was upon Elijah.”

You recognize in what perversity you remain today, the same in which Ahab remained. For after such great signs and wonders had been shown, he does not deign to rejoice with the people, but grieves that Elijah dared to kill the priests and prophets of the idols; nor after so much does he deign to turn to God, but rather persecutes his worshipper all the more. He sees that God is in Elijah, and seeks his life the more. He sees that the prophets of Baal and of the groves were worshippers of demons, and loves them even when dead more than the man whom in so many ways he had perceived to be of God's household. So you too are pleased to love those whom you see to be men of the Arian heretical sect, and you persecute the worshippers of God most fiercely. I have thought it right to press on you a few of the many things done between Ahab and Elijah so that you may know that, once you have forsaken God, you are not easily turned to him either by signs or by wonders, but rather, hardening in your errors, rage like monstrous beasts against the necks of God's worshippers. We beg you, Constantius, not to stay any longer in these evils of yours, but rather to come up out of the devil's whirlwinds, lest those evils overtake you that overtook Ahab and Jezebel. And do not call yourself happy in this, that you are powerful enough to persecute the men of God, when you see that Ahab and Jezebel could have been destroyed at Elijah's request, and yet were kept, so that both the endurance of Elijah, the man of God, might be more fully blessed and the measure of their impiety filled up; as though Elijah could not have asked God that the persecutors of his religion, the worshippers of idols, should burn! He asks for fire from heaven to consume the sacrifices, and at once it comes down; he asks for the rain, which had been withheld for three years and six months, and at once it is given; very many other signs are done; and could the enemies of God not have been destroyed at Elijah's request, when fire, coming down at Elijah's word, consumed even those honoured captains of fifty? You see today that, because you persecute Athanasius or us, you could be destroyed by a thunderbolt or in any other way, but that you are kept for this, either to turn yourself or that the whole measure of your iniquity may be filled up. King Ahab persecuted Elijah as you now persecute Athanasius. Jezebel, indeed, said to the prophet of the Lord, after she had learned that those mighty works had been done by Elijah and the prophets of shame and the priests of the cults killed: “May the gods do so to me and more also, if by this hour tomorrow I do not make your life as the life of one of them.” But what does Elijah hear from God after keeping a fast of forty days and nights? That he should anoint kings by whom Ahab and his associates would be destroyed. The mercy of God is with Elijah; Elijah knows that he is loved by God. Ahab, on the contrary, the persecutor of Elijah, is so wretched that he was always in the devil's power. So you ordered Athanasius to be punished as “justly” as Jezebel ordered Naboth the Jezreelite; so “true” were the witnesses you brought forward against Athanasius, as those brought forward by the men to whom Jezebel had written, saying: “Proclaim a fast, and set Naboth at the head of the people, and set two men, sons of the wicked, against him, and let them testify against him, saying, You have cursed God and the king; and bring him out, and let him be stoned and die.”

Such are your works now, you Arians. You call us guilty, you heap many charges on us, and you do not need false witnesses, for you yourselves are false witnesses in everything. So you sons of perdition, the Arians, try to kill Athanasius as Jezebel killed Naboth, as though you could escape the hand of him who sees all things. You know that God avenged the blood of Naboth and required his death from the hands of those who killed him; and do you think that God will not require the blood of his priest Athanasius from your hands? “And the Lord spoke to Elijah the Tishbite, saying: Arise and go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who is in Samaria, for he has gone down to Naboth's vineyard to take possession of it. And you shall say to him: Thus says the Lord: As you have killed Naboth and taken possession of his vineyard, therefore thus says the Lord: In the place where the dogs and the swine licked the blood of Naboth, there the dogs shall lick your blood, and harlots shall wash in your blood. And Ahab said to Elijah: Have you found me, my enemy? And Elijah said: I have found you, because you have planned to do evil before the Lord, to provoke him. Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am bringing evils upon you, and I will kindle a fire after you, and I will destroy of Ahab everyone who urinates against the wall, the one shut up and the one left in Israel. And I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah, for all the provocations with which you have provoked me and caused Israel to sin. And to Jezebel the Lord spoke, saying: The dogs shall eat her before the wall of Jezreel; and your dead in the city the birds of the sky shall eat.” What do you say to this, Constantius? Do you maintain that your sins are less than those of Ahab and Jezebel? They persecuted the priests of God, killed God's household, took away the religion of God and set up idolatry, turned the people away from God; and you have done and are doing all these things. So you call us your enemies, as Ahab called Elijah, who, when he had heard the Lord's indignation from the mouth of the prophet, said: “Have you found me, my enemy?” to King Ahab; because, of course, you said, “Do not serve idols, but the only God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel.” And because you are told, “Do not be a heretic, but be a Christian,” you call us enemies, because things are pressed on you, who hand down idolatry, that were also pressed on King Ahab by Elijah. Ahab would surely have loved Elijah if the prophet had decided that his idols should be served and God forsaken. Nor can you deny that you would have loved us with singular affection if we had chosen to be what you are. By these things you are understood to be a son of pestilence, a fountain of darkness, the kindling of all evils, the head and whirlpool of wickedness, the bilge of all blasphemers, the kindling of heretics, a root of bitterness, a tree destined for the fire because it bears deadly fruit, an enemy of God, a foe of the church, a falsifier of the truth, an instigator of depravity, a lover of injustice, an adversary of justice, turned into darkness and indeed inextricable darkness, made more truly a temple of all the demons, at whose prompting you, like Ahab, have committed and are committing all these evils. But not for long, unless you turn to God, will you be able to go unpunished, when you see what Ahab and Jezebel received. For if Ahab perished as had been promised him by the mouth of Elijah, if the dogs ate Jezebel, will you go unpunished for such great crimes? You, who not only do not grieve at having killed those dedicated to God but even boast, thinking you have done well. No wonder, since the one you deny, knowing the future, said in the Gospel: “The hour will come when everyone who kills you will think that he is offering service to God; but they do this because they know neither the Father nor his only Son.”

Living without knowledge of God, you knowingly persecute Athanasius, who tells you the truth and loves God with his whole heart. So too Ahab persecuted Elijah. But see the end of Elijah and of his enemy Ahab. See Elijah carried away to enjoy God's eternal friendship, and Ahab now tormented in the outer darkness. Elijah rejoices in God's friendship, and Ahab is paying everlasting penalties. Athanasius will undoubtedly be at the banquet where Elijah is; and you, unless you take thought for yourself, will be in that place of torments where Ahab is held, whose imitator you are found to be in all things. Is this wisdom, that you should have chosen the eternal unhappiness of King Ahab rather than to enjoy the everlasting happiness that Elijah obtained? Scripture tells of his being carried away in the fourth book of Kingdoms, saying: “And as they went on and talked, behold, a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and it parted the two of them. And Elijah went up in a whirlwind as into heaven. And Elisha saw, and he cried out and said: Father, father, the charioteer of Israel. And he saw him no more.” What you heretics have done cannot seem new to us, if you persecute the priests of the Lord, since we find in the second book of Chronicles that Jeroboam and his sons did these things. Holy Scripture says: “Judah and Benjamin and the Levites and the priests who were in all Israel came together from all their borders, for the Levites left their tents and their possessions and went to Rehoboam, because Jeroboam and his sons had cast them out from serving the Lord. And he appointed there priests for the high places and for the images and for the demons and for the calves which Jeroboam had made. And he cast them out from the children of Israel and from the tribes of Israel, those who had set their heart to seek the Lord God of Israel.” It will not be surprising, then, if you persecute us or those entrusted to us by God, if you drive us from the charge committed to us, if, in short, you ordain in our places enemies of God, men who have forsaken God with you, when you see that you are doing what Jeroboam did. For what is it to say, “Condemn the faith written at Nicaea and accept mine,” but what Jeroboam said: “Forsake God and serve my images”? What man says, “Condemn an absent, unheard, innocent man”? Surely he who had already denied the apostolic and evangelical faith, he who had destroyed the tradition of the blessed apostles, as far as it lay with you and yours. That, in short, is how you came to such madness: because, like Jeroboam, you were without God. Otherwise, if you had had God, if you had remembered that you were his worshipper, you would certainly never say: “Condemn the innocent, strike your fellow priest, absent and unheard.”

And so that you may see that you are without God, which is why you order such things to be done, consider a king with whom his God was, as he deserved; consider too his charge to the priests of the Lord, whom he urged to judge the people of God with just judgment; and look at the acts of the judges you have installed against the church and of their ministers; and you will be able to weigh whether the unclean spirits that were with Jeroboam are not with you. “And Jehoshaphat,” it says in the second book of Chronicles, “dwelt in Jerusalem, and he went out again among the people from Beersheba to Mount Ephraim and turned them back to the Lord God of their fathers. And he appointed judges in all the fortified cities of Judah, city by city. He said to the judges: See what you are doing; for you will judge not for man but for the Lord, and he is with you in the word. And now let the fear of the Lord be upon you, and keep and do; for there is no iniquity with the Lord our God, nor respect of persons, nor taking of gifts. And in Jerusalem too Jehoshaphat appointed some of the Levites and the priests and the heads of Israel for the judgment of the Lord and to judge those who dwell in Jerusalem. And he charged them, saying: Thus you shall do in the fear of the Lord, with a perfect heart; and every case that comes to you from your brothers who dwell in their cities, between blood and blood, between law, in commandments and ordinances and judgments, you shall make plain to them, and they will not sin against the Lord, and there will be no wrath upon you and your brothers. Do so, and you will not sin. Behold, Amariah the chief priest is over you in every matter of the Lord, and Zebadiah the son of Ishmael, who is the governor of the house of Judah, in every matter of the king; and the scribes and Levites are before you. Be strong and act, and the Lord will be with you for good.” Did he say to the priests of the Lord, or to the princes of his kingdom, or to the other judges: “Condemn the righteous, persecute the innocent, condemn and kill all who believe in God”? Did he say, “Love what God does not love, hate justice, cherish injustice,” as you say? Or will you be able to deny that you said, “Condemn Athanasius, absent and unheard”? Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, dedicated to God, says that one must judge according to the law of the Lord; and you, a king turned to apostasy, say: “Condemn the unheard.”

Suppose meanwhile, Constantius, that King Jehoshaphat were in the body today and that both of you were speaking to us: he saying, “See what you are doing; for you will judge not for man but for the Lord, and he is with you in the word. And now let the fear of the Lord be upon you, that you may keep and do; for there is no iniquity with the Lord our God nor respect of persons”; you, on the contrary, saying that a man must be condemned unheard, and one whom you yourself know to be innocent. Whom could we bishops of God have obeyed, we whom he had promised beforehand to his people by the mouth of Jeremiah, saying: “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline”? Whom, I say, should we obey, you, or Jehoshaphat, a man dedicated to God, who would compel us to do what we remembered God had commanded to be done? If, then, you recognize that he taught men to fulfil the Lord's commandments, while you have become not only a destroyer of God's commandments but a deserter of God himself, it remains for you to see which of you was a man of God, which did the will of his mercy. We read it written of him: “And the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the first ways of his father, and did not seek images but the Lord God of his father, and walked in his commandments, and not according to the works of Israel. And the Lord established his kingdom, and all Judah gave gifts to Jehoshaphat, and he had riches and much glory. And his heart was exalted in the ways of the Lord, and he further cut down the groves from Judah. And in the third year of his reign he sent his commanders and men of valour”; and further on: “and with them Elishama and Jehoram the priests; and they taught in Judah, having with them the book of the law of the Lord, and they went through the cities of Judah and taught the people. And the fear of the Lord fell on the kingdoms of the earth round about Judah, and they did not make war on Jehoshaphat. And from the foreigners they brought Jehoshaphat gifts and silver and presents, and the Arabians brought him seven thousand seven hundred rams of the flock; and Jehoshaphat went on growing greatly, to the heights.” What do you do of this kind? Surely you have sent through your whole realm that we should all spit on God's commandments and accept your precept, which tried to attack the Lord's precept. Jehoshaphat sent the chief men of valour of his kingdom, sent his counsellors, sent Levites and priests of the Lord, begging that all in his kingdom be worshippers of the Lord, that all with one mind offer themselves as servants to God alone; he sends also the book of the sacred law handed down through the glorious Moses, so that they should do nothing beyond what God had commanded to be done. You are found not only to have attacked the law of the Lord, which commanded that the innocent and the righteous not be killed, but to have forsaken God himself, since you hold not the apostolic faith but the faithlessness of Arius. He turned an erring people from idols to God; you have tried to make a people dedicated to God apostate, as you are, that is, sacrilegious.

You have persecuted and are persecuting Athanasius, thirsting for his blood. But see what the Holy Spirit says in the ninth psalm, in which you seem to me to be specially described: “He has said in his heart: I shall not be moved from age to age, without evil. His mouth is full of cursing and bitterness and deceit; under his tongue are toil and sorrow. He sits in ambush with the rich in secret places, to kill the innocent. His eyes are fixed on the poor man. He lies in wait in secret like a lion in his den; he lies in wait to seize the poor man, to seize the poor man until he draws him into his net. In his snare he will humble him; he will stoop and fall, while he lords it over the poor. He has said in his heart: God has forgotten; he has turned away his face so as not to see, to the end.” If you persevere in this wickedness, will it not be fitting to say of you, “He has turned away his face so as not to see, to the end”? So great are your killings, Constantius, that when it is said in the tenth psalm, in the person of our people, “In the Lord I trust; how will you say to my soul, Flee to the mountain like a sparrow? For behold, the sinners have bent the bow, they have made ready their arrows in the quiver, to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart,” you seem to me to be described there with the partners of your crimes. For we know that you Arians are the antichrists of our time. Or if you are not one who deserves to be numbered among the antichrists, judge for yourself, you denier of the only Son of God. The Holy Spirit says through the prophet: “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord's seat is in heaven. His eyes look upon the poor, and his eyelids examine the sons of men. The Lord examines the righteous and the ungodly, and he who loves iniquity hates his own soul.” And you have decided that a man must be punished whom you yourself have not found guilty, except in this one thing, that he resisted your blasphemy and so became guilty of death in your eyes. Hear the Spirit of God say, “He who loves iniquity hates his own soul,” and yet you compel us to love iniquity rather than justice. If it is not unjust to condemn a catholic unheard on the accusation of you heretics, prove it. For when I find it written further, “He will rain snares upon the sinners; fire and sulphur and the stormy wind are the portion of their cup; for the Lord is righteous and has loved righteousness; his face has seen equity,” I know that you and all who act with you are in this portion. Fire and sulphur and the stormy wind will certainly come upon you, unless you turn to God, since that is the portion of your cup, you deniers of the only Son of God, persecutors of those dedicated to his divine majesty; for though you know that God is just, loves justice and cherishes equity, you have decided to condemn the innocent and to persecute the most faithful priest of the Lord. “Love the Lord,” says the Holy Spirit in the thirtieth psalm, “all his saints, for the Lord seeks truth, and he will repay abundantly those who act in pride.” And you had pushed us to kill an innocent man, to share pride with you. For you could not deny that you are proud, since you have laid deadly hands on the worshippers of God and tried to destroy the evangelical faith and establish the heretical one. Had you not read in the thirty-second psalm, “The Lord loves mercy and judgment, and the earth is full of the mercy of the Lord,” that you ordered an absent man to be condemned? Recognize by these works of yours how thoughtless you are and how much an enemy of your own salvation; for though you remember that it is written, “Who is the man who desires life and loves to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit; turn away from evil and do good,” you nevertheless take no rest from doing what God has forbidden you to do. This is not to want to see good days; this is not to want life; this is to ask for death to be granted oneself. Since, then, you are one who runs to drink eternal death, you seem to me to have been foreshown also in the thirty-fifth psalm: “The unjust man has said that he will sin within himself; there is no fear of God before his eyes. For he has acted deceitfully in his sight, so that his iniquity and hatred may be found out. The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit; he would not understand so as to do well. He has devised iniquity on his bed; he has set himself in every way that is not good, and he has not hated malice.”

Observe what you are, most just emperor, since even what was said against Judas Iscariot and the people of the Jews is felt to have been said on your account. How could we, Constantius, condemn an innocent man at the counsel of your pride, when we knew it is written in David: “Show your mercy to those who know you, and your righteousness to those who are upright in heart. Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the sinner move me. There all who work iniquity have fallen; they have been thrust out and will not be able to stand.” What do you say? Is the mercy and righteousness of God such that the absent and unheard are condemned, and the innocent at that, whom it is not lawful to punish even when present? But what wonder if you, a man who does not know God, ordered these things done? What wonder if, ignorant of his mercy and righteousness, you commanded perverse, wicked, unjust things to be done? Could the word of the psalmist not remove you from so great a crime, when he says, “There all who work iniquity have fallen; they have been thrust out and could not stand”? Nor that word in the thirty-sixth: “Cease from anger and forsake fury; do not be envious so as to do evil, for those who do evil will be destroyed”? Since, reading these things, you decided that the statutes of the Lord were to be held as nothing, I judge that you are the one of whom it is said: “The sinner will watch the righteous and gnash his teeth at him; but the Lord will laugh at him, for he sees that his day will come.” We hold you among those of whom I see it said: “The sinners have drawn the sword, they have bent their bow, to cast down the needy and the poor and to slaughter the upright in heart. Let their sword enter their own hearts, and let their bow be broken. Better is a little for the righteous than the many riches of sinners, for the arms of sinners will be broken.” You are placed among those enemies of the Lord whom the Spirit of God describes further on: “The enemies of the Lord, as soon as they are honoured and exalted, will vanish away like smoke.” Consider at last that you, with all your loftiness, will perish like smoke, unless you correct yourself, being an enemy of God. I see it written further of you that unless you turn and repent you will come to nothing: “I saw the ungodly man highly exalted and lifted up above the cedars of Lebanon; and I passed by, and behold, he was not; and I sought him, and his place was not found.” You are he, I say, Constantius, of whom I see this too said: “The sinner watches the righteous and seeks to put him to death; but the Lord will not leave him in his hands.” The prophet, full of the Holy Spirit, says: “Do not be envious among evildoers, nor be jealous of those who work iniquity, for like grass they will quickly wither, and like green herbs they will soon fall.” And it is said by you, Constantius, the destroyer of God's religion: “Imitate me.” Who would imitate you, except one who wishes to wither with you like green herbs? Who, except one who wishes to be wiped out by the anger of God, if Scripture truly says, “Speak righteousness, judge justly, sons of men,” and you rise up to kill an innocent man?

It cannot be doubted, then, that you are one of those to whom the Holy Spirit says: “For in your heart you work iniquities; on the earth your hands weave iniquity. The sinners have been estranged from the womb; they have gone astray from birth; they have spoken falsehood. Their anger is like that of a serpent, like the deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not hear the voice of the charmers, of the enchanter who charms wisely. God has broken their teeth in their mouth; the Lord will shatter the jaws of the lions. They will come to nothing like water running off; he has bent his bow until they are weakened. Like melted wax they will be taken away; fire has fallen upon them, and they have not seen the sun.” You hear that you with yours will come to nothing, as those have already come whose imitator you have chosen to be. You see that you persecutors of the servants of God, deniers of the only Son of God, are compared to serpents and asps; and are you not at last afraid, and will you not cross over to the house of God? Will you not, though you are shown to be one of those asps, so shape yourself to trample the devil's head that you may be made worthy to reign among those whose glory John relates: “He came to his own, and his own did not receive him; but as many as received him, to them he gave power to become sons of God, to those who believe in his name”? Had you not read it written in the fifty-eighth psalm, “God of Israel, attend to visit all the nations; do not have mercy on any who work iniquity,” that you ordered sentence to be given against an absent man? Nor had you learned that the Holy Spirit warns and rebukes alike through these words in the sixty-first: “How long will you rush upon a man? Will you kill all?” “The fear of the Lord,” says Solomon, “is the beginning of understanding; but the ungodly despise wisdom and discipline.” That is why you despise discipline and wisdom, because you are without the fear of God; that is why you are described as ungodly in the sacred writings: ungodly certainly, because you have not only deserted God yourself, but persecute so savagely those who worship him. Woe to you, for you are found to be with those of whom I read in Proverbs: “My son, let not ungodly men lead you astray, and do not consent if they entreat you, saying: Come, share with us in blood; let us hide a righteous man in the earth unjustly; let us swallow him up alive like the underworld.” What delighted you in the Arians, imitators of the Jews, Constantius, that, hearing these ungodly words of theirs, you followed them in shedding the blood of the servants of God? Why did you not listen to the counsel of Solomon, who says to you: “Do not go on the way with them; do not turn your foot to their paths. For not unjustly are nets spread for birds. For those who take part in murder store up evils for themselves; these are the ways of all who accomplish wickedness, for by their ungodliness they take away their own soul”; and again: “As long as the innocent hold to righteousness, they will not be ashamed; but the foolish, being desirous of insolence, having become ungodly, have hated understanding and have become subject to reproaches.” You, Constantius, have sought these reproaches for yourself; you have condemned yourself, who, despising God's commands, have decided to cling to the Arians, the disciples of the accursed Jews; with whom you rightly hear further: “For since I called and you did not obey, and I spread out my words and you did not heed, but made my counsels void and did not attend to my rebukes, therefore I too will laugh at your destruction, and I will rejoice over you when sudden tumult comes upon you, and overthrow like a storm, when destruction comes upon you. For when you call on me, I will not hear you. The wicked will seek me and will not find me. For they hated wisdom and did not receive the word of the Lord, nor would they attend to my counsels, for they spurned my rebukes. Therefore they will eat the fruit of their own way and be filled with their own ungodliness. For because they deceived the little ones, they will be killed.”

We would certainly have deserved to be killed with you, and that by God, if we had persecuted the man of God with you. But how could we have done it, we who knew that it is written: “Do not devise evil against your friend, against the sojourner and the one who trusts you. Do not carry on enmity against a man without cause, lest he do you some harm”? Or would it not have been without cause, if we had pronounced sentence of death on an innocent man, as the insane fury of your fellow heretics had ordered through you? Woe to you, for I see it said of you, our persecutor: “An insolent eye, a wicked tongue, hands that shed the blood of the righteous, and a heart devising evil thoughts, and feet hastening to do evil.” You have read: “My son, honour the Lord, and you will be strong; besides him fear no other”; and yet you wanted yourself to be feared and God despised. For how could we have been found fearing God alone, if, giving way to your threats, we had condemned a man absent, unheard, and one we knew to be righteous at that? Solomon says: “A deceitful balance is an abomination before the Lord, but a just weight is acceptable to him.” You, on the contrary, do not hesitate to command, “Condemn a man by an unjust judgment,” thinking right what is perverse. Solomon says further of you and those like you: “The ways of fools are right in their own eyes, but the wise man listens to counsel.” “Condemn Athanasius,” you say; and where you could not prevail by the cleverness of your detestable subtlety, you began to use the forces of your empire. Hear, then, what is written of you: “The evil man does evil with insolence”; and again, since you have already strangled yourself with a noose, clinging to the Arians as Judas Iscariot clung to the Jews: “The law of the wise is a fountain of life, but the fool will die by a snare.” It is further said of you: “A bold king will fall into evils.” Certainly you have fallen into these evils, because by denying the only Son of God you have left yourself nothing of wisdom, but have turned yourself wholly to folly; and this is what has made you slaughter those dear to God. It is written: “The wise man, by fearing, turns away from evil; but the fool mixes, trusting, with the wicked.” Had you not read it written, “He who insults the poor provokes the one who made him,” that you dragged us to kill an innocent man with you? For if God is angry with one who insults, how much more with one who has killed his priest! Did you not still keep in mind what is written, “The beginning of a good way is to do just things; they are more acceptable with the Lord than to sacrifice victims,” that you should compel us to do unjust things? And in another place too: “He who calls the just unjust and the unjust just is abominable before God.” We would undoubtedly be abominable if we pronounced you just and judged Athanasius, a man acceptable to God, unjust. “To admire the person of the ungodly,” it says, “is not good, nor is it holy to turn aside the righteous in judgment.” You say on the contrary, you who are seen described in the person of the ungodly: “Condemn the guiltless, following my person.” And though you have compelled us to do things that could win us an angry God, yet we exhort you, the enemy of our safety, to become godly instead of ungodly, healthy instead of sick, alive instead of dead, religious instead of sacrilegious.

“How,” you say, “shall I be able to obtain this? By what means?” Cease persecuting the house of God; cease proscribing, deporting and killing his servants; confess that you are a Christian; curse with us the band of the Arians sought out by the devil's invention; believe as we believe, who are bishops from the succession of the blessed apostles; confess the only Son of God as they confessed him and as we confess him; and you will obtain pardon for such great crimes. For you have read in Solomon, “Death and life are in the hands of the tongue,” and in blessed Paul, “With the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” You remember that it is written, “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who accuses wickedly will not escape”; and yet you dared to accuse Athanasius falsely. For we had no case to answer with the colleagues of your Arian sect, since the power of God had long ago forestalled them, with Arius, at Nicaea, at the time when the faith was written down not only against your blasphemy but against all heresies. We had, I say, no question with those false bishops, the enemies of God, your teachers, that we should fight again against those whom God had once driven out from his people. And so now our account is with you, because you have set yourself up as the author of the claim that Athanasius was guilty; and because we refused to punish him unheard, you, a man who knew yourself to be a false witness, began like a monstrous wild beast to want to punish us together with Athanasius, as though you could overcome the strength of God's servants with your gnashings. For though Solomon says, “The threats of a king are like the roaring of a lion,” yet your lion's roarings can have no strength against us. Why? Because you are a forerunner of the Antichrist, and we are soldiers of Christ. Why? Because you, the persecutor of his religion, cannot overcome the men of God. Likewise in another place he says: “There is no difference between the threats of a king and the anger of a lion.” What is this to the servants of God, who have determined that no one is to be feared but God, who remember that our souls are placed in the hand of God? Your fellow Arians may fear your roarings, because they are without knowledge of God, because they have not put on the armour of God. But we of God's household laugh at your roarings like a lion's. Why? Because, recognizing you as the wild beast whose roarings you are described as having, we must rather laugh at you, seeing a raging beast set under the shape of a man, than fear you. But if you are not a wild beast hiding under the image of a man, say so. You have read in Solomon: “Mercy and truth are the guard of a king, and the righteous surround his throne.” Since, on the contrary, a band of malignant Arians surrounds you and we see that you are a punisher of mercy and a curser of truth, what else shall we judge you to be but a wild beast and a monster? You are roused against us like a roaring lion because we love mercy and truth, because we have not punished an innocent and righteous man; and do you think you are not a savage wild beast and a most cruel monster?

But what desire led you to carry out these things I cannot see at all, that you should have persecuted with such ruin a catholic bishop of complete righteousness, a priest of the Lord. Did you not remember that it is written, “To do righteousness and to be truthful pleases God more than the blood of victims”? Athanasius displeases you because he keeps the tradition of the blessed apostles, because he confesses himself a Christian, because he refuses to be your fellow apostate. No wonder, since we hold it written: “The holy man is unclean in the eyes of the wicked.” He who pleases God displeases you malignant men, and especially you, rash and proud; and you are understood to be rash and proud because you have stretched out your hand against God's ordination, because you thought the apostolic tradition should be destroyed, because you decided that the bishops, under whose care you ought to have lived, should be brought under your rule. Understand, then, what you are, hearing through Solomon the name that belongs to you, the proud man: “The rash and proud man will be called a pestilence.” Pestilent man though you are, you will not be able to afflict us with your disease, because divine mercy affords us protection. In short, you, a pestilent man, tried to make us sharers of your pestilence; but he to whom we live dedicated did not allow your temptations to reach upright hearts. For Scripture prompts us: “Deliver those who are led to death, and do not spare to redeem those who are being killed. But if you say, I do not know this man, know that the Lord knows the hearts of all; and he who formed the breath of all knows everything, who repays each according to his works.” When against this you say, “Condemn the worshipper of God, abandon the apostolic faith, accept my faithlessness,” it certainly shows that you are a pestilent man. God wants us to help those placed in pressures and straits; and you urge those who ought to do good to do evil, and that by applying what you think can be feared. Observe now whether that disease called pestilence is not in you. It is a disease strong enough that you can make not only bodies but souls diseased: the souls, that is, of those who are willing to listen to you saying, “Condemn the bishop of the Lord, repudiate the faith which the church has always held, and accept mine, which Arius handed down.” “To be abashed before a person in judgment,” says holy Scripture, “is not good; and he who says that the ungodly man is righteous will be cursed among peoples and hateful to nations; but those who reprove will hope for better things, and the best blessing will come upon them.” And you thought that we could be abashed before your person and condemn the man whom even you knew to be innocent, whom you held guilty only in this, that he refused to deny that he was a Christian.

Meanwhile, because we reprove you, who are on the road of death, because we correct you, see what reward is promised us: “Open your mouth,” says the prophet, “with the word of God, and judge all soundly; open your mouth and judge justly.” And you say: “Condemn an innocent man.” I do indeed keep in mind what is contained in the sacred Scriptures: “Do not be proud before the king.” But if you had been willing to stay within the bounds of your power and I had been proud against you, I would truly have condemned myself as a transgressor of the law. Now, however, because we tell the truth to you, a murderer and a man of sacrilege, we will certainly not deserve to be punished as proud men, but rather to be rewarded with heavenly rewards, because we did not spare you in your error. It is written: “A whip for the horse and a goad for the ass, and a rod for a foolish nation.” We rightly call you deniers of the only Son of God foolish, since we see you engaged in so great a sacrilege. For when I see it written that “as a dog that returns to its vomit becomes hateful, so is a fool who returns in his malice to his sin,” I judge that it was said especially of you. Why, you ask? Because you swore in your letters to the Alexandrians that you would do Athanasius no further harm, and now you seek to kill him. But you say: “My father had sent him into exile, and I too had to obey my father's decrees.” Suppose, as you will, that Athanasius is a heretic: if he had been rightly sent into exile, why did you allow him, against your father's decrees, to recover the dignity that your father thought he had taken from him? But you say: “It was done at the intervention of my brother Constans.” But you could have met Constans by saying: “The man whom our father proved a heretic I cannot receive into the parts of my realm unless he corrects himself.” But you say: “I feared that wars might arise between us.” Then, because Shapur, king of the Persians, is now waging war against you, if he says to you, “Accept my religions, and I will be at peace with you,” must you, with all who live in your empire, go over to the religions of the demons? For Shapur sacrifices to demons. You see, then, that you did not act as a servant of God in receiving him and recalling him to his place, a man you remembered had been deported in the cause of the faith: first, because you judged God powerless, as though he could not protect you while you protected the truth and resisted the heretics; secondly, because you wanted Constans to be more gracious to you than God. If you remembered that King Constans had become a heretic by favouring Athanasius, whom you already held proven sacrilegious, you ought not only not to have put your kingdom before God, but not even your own life. For you yourself are a witness of your own conscience that it was because of the faith which the church has always held and holds, because he would not condemn it, that he was sent into exile; that is, because he refused to be an Arian. It does not escape you that this is why Athanasius was hated by your father, since you too are pleased to persecute him in the same cause in which your father persecuted him. Let him say, in short, that he is not a Christian, let him confess himself an Arian, and he will be most wise and great in your eyes. Rightly, then, are you compared to a dog that has returned to its vomit; for you were already thought a Christian and not an Arian from the time you restored Athanasius with such letters to the people entrusted to him by God. But now, since you are proved to be an Arian and, desiring your heresy to find a place, persecute a righteous man because he attacks it with all his strength, you are rightly compared to a dog returning to its vomit.

Likewise in that excellent deed of yours too you are rightly compared to a dog that has returned to its vomit: that you accepted the truth that Eudoxius of Germanicia was not a catholic and gave letters against him to the people of Antioch, and afterwards began to defend this same Eudoxius as a teacher of truth, claiming his heresy as the catholic faith. Why so fickle, Constantius? Why are you bent this way and that in the cause of the faith, like a reed when the winds beat on it? What wonder if you were so ready to condemn Athanasius and even to invite all the priests of God to do so, since you did not hesitate to do such things in your rashness even in the matter of the state of religion? You boiled over to shed innocent blood, most pious king, as though you did not remember that it is written: “Of the king who judges the poor in truth, his throne will rise up as a witness”; but you thought you would be supreme if you went against the divine Scriptures, if you did everything they forbid. You hate Athanasius because he is a Christian; because he would not be, as you say, a disciple of Arius, you persecute him with the utmost hatred. But the Holy Spirit had shown long ago by the mouth of Solomon that you would be such towards him, saying: “The righteous man is an abomination to the wicked man.” Do not stay any longer in these evils, Constantius; do not abuse the patience of God. Keep in mind what is written in the seventy-seventh psalm: “The Lord was roused as one asleep, like a mighty man heady with wine, and he struck all his enemies in the hinder parts; he gave them everlasting reproach.” In the eighty-first psalm the Holy Spirit says: “How long will you judge iniquity and accept the persons of sinners? Judge the orphan and the needy; justify the lowly and the poor. Rescue the poor, and deliver the needy from the hand of the sinner.” You say, “Kill with me a man dedicated to God,” wanting us to be counted with you among those of whom it is said, “They have not known nor understood; they walk in darkness.” God commands that we not pronounce unjust judgment, that we not, out of respect for your face, the face of a sinner, allow you to punish the man you persecute unjustly. God has commanded that the lowly be justified by us, that the poor be rescued and the needy delivered from your hand, the hand of a butcher. And you say: “Condemn the man whom God wanted rescued from my hand, the hand of a sinner.” No wonder; for you could not go against your own accursed arrangements. The Holy Spirit says in the ninety-sixth: “You who love the Lord, hate evil”; and your commands show that you say, “Love what is evil.” For if it seems evil to God that an innocent man be condemned, that sentence be given against an absent and righteous man, what else do you compel us to do but what God hates? If, then, we did what God hates, we would certainly not be among those to whom it is said, “You who love the Lord, hate evil.” You, of course, do not hate evil because you do not love the Lord; but we refuse to do what God hates because we love him. You do these things because you are not the servant of him whose fear and love compel us to hate evil. For you, the persecutor of his church, are not found in the church of the Lord, so as to think that the prophet said to you in the psalm, “You who love the Lord, hate evil,” since he also says in the hundredth: “He who acts in pride shall not dwell in the midst of my house; he who speaks wicked things has not prospered in the sight of my eyes.” So it is said not to you who are placed outside, but to us: “You who love the Lord, hate evil.” In short, we hate the evil that you love because you are not in the church of God. For how will you be able to claim that you are in the church of God, a man who not only persecutes the church but denies him who founded the church? Or are you not proud, and will you be able to dwell in the house of the Lord as long as you remain in this arrogance? For who could rightly be called proud, if you could be judged humble, who say: “Condemn an innocent man against the divine commands; trample on God's precepts and keep mine”?

But perhaps you do not speak wicked things, and can be found among Christians, you, the denier of the Father, denier of his only Son, denier of the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, founder of the Arian heresy, destroyer of the apostolic faith; you speak nothing wicked with your poisoned lips, you utter nothing wicked with that sacrilegious mouth! Did you not know that in the hundred and second psalm the Holy Spirit said of the Lord, “The Lord does mercy and judgment for all who suffer wrong,” that you ordered judgment to be given unjustly? Whose commands is it fitting for us, the priests of the Lord, to obey? Yours, you who have not yet been rescued from the unclean spirits, or the prophet's, through whom the Holy Spirit warns us, the worshippers of the true Godhead, to avoid every part of injustice? Had you not read that God said to you kings, “Do not touch my anointed ones, and do no harm to my prophets,” that you dared to stretch out your hands against the house of God? David, full of the Holy Spirit, says in the hundred and fifth psalm: “Blessed are those who keep judgment and do righteousness at all times”; and you say, “Do injustice with me.” You persecute Athanasius, the ungodly the godly, the heretic the Christian; but tell me, I beg you, which of you can be acceptable to God? You, the denier of the eternal majesty of the only Son of God, the builder and founder of a false religion, or Athanasius? You have read in the hundred and eighteenth psalm: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are those who search his testimonies; with their whole heart they seek him.” Tell me, then, which of you seeks God, which serves his majesty faithfully? You, who persecute Athanasius because he confesses himself a Christian, or he who wants you, his persecutor, rescued from the snares of the devil? You, the destroyer of the catholic faith, or he, the preacher of the apostolic faith? If you serve God, how is it that the Holy Spirit says further on, “For those who work iniquity have not walked in his ways”? You heretics, then, workers of iniquity, since you are not found in the ways of the Lord, certainly show by your works that you are in the way of the devil. Have you read, “Do not seek death by the error of your life, nor bring on destruction by the works of your hands, for God did not make death and does not rejoice in the destruction of the living”? Or not? If you have read it, why did you order us to seek death for ourselves? If you have not, learn what you urged us to do, you who have chosen to be in the lot of those whose crimes the Holy Spirit describes by the mouth of Solomon, saying: “Nor did they hope for the wages of righteousness, nor did they discern the honour of holy souls; for God created man incorruptible and made him in the image of his own likeness; but through the envy of the devil death entered the world. Those who are of his party imitate him.” You see that you are an imitator of the devil, placed in his party; you know that you are seeking death for yourself, you who would not remain in the image of God, as you were made by God, but have betaken yourself to him through whose envy death entered the world.

Hear, on the other hand, how great a happiness Athanasius longs to obtain, which is why he refuses to be what you are, an Arian apostate; hear how great a blessedness those too have obtained whom you have already been pleased to kill because they called themselves Christians: “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to die, and their departure was thought an evil, and their going from us destruction; but they are in peace. For though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and having been afflicted a little, they will be greatly rewarded, for God tested them and found them worthy of himself. Like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a burnt offering he accepted them. And in the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will judge nations and rule over peoples, and their Lord will reign for ever.” You desire to kill Athanasius, thinking that if you slaughter him you can do him eternal harm, not knowing that it is written: “The righteous man who has died condemns the ungodly who are living, and youth quickly completed condemns the long old age of the unrighteous. For they will see the end of the wise man and will not understand what the Lord purposed for him, and why he made him safe. They will see and despise him, but the Lord will laugh them to scorn. And after this they will become dishonoured corpses and an outrage among the dead for ever, for he will dash them speechless and puffed up, and shake them from their foundations, and they will be left utterly dry, and they will be in anguish, and their memory will perish. They will come with dread at the reckoning of their sins, and their lawless deeds will convict them to their face.” You see among whom your portion is placed; you see with what sort of men you have made yourself stand against the house of God. But Athanasius you will see among those of whom you may hear it written further on: “Then the righteous man will stand with great confidence against those who afflicted him and made light of his labours. When they see him, they will be shaken with dreadful fear, and they will be amazed at the unexpectedness of his salvation. They will say among themselves, repenting and groaning in anguish of spirit: This is the man whom we once held in derision and made a byword of reproach. We fools thought his life madness and his end without honour. How has he been numbered among the sons of God, and why is his lot among the saints?” Then, unless you take thought for yourself, you will say this, when you see yourself plunged into Tartarus; then you will say what holy Scripture says the persecutors of the soldiers of Christ will say: “So we strayed from the way of truth, and the light of righteousness did not shine on us, and the sun did not rise upon us. We wearied ourselves in the paths of iniquity and destruction, and we journeyed through trackless deserts, but the way of the Lord we did not know. What did pride profit us? Or what good has wealth with boasting brought us? All those things have passed away like a shadow and like a messenger running by.” On the other hand you will see Athanasius among those whose glory the Holy Spirit tells, saying: “But the righteous live for ever, and their reward is with the Lord, and their care is with the Most High. Therefore they will receive the kingdom of splendour and the diadem from the hand of the Lord, for with his right hand he will cover them and with his arm he will shield them.” You, on the contrary, if you remain in this obstinacy of mind, if you resolve to end this fragile life among the Arians, will be among those to whom the Holy Spirit likewise speaks by the mouth of the prophet: “Hear, therefore, O kings, and understand; learn, judges of the ends of the earth; give ear, you who rule over multitudes and pride yourselves on crowds of nations. For your power was given you by the Lord and your strength by the Most High, who will examine your works and search out your thoughts; because, being ministers of his kingdom, you did not judge rightly, nor keep the law, nor walk according to the will of God. Terribly and swiftly he will come upon you, for the severest judgment falls on those in high places. For the lowly may be pardoned in mercy, but the mighty will be mightily tested. For the Lord of all will not shrink from anyone's person, nor will he reverence anyone's greatness; for he himself made both small and great, and he takes thought for all alike; but a stronger inquiry awaits the strong. To you, then, O evil tyrants, are my words, that you may learn wisdom and not fall away.” Then, if you have not yet heard us, Constantius, you will see what you cannot see now because of your unbelief; you will see then, when you have been placed among your fellow tyrants in those places of torment, not only that you loved unjust judgments, but that you wished to destroy the house of God, that you became a denier of the Son of God, that by your threatening power you decreed that the faith be preached otherwise than the prophets and apostles preached it. Nor will you be able to say, “I am not among those whom the Holy Spirit describes through Solomon,” when you hear him say: “To you, then, O evil tyrants, are my words.”

You will not be able to deny, then, that you are the chief of all your fellow tyrants, if only you look closely at your work. “The keeping of the laws,” says the prophet, “is the assurance of incorruption, and incorruption makes one near to God.” To this you say: “Corrupt the law of God, as you, our persecutors, have corrupted it.” Who is so senseless as to want to be corrupted by you and perish for ever? Who would not want to become near to God by remaining in integrity? Why have you either done these things yourself or dared to compel us to do them? Had you not read that Solomon said to God in the book of Wisdom: “God of the fathers and Lord of mercies, who made all things by your word, and by your wisdom formed man to have dominion over the creatures made by you, to order the world in righteousness and equity and to judge with uprightness of soul”; and again: “You taught your people by such works that the righteous must be humane, and you made your sons to be of good hope”? Had you not found these things written, I say, that you dared to provoke us to such inhumanity? How shall we be sons of good hope? How shall we, his servants, present ourselves righteous and humane before God, when transgressors of the law are called neither righteous nor sons of God? Learn, then, from what good you wished to drag us to death, and everlasting death at that; for everyone who ceases to be among those whom God has called into the adoption of sons loses life and possesses everlasting death. Since, then, you Arians are inhuman, ungodly, cruel murderers, how can you be called Christians? But also, since you deny Christ, the only Son of God, and confess that you have believed in the Antichrist, from where or how will you be able to prove yourselves servants of Christ, when you have shown by your own profession that you are servants of the Antichrist? For the antichrist in whom Arius believed truly was “when he was not”; but our Saviour, Lord and God, the only Son of God, is not, as you would have it, Constantius, a creature, but the Lord of creation; he is eternal, beyond reckoning, as is he whose Son he is. He did indeed put on a perfect man in the last days from the womb of the virgin; but even when he had taken up man, he is unchangeable, incorruptible, inexpressible and unalterable, as is he whose Son he is. The man he took up could not change him into anything other than what he always was, since he is in the form of God his Father, since the Son is equal to the Father, as the most blessed apostle relates: “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” For because he said, “He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,” the only Son of God, God, could not become anything other than what he is, incorruptible, inexpressible, unchangeable, since he remains always in that state of eternal greatness in which his Father too remains. But we certainly understand what “he emptied himself” means: that though the Son is like and equal to the Father, he nevertheless willed to become man also for our salvation.

Since, then, you have accepted the Antichrist in place of Christ, because he truly was when he was not, with what face do you still resist Christians, if not with that with which adulteresses resist chaste women? You dared to try to lord it over the people of God, to subject the church of God to your kingdom, the church that fears only his divine majesty, to your worthless rule; and you did this because you do not know that it is written of you tyrants: “Therefore undisciplined souls have gone astray; for when the lawless supposed that they could lord it over a holy nation, they themselves lay as captives of darkness and prisoners of a long night, shut in under their roofs, fugitives.” You see now that you are among those persecutors of the people of God of whom you have read that they are all bound by one chain of darkness; and again: “They indeed deserved to be deprived of light and imprisoned in darkness, who had kept your sons imprisoned, through whom the incorruptible light of the law was beginning to be given to all.” Or will you deny that you hold the bishops of God in confinement? And why do you hold them? Surely so that we may not preach the truth to the people of God? Why do you keep us in prison? Why do you send us into exile? Is it not because you fear that we may show, by the revelation of the sacred Scriptures, that you Arians are ravening wolves, mad dogs, and the antichrists of our time? For the sacred Scriptures prove from your acts that you are not servants of God but plainly sons of the devil. For if you are not one of those whom the sacred Scriptures cry out would be such, why, when you found it written in the hundred and thirty-first psalm, “Arise, Lord, into your rest, you and the ark of your holiness; let your priests be clothed with righteousness,” did you want an absent man condemned by us? Surely so that we might lose the righteousness with which the Lord had clothed us. For since he says, “Let your priests be clothed with righteousness,” and you were pressing us to do injustice, what else would we be, if we had done what seemed good to your ill will, but your partners in crime, fountains of all iniquity? We, that is, who, laying aside the duty of righteousness, would have taken up that of injustice to please you. You persecute the house of God, Constantius, not knowing that you persecute God himself in his house; for the house of God is the church, in which the Lord dwells, as it is written in the same psalm: “The Lord has chosen Zion; he has preferred it for his dwelling. This is my rest for ever and ever; here I will dwell, for I have preferred it.” Since this is so, see that it is you who are punished when you punish any of us; that you persecute your own salvation when you fight against God, not against us, in whom you hear God say that he deigns to rest. You, then, who try to violate the temples of the Lord, unless you turn, will perish in the same way as those of whom David speaks in the hundred and thirty-fifth psalm: “Who struck Egypt with their firstborn, for his mercy endures for ever; and brought Israel out from their midst, for his mercy endures for ever; who divided the Red Sea in two, for his mercy endures for ever; and led Israel through the midst of it, for his mercy endures for ever; and shook off Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea.” Why do I find this written, except that I should believe that, when you tried to oppress me, my God could, unless you turned, destroy you as he did Pharaoh, and would rescue me from your hands as he rescued them from Pharaoh's power? For that is why he says at each of the mighty works, “for his mercy endures for ever”: to show me that the mercy of the Lord abides with me always, as long as I serve him alone, but cannot be with you, because you are his enemy, as Pharaoh was.

We refused to condemn an absent man; we refused to give sentence, as you wished, against one we know to be innocent and whom we know to be a preacher of the catholic faith. Why? Because we Christians have stretched out our hope to God, not to you and your perishing kingdom. We refused to please ourselves with the glory of your kingdom, since we are waiting to obtain glory from him in whom alone we must trust and hope, as David teaches when he says in the hundred and forty-fifth psalm: “Do not trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation. His breath will go forth, and he will return to his earth; on that day all their thoughts will perish. Blessed is he whose helper is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps truth for ever, who does judgment for those who suffer wrong.” We refused to persecute unjustly with you a man full of the fruits of righteousness, lest when God began to take vengeance on you he should take it on us too. We did not do what you unjustly ordered us to carry out, lest we should come with you to that place described in Ecclesiastes: “And God will seek out the one who suffers persecution”; and further: “I saw under the sun the place of judgment, there the ungodly man; and the place of the righteous, there the godly man.” We refused to join ourselves to heretics; we refused to join hands with you to attack the house of God; we refused to accept idolatry with you to the insult of God; we refused to be mixed up in your sacrilege, lest we too should deserve to hear with you what the priests, the people and the king of Israel, who had all forsaken God and gone over to idolatry, will hear by the mouth of the prophet Hosea: “Hear this, priests, and attend, house of Israel, and give ear, house of the king; the judgment is against you, for you have become a snare for a trap, and like a net spread for the fowler's catch.” You surely knew that it is written in the prophet Amos, when you gave the lesson, that is, the example of condemning the innocent: “He who did judgment on high and set righteousness on the earth.” Violator of God's justice, were you ignorant of what the prophet Micah said of the rulers of the Jews: “They have not lifted up their hands to God, and they coveted fields and plundered orphans and a man's house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I know evils against the people, from which you shall not lift your necks”? But on you, though you are pleased to proscribe, deport, send to prison, torture, and at last kill the worshippers of God, will no evil be repaid? We refused to be mixed up in your abominable acts, lest, condemned with you to eternal punishment, we should hear what God says in Micah: “Hear this, then, you heads of the house of Jacob and the remnant of the house of Israel, who abhor judgment and pervert all that is right, who have built Zion and Jerusalem with blood and with iniquities. Her judges judged for gifts, and her priests answered for pay, and her prophets divined for money, and they leaned upon the Lord, saying: The Lord is among us; no evil will come upon us.” Had you not further read in that most holy prophet, that you ordered a man dedicated to God to be condemned: “With what shall I lay hold of the Lord, approach my God most high? Shall I lay hold of him with burnt offerings, or with calves a year old? Or will the Lord accept me for thousands of rams or ten thousands of fat goats? Or shall I give my firstborn for ungodliness, the fruit of my womb for the sins of my soul? It has been told you, O man, what is good; or what does the Lord require of you but to do judgment and righteousness and to love mercy and be ready to walk with the Lord your God?” Nor had you found it written in Habakkuk, “The ungodly man has oppressed the righteous by his power,” so that you set about so wicked a work, one that could make you ungodly before God? Nor had you found it set down further on: “Why do you look upon the despisers? Will you be silent while the ungodly man devours the righteous?”

And therefore, seeing that you, an ungodly man, had tried to devour a righteous man, not only have we not kept silent that you act wickedly, but we will not keep silent. For you are no other than the one of whom it is said: “The self-pleasing and the despiser, the proud man, will achieve nothing, who has enlarged his soul like the underworld.” Nothing can be said of it that does not fit you, if you will deign to recall with me the crimes of your deeds and are not slow to review the deaths you have caused. For who else in our days can be found pleasing himself, a despiser, proud, achieving nothing, who has enlarged his soul like the underworld and can be reckoned like insatiable death, except you? But see that God tells you that you can achieve nothing. For though you are a despiser of God's commands, though, desiring to persecute his religion, you have so enlarged your soul to slaughter his worshippers that you will not cease harassing the Lord's flock in your whole kingdom, yet all your hostility achieves nothing. For all whom you persecute are and always will be servants of God. But you, unless you look out for yourself, will perish for ever, pleasing yourself, a despiser, proud, enlarging your soul like the underworld to devour and swallow us alike, because we resist you when you act wickedly; made like insatiable death, you are driven by furies to our slaughter. You are so wicked, Constantius, that when I find the prophet saying, “O you who lay an evil foundation for his house, to set his nest on high,” you and the inheritance of the Antichrist, whom you favour, come before my eyes, as I recognize those sacrilegious attempts of yours. For it cannot be doubted that you have tried and are trying to have your heresy founded in your whole kingdom and the catholic faith destroyed. And when I hear the prophet dedicated to God say, “Woe to those who build a city with blood and prepare a city with iniquities,” you seem to me to be the one building a den of robbers by the shedding of blood, by the slaughter of the servants of God. Or will you deny that your malignant council of Arians is a den of robbers? If you are not robbers, how are you found killing those dedicated to God? Woe belongs to those who build cities in blood; did you not see, most prudent emperor, that woe could be yours, since you thought your heresy must be rebuilt by shedding the blood of the men of God? The Holy Spirit says through the prophet Zephaniah: “Seek the Lord, all you lowly of the earth; do judgment and seek righteousness, and answer so that you may be sheltered on the day of the Lord's wrath.” You say: “Condemn an innocent man; be murderers and men of sacrilege with me.” Or are these not the things you order us to do? Did you order the priest of the Lord to be condemned, or not? Did you order that the Arian faithlessness be held and the faith written at Nicaea rejected? If you cannot deny that you commanded these things to be carried out, see that you wanted to make us both murderers and men of sacrilege. God says: “And it will come about on that day that I will search Jerusalem with a lamp and take vengeance on the men who are despisers, who do not keep the commandments”; and you say that your commandments and those of your fellow blasphemers must rather be kept. How could we have condemned unjustly a priest of the Lord full of the fruits of righteousness, when we see what threat arose against the rulers of the Jews and against all their accomplices, who are known to have done what you are doing? “O city that was splendid and redeemed, the dove! She has not listened to the voice, she has not received discipline; she has not trusted in the Lord, and has not drawn near to her God. Her princes roar like lions; her judges are like wolves of Arabia; they will leave nothing till morning. Her prophets are windy men, despisers; her priests defile themselves and act ungodly. But the Lord is righteous in her midst, and he will do no injustice.”

Since this is so, and it is in no way lawful for us to pronounce unjust judgment, it remains either for you to make yourself one of his servants and learn to pronounce judgment, or, if you always want to be among God's adversaries, to pronounce your unjust judgment alone, and to stop compelling us to do what you see God forbids. Stop now accusing Athanasius, or us, of destroying the house of God, when you find in Zechariah that you and your fellow tyrants have been described as future persecutors of God's inheritance, you who, he says, have usurped power beyond measure. For the Lord, telling of your cruelty, says: “I am jealous for Jerusalem and Zion with great jealousy, and with great anger I am angry at the nations that set themselves over you, because I was angry a little, but they made themselves helpers to evil.” Do you dare, lover of darkness and curser of light, to say, “Condemn an innocent man,” when God deigns to command us through Zechariah, saying: “Judge just judgment, and show piety and mercy each to his brother; and do not oppress by power the widow and the orphan and the proselyte and the poor; and let none of you remember in his heart his brother's malice”? Since these are the heavenly commands, by whose authority did you say, “Tear your fellow servant to pieces”? If you say you put forward this authority from God's commands, you will not be able to prove it, since no command of God that the innocent be condemned can be found in the sacred Scriptures. Since, then, you have done what the law of God forbids, it is clear that you put forward this authority from the will of him who is known to be God's enemy; and so you must be compared to those of whom it is said through the prophet: “And they refused to heed, and turned their back in folly, and made their ears and their heart unpersuadable, so as not to obey; they made them heavy so as not to obey my law”; and further on: “They did not listen; if they cry out, I will not hear them, says the Lord almighty. Be at peace, souls: these are the words that you shall do: speak the truth each to his neighbour, and judge peaceable and just judgment in your gates, and let none of you devise his neighbour's malice in your hearts, and do not love a false oath; for all these things I hate, says the Lord almighty.” Why do you compel me to do what the Lord almighty says he hates? And teaching about fasting the Lord says, “Love peace and truth.” How could we have been lovers of peace and truth if we had punished as guilty an innocent man weighed down with false charges by you and yours? Or what peace would there have been, when by doing these things we could have been cast out even from the Lord's peace? For the peace of the Lord, who says, “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give you,” would not have been left by him in us, if we ourselves had unjustly taken it from another. Who does not know that when discipline departs, grace departs too? In Malachi God says: “A son honours his father and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honour? says the Lord almighty.”

What fear and honour, then, were we going to give God, if we had done what you ordered to be done? For those commands of yours strive to take both the fear and the honour of God away from those dedicated to his mercy. And further on, showing your work in particular, he says: “You have provoked God with your words, and you said, In what have we provoked him? In that you say: Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of God, and he will bless them; and where is the God of justice?” The prophet says “Where is the God of justice?” against those who say, “He who does evil is good in the sight of God, and he will bless them”; and you give orders for the blood of the righteous to be shed, and still call yourself a servant of God, when you are the squanderer of his law. Is it just to condemn an absent man, and an innocent one at that, or unjust? If it is not just, why do you compel us to do the thing for which we would deserve to be punished by God? “All the days of your life, my son,” says Tobit, “keep God in mind, and do not wish to sin or to transgress his commandments. Do righteousness all the days of your life, and do not walk in the way of iniquity; for if you act in truth, there will be regard for your works and for all who do righteousness.” Tell me, Constantius: does he do righteousness who kills the innocent, who sheds the blood of the servants of God? If he does not do righteousness but rather iniquity, it remains for you to see that you are a lover of iniquity and a fabricator of every wicked work. For since the sacred law urges us to do righteousness at all times and you compel us to do injustice, what else would you have me take you for but a lover and perpetrator of injustice? “All the days of your life,” he says, “keep God in mind”; when you have abandoned him by clinging to the Arians. For we who hold the apostolic faith do not abandon him. How do you not transgress his commandments, you who kill his servants dedicated to his name and majesty, compelling them to abandon him and become your fellow serpents and fellow apostates? We suffer hatred from you because we tell you the truth, because we want you to live with us for ever; but you love those who have gone over to you, those who at first contradicted you but afterwards preferred to serve your wicked designs rather than obey the commands of God. You rejoice that you have enticed them by your cunning and brought them to accept your heresy, that you have them subject to you in everything, men whom you had long seen treating you as nothing, whom you saw trampling the authority of your reign underfoot by the truth. But we want you to know that this deed is not new, but has often been done so by the faithless and thoughtless, by those whom, knowing the future, he foreshowed by the most holy mouth of the prophet Malachi: “You have made your counsels heavy against me, says the Lord almighty, and you said, In what have we spoken against you? Because you said: Everyone who serves God is vain; and what more have we gained by keeping his commandments and walking as suppliants before the Lord almighty? And now we call strangers blessed, and all who do wicked things are renewed, and they have resisted God and been saved. So those who fear God spoke against him, each to his neighbour. And the Lord gave heed and heard, and wrote a book of remembrance before him for those who fear the Lord and reverence his name. And they shall be mine, says the Lord almighty, on the day when I make them my possession; and I will choose them as a man chooses his son who serves him well. And you shall return and see how great the difference is between the righteous and the unrighteous, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him. For behold, the day of the Lord comes, burning like an oven, and it will burn them; and all the foreigners and all who commit crimes shall be as stubble, and the day of the Lord that comes will set them on fire, says the Lord almighty, and neither root nor vine shall be left of them.”

Hearing God say these things, and since you are still pleased to remain in your evils, I suppose you rejoice even in this, that you will receive those things from him together with the transgressors, with those who forsake God. Woe to you, murderer and man of sacrilege, for unless you repent of your deeds you will be, as you are now, among those whom he rebukes by the mouth of Isaiah, saying: “Woe, sinful nation, a people full of sins, an evil seed, lawless sons; you have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel.” You will always be one of those who, for the wickedness of their pursuits, are compared to the rulers of Sodom and the peoples of Gomorrah, when it is said: “Hear the word of the Lord, rulers of Sodom; give heed to the law of God, people of Gomorrah.” You will be with them, unless you correct yourself, of whom you have read it written: “If you multiply prayers, I will not hear you, for your hands are full of blood.” Woe to you, Constantius, who have incurred such great offence from God that you could not see what you should have guarded against. For when he says by the mouth of Isaiah to those killers of the holy prophets and of all the righteous, “Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evils from your enemies before my eyes; cease from your evils, learn to do good, seek judgment, rescue the one who suffers wrong, give judgment for the orphan and justify the widow,” and you, on the contrary, ordered the worshippers of God to be slaughtered, God himself to be deserted and idolatry to be taken up, was this to have heard God's warnings and to have been corrected? Why do you compel us to do this, except that you long for us to be consumed by the sword with you? “And if you are willing,” says God, “and listen to me, you shall eat the good things of the land; but if you are not willing and do not listen to me, the sword shall devour you; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.” Whom shall we obey, God who says this, or you, his enemy? God tells the Jews to abandon their errors now, to cast their evils out of their hearts, to learn to do good, to judge just judgment. You say: “Condemn unjustly.” Why do you urge me to do this, except that you want me made such a man as those to whom God said: “But you, says God, why do you set fire to my vineyard, and the plunder of the poor is in your houses? Why do you do wrong to the people and shame the face of the needy?” And you do these things, you carry out all of them, for doing which he is angry with those who do them, as though you knew that you could not please unless you had set fire to the Lord's vineyard, stored the plunder of the poor in your house, and inflicted wrongs in many ways on the servants of God. Or will you try to say that you have done none of these things? Did you not set fire to the Lord's vineyard when you compelled it no longer to know the Lord of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the apostles, the God of the prophets and martyrs, but the idolatry brought in by Arius and exalted by you? Is not this plunder of the poor in your house, the plunder of the servants of God, the Christians, on whose account you have read it written, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” since you know that you have proscribed those who resisted your sacrilege? Will you dare to say, “I have not done and do not do wrong to the people of God”? And who ever did so great a wrong as you, who do not cease inflicting every kind of torture and punishing in various ways?

We refused to punish an innocent man as guilty, lest the sentence still prophesied by the mouth of Isaiah strike us too: “Woe to those who write wickedness; for those who write write wickedness, turning aside the judgment of the poor and seizing the judgment of the needy of my people, so that the widow may be their plunder and the orphan their spoil. And what will they do on the day of visitation? For tribulation will come upon you from afar; and to whom will you flee?” We did not yield to your poisoned counsel, desiring to flee in all our tribulations and anxieties to him to whom that lover of justice Job fled in all his trials; we did not obey your cruel command, because we wished to be found imitators of that servant of God, Job, who says: “I delivered the poor from the hand of the mighty, and I was a helper to the orphan who had no helper; and the mouth of the widow always blessed me. For I was clothed with righteousness and covered with judgment; and I was an eye to the blind and a father to the weak, and I broke the jaws of the wicked and took the plunder out of their teeth”; and further on: “I have been set in the balance of justice, and the Lord knows my simplicity, for my foot never strayed from the right way, nor did my eye look on evil.” What is the right way from which the glorious Job says he did not depart? Surely this: the way that neither killed the innocent nor knows another God, because it knows only the God of angels and archangels, the God whom you think cannot rescue us from your power. For when you say of the faith of the blessed church, “If the faith written at Nicaea is catholic, let him in whom they have believed rescue them from my power,” you are saying that God has no strength to rescue us from your hands, that he cannot stand against you; you assert that the God of the apostolic church has no such power as could shut out your might. For what else does the faith of the blessed church confess but that it believes in God the Father unbegotten and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? What else does the faith of the catholic church confess but that the Trinity is perfect and that the Godhead of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is one? What else does the faith of the blessed church confess but that neither the Father took up man nor the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, but the only Son of God? What else does the faith of the glorious church assert but that the only Son of God is unchangeable, unalterable, beyond reckoning, immeasurable, eternal, as is he whose Son he is? The holy church has believed that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one power and one sole dominion. This faith, I say, you call heretical, and you assert that yours is catholic, the faith that says God has no true Son, that says there was when he was not, that says he was made from nothing; with the very thoughts with which Rabshakeh, the commander of the king of the Assyrians, reproached the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, saying: “Let not Hezekiah deceive you, that your God can deliver you from the hands of the king of the Assyrians.” So you too, the commander of the Antichrist, say through your men: “Do not let the words of your bishops, who contradict me, deceive you, that the faith they preach can deliver you.” For though you vary the words, the matter comes to this, that it is plain you reproach God before us as being powerless to rescue us, as the king of the Assyrians reproached him: “Thus says the king of the Assyrians: If you wish to be blessed, come out to me instead, and you shall each eat the fruit of your vine and fig tree, and drink water from your own cisterns, until I come and take you into a land like your own land, a land of wheat and wine and bread and vineyards. Do not, then, let Hezekiah deceive you, saying, God will deliver you”; and further on: “Who will deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?” But that you have been shown to be such, God says, on the contrary, by the mouth of Isaiah to Hezekiah: “You have no reason to fear these words which you have heard, with which the envoys of the Assyrians reproached me. Behold, I am sending my spirit, and when he hears a report he will return to his own country and fall by the sword in his own land.” We see, Constantius, the same dangers now standing about you, unless you take thought for yourself, that stood about him who said: “Thus you shall say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying, Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of the Assyrians.” So you, blasphemer, are in danger like him, and do not see it; we worshippers of God, on the contrary, see ourselves standing safe, defended and unharmed. And why are we safe and defended, except that we hold the holy faith which the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs held, the faith you have judged heretical?

But to return again to Athanasius, in whom you persecute this sacred faith: did you not fear, I beg you, the indignation of the Lord brought against those who tried to reproach the most righteous Job, that you assailed a bishop of God with false charges? Do you not fear even now that God may say to you what he said to that king who spoke against the most holy Job: “You have sinned, you and your two friends; for you have spoken nothing true before me”? Meanwhile you Arians will be able to be found superior to Athanasius before God now just as those who reproached Job were found then. It is to your advantage, Constantius, to make supplication to God for your crimes through Athanasius, the priest of the Lord, to direct your prayers through him, as they did through Job; to take care to obtain saving baptism through Athanasius or through his fellow bishops. For the rest, however you torment yourselves against Athanasius, you are found to be among the sons, being heretics, of that serpent, the snake, the runaway deserter; but Athanasius is of God's household, as Job was; he is of the sons of light and holds that very way of righteousness which Job, the servant of God, held; he possesses the faith, and so Athanasius is of the sons of Abraham. Athanasius confesses the Son of God as Job confessed him. And how is Job one of the sons of Abraham, except that he believed as Abraham believed? If you do not know that this is so, read through the blessed apostle Paul, not only to the Romans but to the Galatians, and you will find that what I am defending is true. Or, because the blessed apostle made no special mention of the name of the righteous Job, will it be denied that Job is of the sons of Abraham? If it cannot be denied that Job is of the sons of Israel, it cannot be doubted that he became so great and such a man only because he believed in God as blessed Abraham believed. For the apostle reveals that believers are justified not by the works of the law but through faith; nor would the victory in those temptations have been reckoned to him as righteousness, had he not believed in God as Abraham believed. Or how would he have overcome the devil, unless he had believed in God the Father unbegotten and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? Or if you think that men have not always believed as we believe today, prove that the blessed apostles and martyrs could have overcome your fellow butchers and, having defeated your friend the devil, attained the heavenly kingdoms, except by believing in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. If, then, those who believed after the coming of the Lord, the only Son of God, conquered by believing thus, believe that those too who conquered the devil before his coming believed no otherwise than as we believe today. For neither would Daniel have overcome the lions, nor the three young men the fire, unless they had believed as the church believes today. That, in short, is why the apostle appeals to the faith of Abraham, proving by the authority of the sacred writings that Abraham believed as Paul now believed, and that he himself was a son of wrath, in error, at the time when with the Jews he denied the only Son of God.

Since this is so, I beseech you to stop now waging war against the house of God, and to accept the heavenly exhortations that can lead you to obtain everlasting salvation. Hear what God says to you by the mouth of Isaiah: “Hear me, you who have lost your heart, who are far from righteousness.” Or if your heart is with you, if you are not far from righteousness, why do you say to us, the priests of God, “Condemn an absent man, punish an innocent one”? For if you have not lost your heart and you keep the way of righteousness, why do you not remember what is written: “Keep judgment, do righteousness; for my salvation is near to come and my mercy to be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this, and the man who holds fast to it, not profaning my sabbaths, keeping his hands from doing injustice”; and again: “There is no rejoicing for the ungodly, says the Lord. Cry out with strength, do not spare; lift up your voice like a trumpet and declare to my people their sins and to the house of Jacob their iniquities. They seek me day by day and want to know my ways, as a people that had done righteousness and had not forsaken the judgment of God. They ask of me now just judgment and desire to draw near to God.” What hope, unhappy man, can you have, unless you repent of your evil deeds, when you hear God say, “There is no rejoicing for the ungodly”? Or will you deny that you are ungodly towards the worshipper of God, when you do not deny that you shed blood? Then, if God uttered such rebukes against those who, at the time of fasting, struck their subjects with their fists and hurt them with other kinds of injuries, what would he have uttered against us, if, against the commands of his divine greatness, we had condemned a man unheard, absent and innocent? “Not even if you bend your neck like a hoop and spread sackcloth and ashes beneath you, not even so will you call it an acceptable fast.” We see through this threat how great God's anger against us could be, if we condemned an innocent man. For if the Lord is so angry if we strike those subject to us with our fists at the time of fasting, how much more if we slaughter his worshippers! If I may not strike my subjects with my fists at the time of fasting, could I be allowed at any time to strike my fellow priest with the sword? “This is not the fast I have chosen, says the Lord; but loose the bonds of violent contracts; let the broken go free, and tear up every unjust bond; break your bread for the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise those of your own seed.” What hope do you hold, most prudent king, when you have turned all these things into their opposite? For how have you loosed every knot of iniquity, when you remain such, in your unbelief, as you have set yourself against us, and grow more and more in your ill will to destroy us; when in your blasphemy you, the author of sacrilege, have grown still more, asserting even by edict that your blasphemy is the catholic faith, after the manner, that is, of harlots, who at first commit fornication in secret but afterwards become so shameless, so lose the grace of modesty, that they wish to commit fornication in the open? How have you loosed every knot of iniquity, when you still keep the fury you took up years ago against blessed Athanasius so firmly that you want his blood shed? How have you let the broken go to rest, when you do not cease torturing the servants of God in various ways? And how have you let the broken go to rest, when you see that prisons, mines and places of exile can hardly hold the number of Christians condemned by you? How, even if you break your bread for the hungry, will the Lord accept it, when you kill with hunger the servants dedicated to his eternity? How, if you bring the homeless poor into your house, will God deign to look on your work, when he sees the servants of his glory thrown out of their private houses and made exiles because they refused to accept your idolatry instituted through Arius? How, if you cover the naked, will you be able to please God, when you have taken away the inheritances of his servants and said, “If you condemn the apostolic faith and accept the Arian one, you will recover all your property”?

Indeed, of all these sacred commands of the Lord you are found to fulfil one: that you do not despise those of your own seed. Truly you do not despise your fellow vipers the Arians, born, that is, of your shameless father the devil; you love your brothers, because you see that they are nearer to you; you love them with singular affection, you lavish on them all the glory of your reign, you have them as partners and sharers in destroying God's inheritance in your realm; you have made them rich, you have raised them above all who are placed in high office, that is, those who have decided to mingle with your darkness. Since, then, you are doing what God hates, how do you think you can be heard by God, or that if you give alms it can be counted acceptable to you, when you hear him say: “Then your morning light will rise, and your health will spring up quickly, and righteousness will go before you, and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking he will say to you, Here I am”? Do you think you can obtain any of these things, since the morning light has not risen for you, but inextricable darkness has besieged your mind and the fogs of error have woven it over? What health has arisen for you, when you are placed in every wound of death, when every day you bring forth increase to your wounds, when you are taking pains to destroy yourself utterly? For we have health from nowhere else than, first of all, from believing as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs believed. How can righteousness go before you, when you remain wholly in injustice, when you are the bilge of the Arian doctrine, the shedder of Christian blood? How will the majesty of God surround you, when you are attacking that very majesty, having forsaken it and decided to take up the idolatry of the Arian doctrine? How then will you cry, and God hear you, and while you are still speaking say to you, Here I am, when you deny God the Father, deny his only Son, deny the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? How can he either hear you or say to you, Here I am, when you overturn his religion as far as lies in you, when you have removed his catholic bishops and installed heretics? How will he hear you, whom you thought should be trampled in every way, unless you repent of your evil deeds, unless, leaving your wicked ways, you take hold of the just road of the holy church? Then indeed you will be able to obtain these promises of God. For it is written for those who have turned to God with their whole heart: “Thus says the Most High, who dwells on high, holy for ever among the holy, whose name is the Lord Most High, resting among the holy, and giving fairness of soul to the faint-hearted and giving vindication to the broken in heart: I will not be angry with you for ever, nor will I always exact vengeance from you.” But to whom does he say this? Surely to those who have turned to blot out their sins by satisfaction. Hence too: “This is not the fast I have chosen, says the Lord; but loose every knot of iniquity, loose the bonds of violent contracts; let the broken go free, and tear up every unjust bond. Break your bread for the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise those of your own seed. Then your morning light will rise, and your health will spring up quickly, and righteousness will go before you, and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry, and God will hear you; and while you are still speaking he will say to you, Here I am.”

God will be present with you, if first you believe in him, and then turn yourself to the things he says further on must be fulfilled: “If you take away from yourself the chain of iniquity and of bondage and the word of murmuring, and give your bread to the hungry from your heart and satisfy the humbled soul, then light will rise for you in the darkness, and your darkness will be as midday. And your God will be with you always, and you will be filled as your soul desires, and all your bones will grow fat, and they will be like a well-watered garden and like a spring whose water does not fail.” These things, as has been said already, you will be able to obtain if you betake yourself to the church, if you avoid your fellow Arians, if you deign to hate that congregation of yours, the congregation of the malignant. Then God will be with you always; then light will rise for you in the darkness; then your darkness will be as midday; then your road will be directed in good things. But if you remain in this stubbornness, if in this cruelty, so as to torture his servants, God will not be with you, but the one who even today is found to be in your Arian assembly, that is, the devil. For the things you are pleased to do are not God's but the devil's. Whether it is a work of God that you proscribe certain men because they did not condemn Athanasius, the innocent bishop of God, or because they did not communicate with your fellow heretic George, or because they call themselves Christians, because they refuse to become your fellow apostates, we can well judge, if it is a work pleasing to God; likewise whether that is almsgiving which you give from the tears of others, from the goods of those who preferred to be deported, killed and proscribed by you rather than either condemn an innocent man or deny the only Son of God, believing in whom they knew Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets, apostles and martyrs were glorified. He who is able to grant this to us is witness that I desire you to become their companion and a sharer with them all, and that these are my prayers for you.

Do you dare, Constantius, to stretch out your hands against those dedicated to God, to harass those whose happiness the apostle declares, saying: “But we know that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord, for those who are called according to his purpose, whom he foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”? Your persecutions do indeed work together for our good; but observe what God promises to you persecutors through Jeremiah, saying: “Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of his harvest; all who eat of it will repent; I will bring evils upon them, says the Lord.” The evils that God promises you will come upon you, Constantius, unless you correct yourself, as they came upon that carnal people, your fellow blasphemers, to whom it is said: “You have done evil to defile your ways, and in your hands has been found the blood of innocent souls.” You will be among God's enemies for ever, unless you listen, hearing his holy warning saying: “If you truly amend your ways and your thoughts, and truly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour, and do not oppress the proselyte and the poor and the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and do not go after other gods.” You will amend your ways if you now cease persecuting the servants of God, if you confess that you are a Christian and deny that you are an Arian, if you believe that the Son of God is the true Son of God, if you anathematize those who say, “There was when he was not,” and “He was made from nothing.” You will change your ways if you repent of your murders and your sacrilege; otherwise you will be, as you are now, one of those to whom God says in reproach: “Is my house, in which my name is called, a den of robbers?” Whom do you want to be the house of God, you Arians or us Christians? For if your malignant congregation is the house of God, then a congregation of robbers is the house of God. For in shedding the blood of the servants of God, as the Jews shed it then, you are seen to be robbers. By your fruits, emperor Constantius, you are recognized to be not a Christian but plainly a chief of robbers. In short, you order the innocent to be put to death, dwelling, that is, not in the church of the Lord but in a den of robbers. You do not cease to kill those whom you see ready to be killed for the glory of the only Son of God, for his eternal majesty. We refused, at your false suggestions, to give sentence against a righteous man, lest that rebuke of the Lord strike us too, with you and with the Jews: “He has bent his tongue like a bow; in falsehood, and faith has not prevailed on the earth; for they have gone from evil to evil, and they have not known me.” You, the contriver and lover of false charges, you who do not know the Lord, will, unless you correct yourself, be as you are, one of those of whom you have read it written: “They do not speak the truth; their tongue has learned to speak falsehood. They would not turn back, and they did not leave off usury upon usury, deceit upon deceit. They would not know me, says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I will refine them and try them, for so I will do because of the wickedness of the daughter of my people. Their tongue is a wounding arrow; the words of their mouth are evil. One speaks peaceably to his neighbour, and within himself he holds enmity. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord, or shall not my soul take vengeance on such a nation?”

Rescue yourself, Constantius, from the pit of the Arian madness, so that you may not pay eternal penalties with your fellows in sacrilege. Do not boast to yourself of your perishing dignity; consider that you are mortal, because you cannot obtain immortality otherwise than by acknowledging God and doing his will, as it is written: “Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, and let not the strong man glory in his strength, nor the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in God, for I am the Lord who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth, for in these things is my will, says the Lord.” Since, then, you see that the Lord's will is in these things, how are you pleased to hate the things the Lord says he loves? “Let him who glories,” he says, “glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in the Lord.” How will you be able to say that you now glory in God? How will you be able to claim that you seek him, when you are provoking all the worshippers of his majesty to abandon the faith of the apostles and to accept the blasphemy of your doctrine? “Let him who glories glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in the Lord, for I am the Lord who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth, for in these things is my will, says the Lord.” Since, then, you want unjust judgment pronounced by the priests of God, since you are a shedder of innocent blood, you are not the servant of him who deigned to speak these things by the mouth of the prophet, but plainly the servant of him who filled the heart of Cain, so that he killed the righteous young man, the first worshipper of the Lord. That is why, though you are placed in such loftiness, you are nevertheless found to be one of those of whom you have read that the Lord spoke in the Gospel: “You are born of your father the devil, and you want to do your father's desire; for he was a murderer from the beginning and did not stand in the truth.” You are a liar and a murderer: a liar, because you have brought false charges against Athanasius, the servant of God; a liar, because you call the heretical faith catholic and the catholic faith heretical; a murderer, because you both pursue the blood of Athanasius and have already killed a certain number of the worshippers of God. You have certainly not stood in the truth, since you do these things, but you are wholly set in falsehood, because your father too is a liar, he who compels you to deny the only Son of God, who drives you to shed the blood of his servants. We refused to condemn an absent man, we refused to pronounce a guilty sentence, we refused to accept your heresy, lest, made like you, we should deserve to hear what your fellow wanderers the Jews hear, to whose reproach we gather that it was said through Jeremiah: “All the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart.” You are, and will be, unless you hand yourself over to us, among those against whom the Holy Spirit cries out to God in the person of our people: “I know, Lord, that a man's way is not his own, nor will a man walk and direct his thought. Correct us, Lord, but in judgment and not in anger, lest you make us few. Pour out your wrath on the nations that do not know you and on the kingdoms that have not called on your name, for they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pasture.”

You see that you are one of those against whom the Spirit of God speaks in the person of our people. You see, unless you turn, that the wrath of the Lord will come upon you, a foreigner, upon you, a king, because you have not only not called on the name of the Lord but have even persecuted. For when he says, “for they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pasture,” who can be found among your fellow tyrants to be the chief destroyer of this pasture but you, who have neither ceased tearing the servants of God nor sowing your blasphemies through your whole realm? For it cannot be doubted that you have tried to destroy the pasture of the people of God, since you have taken away its shepherds, of whom, as we have often said, God said through Jeremiah, “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline,” and have installed heretics, and have had a limit imposed on other catholics, so that, if they wished to remain in their sees, they should not dare to preach the apostolic faith, nor attempt, while you, the defender of the Arian heresy, live in the body, to instil the evangelical tradition in the peoples. This is the matter that proves you tried to destroy the pasture of the people of God. For all the nourishment of Christian souls is nothing but to believe as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs believed, and then to do all righteousness. You, on the contrary, since you have wanted to take the faith from the hearts of God's peoples and to plant your faithlessness, since you want justice done in the church of God in such a way that an absent and innocent man is condemned, and a catholic is punished by the followers of justice, by priests his fellows, at the suggestion of you, a heretic, how can you seem not to be a destroyer of the pasture of the Lord's flock, when our pasture is nothing but heavenly teaching? “If you would come to life,” says the Lord, “keep the commandments”; and again: “If you do what I command you, I no longer call you servants but friends.” Since this is so, you ought, to clear yourself, to produce the Lord's commands that have ordered that an innocent catholic bishop, accused meanwhile by you, a heretic emperor, must be killed by his fellow priests. For perhaps at this point you will try to say that you have not tried to destroy the pasture of the Lord's flock. If you can produce no command of the Lord such as the one you issued, it remains that the eyes of your heart, blinded by the blasphemy of Arius, opened by this rebuke of the servant of God, should see that you have done all that we have charged against you. You cannot deny that you show yourself towards us such as that Herod showed himself, whose colleague you are found to be in the rage of butchery, in sacrilege and in royal dignity, towards those little children whom we read in the Gospel were killed on account of God, the Son of God. You have surely found the cruelty of Herod, which you are now pleased to display, written in the evangelist Matthew: “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the magi, was very angry, and sent and killed all the infants in Bethlehem and in all its region, from two years old and under, according to the time he had ascertained from the magi.” Perhaps you do not yet see that you have been moved against us, the worshippers of God, as unjustly as Herod was moved against those little ones. Why are you pleased to be hostile to us? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians, who did not condemn a righteous man weighed down by false charges from you. From these things you can weigh who you are by the answers of the blessed John the Baptist, and reconcile yourself to God through repentance: “Brood of vipers, who showed you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear, then, fruit worthy of repentance, and do not put yourselves forward, saying, We have Abraham as our father. For I tell you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. For already the axe is laid to the roots of the trees; for every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

What do you think of this? Ought we to have condemned an innocent man, ought we to have given sentence against an absent man unheard? And how, if we had done it, could we have been found Christians, when the most blessed John urged those people, so that they might be Christians, to bear fruit worthy of repentance? They, who had not yet taken hold of the way of righteousness, were urged to take hold of it; we, who already hold it, were and are pressed by you to occupy that road of iniquity on which the Jews are known to stand. What, then, could have befallen us, if we had fed on your viperous counsels, except that from Christians we should have become a brood of vipers? Why did you command these things to be done, except that you desired us to become your fellow serpents? You know that the Lord said in the Gospel, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” and yet you said that an innocent man must be killed. For how shall I be able to be blessed if I condemn a righteous man, if, rejecting the thirst for righteousness, I conceive a burning for injustice? How shall I be satisfied by God for the fruits of righteousness, when this unjust work would make me a fratricide like Cain? How again shall I be able to attain the heavenly kingdom among the merciful, enriched with the fruits of mercy, when, if I kill the servant of God as you desire, I shall be found not merciful but cruel and wicked, a murderer in fact; since, as I was merciless towards my brother, so will that lover of mercy, that exactor of righteousness, be towards me, who says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”? “Whoever,” says the Lord, “breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven”; and do you say, Constantius, that whoever does not shed innocent blood cannot attain the kingdom of heaven? Tell me, most holy man, in what could the righteousness of Christians exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, if we had killed the man whom you persecute because he calls himself a Christian, because he refuses to become an Arian? In what would we be better than the scribes and Pharisees, if we had become deniers of the only Son of God with you, if, as they reject it, we had rejected the evangelical faith with you and destroyed the apostolic tradition? Did you not remember that the Lord said, “You have heard that it was said to the ancients, You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment,” that you ordered these things to be done? If I am angry with my brother without cause, if I call him a fool, the only Son of God says that I shall be liable to Gehenna; and you, emperor Constantius, say that if I shed the blood of the innocent I shall possess eternal rest? Nor could you keep in mind, when you planned that Athanasius must be killed, on what condition the Lord commanded gifts to be offered: “If, then, you offer your gift at the altar and there remember that you have something against your brother, leave your gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then come back and offer your gift.” What evil had Athanasius done, that you transgressed these commands and ordered him to be killed? Surely this, that he has said and says that he is a Christian; for there is nothing else that you curse and long to punish in Athanasius. Did you not remember that the Lord commanded us to love even our enemies, that you persecuted so fiercely a man you knew had sinned neither against you nor against God? “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and do good to those who persecute you, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sunrise appear on the good and the evil and rains on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your friends, what more are you doing? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.” The Lord commands us to love even our enemies; and you persecute us because we did not shed with you the blood of an innocent priest of the Lord. The divine voice cries out, saying, “With the judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you measure, it will be measured back to you”; and you say, “Slaughter a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” Though you remember that you are a fountain of evils, you nevertheless dared to say of a man you knew had been falsely accused by you, “He is guilty of death.” You are so senseless, Constantius Augustus, that when you commanded these things you could not even remember that saying of the Lord: “Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but do not see the beam in your own eye? Or how do you say to your brother, Let me take the speck out of your eye, and behold, there is a beam in your own eye? And then you will see to take the speck out of your brother's eye.” The Lord says the beam is in your eye, and do you dare to say to Athanasius, a most righteous man, “You have a speck in your eye”? For he has committed none of the things you are pleased to charge against him; you, on the contrary, have perpetrated all that we have said, condemning an innocent man as often as you have said it.

What other way did you want us to take but your own, which the Lord describes, saying: “How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it”? Because you are set on this broad and spacious way, you ordered an innocent man to be condemned, surely wanting it revealed to all that your perdition reigns far and wide. At the time when you came to Italy, you had disguised yourself, a wolf, as a sheep, as though we would not find you out by your works, as though the Lord's warning had escaped us: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves; by their fruits you will know them.” Did not your most bitter fruits, sown in you by the devil's poisons, at once shine out sadly when you tried to say that an unheard man must be condemned? Were not the snares of you, a ravening wolf, at once laid open, in that you had built a mighty engine against God's sheepfold? As, then, you have been recognized by your fruits as a wolf and not a sheep, so too the holy Gospels prove what you are, unless you take thought for yourself: a tree destined for the fire. “Do they gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. By their fruits, then, you will know them. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.” Is this how you do the will of the Father of the only Son of God: that you deny his only-begotten Son, that you say the Father himself is not a true Father, that you try to destroy the foundations laid through the apostles, that you killed and are killing his worshippers, that you drove his bishops from the peoples entrusted to them, that you ordered an absent and unheard man to be condemned, that you brought into the church your heresy, which blasphemes the one divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? If all these things, as we have said, are pleasing to God the Father, you will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven. For you hear his only Son say: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.” You order an innocent man to be condemned; do you not recall that God said in Exodus: “If two men quarrel and strike a woman with child, and she miscarries a child not yet formed, he shall suffer a penalty; whatever the woman's husband assesses, he shall give, with consideration. But if it was formed, he shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise”? I suppose nothing of the sacred Scriptures escapes you; for you could not give us your excellent commands unless you were learned in the law. You have surely read this too: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them I will liken to a wise man who built his house upon the rock. The rain came down, and the floods came, the winds blew and beat on that house, and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. And everyone who hears my words and does not do them I will liken to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, the winds blew and dashed against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.” Which of these do you say you are, Constantius, the wise or the foolish? If you say the wise, why do your works show you foolish? Why is your house found set upon sand? For you will not be able to say that you have built your house upon the rock, when every wise man sees the structure of your folly, when every servant of God sees this great ruin of your salvation which the Lord foretold. For in what is a Christian found to stand, except in obeying the Lord's commands, except in remaining unmoved, though he be harassed with all persecutions for the name of the Son of God? In what will a Christian be perfect, except if he is even killed for him whom you are pleased to deny to be the true Son of God? You, on the contrary, since you are not in the church but among the Arians, God's enemies; since you deny the only Son of God; since you do not fulfil the commands of his mercy but rather try to destroy them; since you are a transgressor of the law, a deserter of the oath of the heavenly army, a persecutor of God's religion; since you show yourself a butcher towards his worshippers, how will you be found a wise man, like him whom the Lord said built his house upon the rock?

But you say against this: “I am not foolish; I know that I am wise.” If you are wise, why have you done and are you doing things that only the foolish can do? If you are wise, why did you order an unheard, absent man to be condemned? Why did you command an innocent man to be killed? Why did you desire the priests of God to become enemies of God? For they could not become friends of God by this deed, since you know that the Lord said to the apostles, “If you do what I command you, I will no longer call you servants but friends.” If you are wise, why must I, a priest of God, listen to you when you condemn Athanasius? You did not even allow him to set out the grounds of his pleas. If you are wise, if you are a worshipper of God, why do you persecute us because we confess ourselves Christians? Why do you love so warmly those who do not say they are Christians but confess they are Arians? If you are wise, why have you often sent armed soldiers to the house of God? If you are prudent and know yourself to be a servant of God, why have you persecuted, and do you persecute, his people with arms? Why, finally, do you call the apostolic and evangelical faith heretical and pronounce the heretical one catholic? You call yourself wise; but we, on the contrary, see that no one who does these things can be wise. For what man of sacrilege can be called prudent, except by those more imprudent than himself? If you are wise, Constantius, I shall not be able to find anyone more foolish than you. Do you still seem to yourself wise, you who have supposed that the prophets, apostles and martyrs were killed for a creature? For you will not dare to deny that all these were killed for the only Son of God. How can you be called wise, who not only did not try to resist the falling rains, the overflowing floods, the blowing winds, lest they should ruin you, who are found to be the house, but have yourself turned into rains, floods and winds, so that you, a devilish whirlwind and storm, might drag us with you into the outer darkness? “Now the works of the flesh are plain,” says the apostle, “which are adulteries, sexual immorality, uncleanness, indecency, debauchery, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, strife, jealousies, anger, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, carousing and the like, which I warn you of, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” And does your mind, vigorous with wisdom, rage for the death of an innocent man? The apostle cries out that murderers will not possess the kingdom of heaven; and you, Constantius, the most prudent emperor, say: “Slaughter the absent, butcher the unheard, kill the innocent, and the kingdom of God will be yours.” From this one may understand how wise you are, if indeed you are the one who built his house upon the rock. For you will not be able to deny that you said: “I want to condemn Athanasius because I desire to please God.” So you desired us too to please God as you have already pleased him, ever since you were pleased to plan to destroy Athanasius with the knowledge of all of us, the priests of the Lord. So in the beginning Cain pleased God, as soon as he planned to kill his brother! In this way it is seen, Constantius, where your root is, from what stock you have descended. Can you deny after this that you are in that company which the apostle describes to the Romans: “And as they did not see fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting, filled with all iniquity, malice, indecency, covetousness, wickedness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil ways; whisperers, slanderers, hateful to God, insolent, proud, self-pleasing, boastful, inventors of evils, disobedient to parents, foolish, disorderly, without affection, without mercy; who, though they knew the righteousness of God, did not understand that those who do such things are worthy of death; not only those who do them, but also those who consent to those who do them.” See what that excessive love for us, suddenly arisen in you, would have brought us, if we had dared to yield to you: we would have drunk everlasting death. Likewise he says further on: “Repaying no one evil for evil, providing good things not only before God but also before men; if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, having peace with all men.” Thirsting for these saving warnings to be trampled on, you urged us to punish an innocent man. For how would we have been found to have provided good things not only before God but also among men, if we had condemned an innocent man, we who would have given a pattern for shedding the blood of the righteous? How would I be found desiring to have peace with all men, if, roused by your false suggestion, a heretic's, I had destroyed the peace of my fellow priest?

Tell me, Constantius: did you bring a true charge against Athanasius to the church of God, or a false one? If you hold it certain that you brought a true one, prove it to me, who already know you to be the bearer of a false charge. Do you think you have done nothing evil in the sight of God? What reason compelled you to become a false witness? Why did you, an emperor, become a liar? Why did you not fear being destroyed after the example of Ananias and Sapphira? Scripture says in the Acts of the Apostles that the blessed Peter said to Ananias: “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, so as to keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, did it not remain yours, and when it was sold, was it not in your power? Why have you set this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God. And Ananias, hearing these words, fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard. And the young men rose and carried him out and went and buried him. And after an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened, and Peter said to her: Tell me whether you sold the land for so much. And she said: For so much. Why have you agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out. And immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last.” I suppose you have read this, and yet you did not fear to concoct a lie in the sight of the Lord. Why did you do it, unless because you are wise? What do you think will happen to you, who are not only a liar but a murderer, not only a murderer but a heretic? Do you believe that such great things will go unpunished for you? Do you believe that you can escape eternal punishments? It is said to Ananias, “Why has Satan filled your heart, so that you lied to the Holy Spirit?” and will you say, emperor Constantius, that Satan has not filled the heart of you Arians, so that you have lied to the Holy Spirit abiding in the church of God? For you came to the church saying, “Athanasius has sinned against God”; and the Holy Spirit saw your lying souls, as he saw Ananias and Sapphira. He saw, I say, the Holy Spirit, when you were inventing these things, that you had devised such things about Athanasius in order to bring your heresy into the church, in order to destroy the apostolic tradition. Ananias and Sapphira, because in selling their field they defrauded part of the price, because they dared not to speak honestly before the apostle of God, deserved to be judged thus. You, who have not only brought false charges against a servant of God but have persecuted the whole house of God, who have shed the blood of his worshippers, who have sent his priests to the mines and into exile and ordained heretics in their places, who have called the evangelical faith heretical and your blasphemy catholic, who have brought idolatry into the church, who have deserted the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob and of all the prophets, apostles and martyrs and followed the idolatry of Arius, do you think that, if you persist in this blasphemy and cruelty, the greatest vengeance will not fall on you? Then, if God deigned to take such vengeance on Susanna's adversaries, do you think a heavier vengeance will not proceed against you? It will proceed, believe me, if you do not turn in time. For if they, because they had tried to violate Susanna's chastity, deserved to receive what I have set down below, how much more you, who have set about violating the chastity of the church? They assailed Susanna with a false charge, and you have assailed in the same way not only Athanasius but all who resist you. Or can you name one of those who resisted to whom a charge has not been attached? So you were armed to violate the chastity of the church as they were to violate Susanna's, they who said: “The doors of the garden are shut, no one sees us, and we are in desire for you; so consent to us and be with us; otherwise we will bear false witness against you, that a young man was with you, and that is why you sent the maids away from you.” Or will you try to deny that it was said: “We Arians desire that we and you Christians be made one body; abandon the faith which you hold, written at Nicaea against us; agree to the doctrine of Arius; otherwise, because we have great power and the empire is ours, we will oppress you in whatever ways we please, and you will all be removed from your sees”? You will not be able to deny that this is so, since your designs, hateful to God, have been revealed by events. For why were we compelled, even if we did not condemn Athanasius, nevertheless to be mixed in the communion of the Arians, unless because you, the pimp of the Arian heresy, desired us all to become your fellows in sacrilege by any means?

But I suppose you still try to deny that you persecute us because we Christians refused to become Arians. How will you be able to deny it, when you sent into exile the most holy Dionysius, bishop of Milan, who, believing your false assertions, had already condemned Athanasius, because he refused to be an Arian? Or is Auxentius, whom you, rash and pestilent man, ordained in his place, not an Arian? If Auxentius holds the holy faith written at Nicaea, then you too may be no Arian, and you may have done none of the things I assert, and may not have brought a false charge against Athanasius. Perhaps you will say that you are catholics because Susanna was heard, but we have not been. As far as our conscience goes, we know that we have been vindicated, since you, the serpent, have been exposed, since all your poisons have been laid open, since all your machinery has been revealed; for this is the vengeance we desired on you enemies of God, that God should reveal to his people that you are heretics. Almost the whole world now knows that Athanasius was falsely assailed by you, and that you are the author of this iniquity; for you have been seen desiring to accomplish one thing and putting forward another. Susanna, groaning, says to the people: “I am hemmed in on every side; for if I do this, it is death to me; and if I do not, I shall not escape your hands. It is better for me not to do it and fall into your hands than to sin in the sight of the Lord.” And we too, as soon as we saw the charges laid on by you, would have put out our torches, since we would have been darkness, as you are. What Christian would not say that it is better for him to be killed by you, the forerunner of the Antichrist, than to go into the darkness of you Arians or of any heretics? You had charges brought not only against Athanasius but against us as well, because we Christians refused to become Arians. Particular charges that could be brought against particular men were not lacking, so that none of us should seem to have been sent into exile for God's sake, but as if for our crimes. Since, then, you are guilty of such great crimes, you said that Athanasius was guilty of death because he did not want to have God angry with him together with you; those elders, whose equals you are in this crime, did the same. For Scripture says: “And it came about on the next day, when the people assembled at the house of her husband Joakim, that the two elders came, full of wicked intent against Susanna, to put her to death. And they said before the people: Send for Susanna the daughter of Hilkiah, who is the wife of Joakim. And they sent, and she came, she and her parents and all her kindred. Now Susanna was very delicate and beautiful in form. And the wicked men ordered her to be unveiled (for she was veiled), so that they might be filled with her beauty. And all her family and the others who saw her wept. Then the two elders stood up in the midst of the people and laid their hands on her head; and she, weeping, looked up to heaven, for her heart trusted in the Lord. And the elders said: As we were walking in the garden alone, this woman came in with the maids, and she sent the maids away and shut the doors of the garden, and a young man who had been hidden came to her and lay with her. And we, being in a corner of the garden, seeing the wickedness, ran to them, and we saw them coming together. Him we could not catch, because he was stronger than we, and because he opened the doors and leapt out; but her we seized and asked who the young man was, and she would not tell us. To these things we testify. And the whole assembly believed them, as elders of the people and judges, and they condemned her to die.”

Consider closely, Constantius, whether the accursed inventions of you Arians are not such things as you have meanwhile done against Athanasius as those elders did against Susanna. For who would not have believed you, the emperor, when you said, “Athanasius has committed sacrilege”? But because in this you were more detestable than those fellow damned men of yours, the false elders, you were not believed by us; for you were told that an absent man could not be condemned. Those elders made their criminal charges against her in her presence, and the whole assembly gave sentence on her in her presence; you, on the contrary, when on the accusation of heretics you compelled a catholic to be condemned unheard and absent, already the machinery of your stage play had begun to be seen. But hear now what was granted to the chaste Susanna by the defender of the innocent, the avenger of the oppressed; hear what the book of Daniel tells of Susanna's vindication: “And Susanna cried out with a loud voice and said: Eternal God, who know what is hidden, who know all things before they come to be, you know that they have borne false witness against me; and behold, I am dying, though I have done none of the things these wicked men have invented against me. And the Lord heard her voice. And as she was being led away to die, God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel, and he cried out with a loud voice: I am innocent of the blood of this woman. And all the people turned to him and said: What is this word that you have spoken? And he, standing in their midst, said: So, foolish Israelites, without examining and without knowing the truth you have condemned a daughter of Israel! Return to the judgment; for they have borne false witness against her.” So now too, when Athanasius cried out to God, God made all his servants rise up for the truth against you, his adversaries. He has granted to his worshippers what he granted then to his most devoted Daniel, so that we might understand that you are a false witness, that you are one of the brood of vipers, that you invented these falsehoods with your fellows in sacrilege. All are now returning to judge just judgment, while you meanwhile twist the sentence of death, even those whom the devil, the master of your soul, had ensnared through you by his cunning when they were unaware. For apart from your fellow Arians there can be no one who does not want Athanasius's innocence vindicated by God, who does not favour the innocence of Athanasius, as now too that of Susanna, after it was established that she had been assailed with a false charge: the chaste woman by the unchaste, the pure by adulterers, the handmaid of God by the servants of the devil. So the standing of an innocent man faithfully serving God has been battered by you serpentine sons of Satan; but you have been laid low. For all your poisons lie dead, killed by the power of God, since every Christian soul is praying God that, as he rescued Susanna, he may deign to rescue Athanasius from a false charge, to rescue him from your sword, the sword of a butcher, from your savagery, the savagery of a murderer. Meanwhile I press you again and again to see what madness has seized you Arians, what insanity has gripped you, that you dared to contrive these things for the death of an innocent man, when you knew that God knows all things before they happen. But no wonder if this machinery was built against Athanasius by you and yours, since you did not hesitate to say of God the Father: “He is not a true Father, for he does not have a true Son.” For you who say that the Son of God is from nothing, what else do you say but that he is not a true Father? It is no wonder, I say, if you have so risen up against Athanasius, the servant of God, when you do not hesitate to lay your deadly hands on him whose servant Athanasius is. For a robber who has not spared the master of the house will not be able to spare his household when it resists him.

But let us now return to what you were ordering us to do. You said: “Condemn Athanasius.” What had happened that we should not see him face to face? What had been done that I should not examine every hinge of the matter? Why did you not allow him to be convicted by competent witnesses? Did even the most holy Daniel, or rather the Holy Spirit through Daniel, condemn these men unheard? For we read that the glorious Daniel said to the people: “Separate them from each other. And he called one of them and said to him: You who have grown old in evil days, now your sins have come which you committed before, judging unjust judgments, condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go, though the Lord says, You shall not kill the innocent and the righteous. Now then, if you saw this woman, say under what tree you saw them dealing together. And he said: Under a mastic tree. And Daniel said: You have lied well against your own head; for already the angel of the Lord, having received the command from God, will cut you in two. And when he had removed him, he ordered the other to be brought and said to him: Seed of Canaan and not of Judah, beauty has deceived you and lust has perverted your heart. This is how you used to treat the daughters of Israel, and they, out of fear, lay with you; but a daughter of Judah would not endure your wickedness. Now then tell me, under what tree did you catch them dealing together? He answered: Under an evergreen oak. And Daniel said to him: You too have lied well against your own head; for the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two, to destroy you both. And the whole assembly cried out with a loud voice and blessed God, who saves those who hope in him. And they rose up against the two elders, because Daniel had convicted them out of their own mouths of being false witnesses, and they did to them as they had wickedly meant to do to their neighbour, according to the law of Moses, and they put them to death; and innocent blood was saved that day.”

What can your imprudence answer to this, Constantius? You see that not even those guilty of so great a crime were condemned without everything being examined most carefully; and did you not hesitate to order the priests of God to pass sentence of death on a man you knew to be innocent? What should we have heard, if we had done it? Surely what those false elders, those rocks of lust, those false witnesses, hear: “You who have grown old in evil days, now your sins have come which you committed before, judging unjust judgments, condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go, though the Lord says, You shall not kill the innocent and the righteous.” Would we not rightly and deservedly have heard this, if we had been either enticed or terrified by you, the bilge of the Arian doctrine, into condemning an innocent man? And therefore all these evils have come upon you. You with yours will hear what they heard through Daniel, whether because you are guilty of bringing a false charge, or because you invite the whole choir of bishops to the slaughter of an innocent man, or because you wanted the whole people of God to accept your heresy; you will hear it, and more heavily, because your crimes are heavier: you have become a destroyer of God's religion, you have killed a vast multitude of those who called themselves Christians, you have brought your Arian heresy into the church, you have condemned the catholic faith, you have denied that God the Father is a true Father, you have said that his only Son is not a true Son, and you have asserted that the Holy Spirit the Paraclete is not the true Spirit of God. Against you and against all God's enemies the faith of the holy church cries out that it believes in God the true Father, unbegotten, and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, which the Greeks call homoousion, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made; and in the Paraclete Spirit, the true Spirit of God. To you, then, a false witness, a spiritual adulterer, a murderer and man of sacrilege, heavier things will rightly be said, rightly, since by such great and such crimes you are greater than those false elders, the enemies of Susanna. For if it is said to those liars, “You have lied well against your own head; for already the angel of the Lord, having received the command from God, will cut you in two,” and, “You have lied well against your own head; the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two, to destroy you,” how much more will such things be said to you, unless you look out for yourself! Had it fallen out of that heart of yours, covered with the darkness of errors, that it is written, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it,” that you ordered an innocent man to be condemned? For, unless I am mistaken, everywhere the sacred law says that the innocent and righteous are not to be condemned. And therefore, since you commanded these things to be done against God's command, we hold you to be one of those whom the Lord strikes in the Gospel: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, for you are tombs that do not appear, and men walking over them do not know it.” Those whom you enticed to love you, a man of sacrilege, did not know it; they had not perceived from your efforts that you are a tomb full of every uncleanness; they thought you a man. But we, as soon as you began to impose on the bishops the necessity of condemning an absent man, said at once that you were a worshipper of injustice and a persecutor of justice. Likewise, when we, the legates of the blessed church, pressed you to condemn the sect of Arius, and you said rather that it was catholic, we foretold that you were the forerunner of the Antichrist.

When you are pleased to persecute and kill Christians, Constantius, you make yourself like those to whom the Lord says: “Woe to you who build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. So you bear witness, not agreeing with the works of your fathers, for they killed them, and you built their tombs? Therefore I send prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. So I tell you, it will be required of this generation.” You are understood to be one of them from this: that while you restore the shrines of the blessed martyrs, you shed the blood of the servants of the only Son of God. Return, Constantius, to the house of God; be a Christian, lest, found outside the church, you be always, as you are today, among those whom the Lord says he will strike: “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for I tell you, many seek and will not be able. When the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us, he will answer, I do not know where you are from. Then you will begin to say, We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets. And he will say to you, I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets entering the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrust out.” Do not so hate yourself as to let yourself hear these things among them, especially since you see that you have been more wicked than one to whom it is rightly said, “Depart from me, worker of iniquity.” You will be, Constantius, if you choose to remain in this ill will of yours, among that carnal people to whom it is said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you”; you will be among them, I say, because you persecute those who urge you to win God's favour, just as they persecuted the prophets and apostles.

Again the defence of the truth requires that you be asked why you ordered an absent man to be condemned. Tell me, I beg you, did you order it to be done well or badly? If you say well, I suppose you take refuge in the deed of blessed Paul, in that he wrote to the Corinthians that he had already punished the sinner whom he had learned had sinned gravely. Let us see now whether you, a beast with only the limbs and body of a man and the mind of a wild animal, have acted as the apostle acted, whether you have carried out the matter in the order in which he did who said: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, such as is not even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be removed from your midst. For I, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as if present, him who has done this: in the name of the Lord Jesus, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You say, I suppose: “And I ordered you to condemn an absent man because the apostle too condemned one.” First of all, catholics had reported to the blessed apostle, men he knew to be faithful, whom he had proved devoted to God, and he knew that the whole holy church of the Corinthians was a witness. You, on the contrary, darkness that you are, pressed us to condemn an absent man on the accusation of yourself and your fellows in sacrilege, heretics hateful to God. Then, since you hear the apostle say, “When you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of the Lord Jesus, to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” why, darkness that you are, when we said, “We will go to him at our own expense; we will hear him among the people over whom he was divinely set; only give us catholic accusers according to the command of the sacred law,” did you refuse? Why did you take pains, as though we were gladiators and not bishops, only that we might, as you wished, kill the man whose blood you had long been thirsting for? Meanwhile you ought to know that you, unhappy man, have been handed over to Satan for your murders and your sacrilege, as was the man found guilty among the Corinthians. For these deaths you have caused and are causing are not smaller, that if the Holy Spirit says by the mouth of the blessed apostle that he handed that man over to Satan for destruction, he should not have handed you over as soon as you committed such grave crimes. For if it were not so, you would surely have remembered that the apostle said, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men”; you would never have dared to compel the priests of God to condemn a man unheard. For since I have been bought with a price, since, freed from the law of sin, I have been made a slave of righteousness, no burden ought to have been laid on me by you, now living under the law of righteousness, so that I should again become a slave of iniquity and injustice. The burden has been laid by you, then, because you have been handed over to Satan for destruction on account of murder and sacrilege. If you had not been handed over to Satan, you would remember that the apostle wrote to Timothy: “But we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the righteous, but for the unjust and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the wicked and profane, for parricides and matricides, for the indecent, for men who lie with males, for kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God which was entrusted to me.” If you were not handed over to Satan for destruction from the moment you denied the Son of God, how did you pass over so many things that could have restrained you from so great a crime, and leap to doing things that could take away all that is known to be sound teaching?

You who do things contrary to sound teaching, who proscribe, torture, deport, imprison and kill, tell me, I beseech you, whether you are unlike that king Herod whose butchery holy Scripture describes thus: “At that time King Herod laid hands on some of the church to harm them. He killed James the brother of John with the sword; and when he saw that this pleased the Jews, he went on to seize Peter also. It was the days of unleavened bread. When he had seized him, he put him in prison, handing him over to four squads of four soldiers to guard, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. So Peter was kept in prison; but earnest prayer was made to the Lord for him by the church. And when Herod was about to bring him out, that night Peter was sleeping between soldiers, bound with two chains, and guards before the door were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by, and a light shone from him in that place; and striking Peter on the side he woke him, saying, Get up quickly. And he got up, and the chains fell from his hands”; and further on: “And when they had passed the first and second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city, which opened for them of its own accord. And when they had gone out, they went on along one street, and immediately the angel left him. And Peter came to himself and said: Now I know that the Lord has truly sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Herod and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews. Now when day came there was no small disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter. And Herod, when he had searched for him and not found him, examined the guards and ordered them to be led away.” We see that you are like him in everything, whether in cruelty or in sacrilege. For as he killed the blessed apostle James, so you have killed a vast multitude of those who believe as the apostle James believed; as he persecuted the only Son of God in the apostle James, so you persecute him both in those you have already killed and in us. Again we both instruct and exhort you to return to the church of God and to cease now persecuting Athanasius, or us who act against your heresy, lest you begin to perish after the example of this Herod, whose end holy Scripture tells, saying: “He went down from Judea to Caesarea and stayed there. Now he was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon; and they came to him with one accord, and having persuaded Blastus, the king's chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country was fed by the king's country. On an appointed day Herod, clothed in royal robes, sat on the tribunal and made a speech to them. And the people cried out: The voice of a god and not of a man! And immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.” Did you, who want to seem learned in the law, not know that John the blessed apostle said, that you said, “Condemn an innocent man”: “By this we know that we have known him, if we keep his commandments. He who says, I have known him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected”? You command things to be done against God's command; the apostle, on the contrary, says that whoever has not kept his precepts has not even known him: “If one says, I have known him, and does not keep his commandments, he is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” You want us to be liars, you want us to be found murderers, surely so that we may not be found Christians. For Christians are neither liars nor murderers. The apostle says, “Whoever keeps his word, in him the love of God is truly perfected”; and you, an apostate, forerunner of the Antichrist, say: “Whoever does not keep his commandments will live.” Further he says: “He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness even now. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause of stumbling in him. But he who hates his brother walks in darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his heart.” What can be said by you, a man of darkness, to this? Why do you urge us who are set in the light: “Hate with me the man whom I unjustly hate; share my madness; be murderers like me”? Then, if he says that he who hates his brother walks in darkness, so that he does not know where he is going, because the darkness of violence has blinded his eyes, what if someone has killed his brother? What if he has been a murderer? But the crime of murder seems nothing to you, who are found to have shed the blood of so many servants of God. You dare to order the priests of God to do things that please only your father the devil and you Arians, his sons.

The most holy apostle likewise urges that, keeping the road of righteousness, we may deserve to be placed in everlasting rest; and you, a most wise man, compel us to come with you to eternal torments. “Little children, let no one deceive you. He who does righteousness is righteous; but he who commits sin is of the devil, for the devil sins from the beginning. For this the Son of God was revealed, to undo the works of the devil.” Since, then, the apostle says that sin is from the devil, and you compel us to commit capital crimes, what else can I call you but the devil's agent? You, whom I see so loving his cause, so cultivating his business, that you desire us all to be found on his side. For why do you compel every worshipper of God to go over to him, except because you have chosen to favour his party? You hear the blessed apostle say, “For this the Son of God was revealed, to undo the works of the devil”; and you press the worshippers of God to complete the devil's work. When you do this, do you not seem to have made yourself the assailant of him who undid the devil's work? But it is no wonder that you have chosen to have what the only Son of God undid rebuilt through you, the devil's henchman, since you did not hesitate to deny the very one who destroyed the devil's work. That is why it is nothing to you to shed innocent blood: because, denying the lover of the innocent and the defender of his worshippers, you have betaken yourself to the one to whom Judas Iscariot betook himself. If, then, you cannot deny that it is the devil's work to shed the blood of a righteous man, it is surely clear that you have done the devil's work and urged us to do it. Further, John, most dear to God, speaks so that brotherly love may be kept inviolate, saying: “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain: everyone who is not righteous is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. For this is the promise you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; and not as Cain, who was of the evil one and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his own works were evil, but his brother's righteous. Do not wonder, brothers, if the world hates us. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brothers; he who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Since, then, everyone who is found to hate his brother is called a son of the devil, a murderer, is compared to Cain the fratricide, is marked out as remaining in death, why were you compelling me to carry out this work, which would have made me a fratricide like Cain and a son of the devil, which would have made me remain in everlasting death? When you see that I have already passed from death to life, when God has already placed me among those whom he has deigned to call sons, for what reason did you want me to become Cain, darkness, and a son of the devil? In what have I harmed you, in what have I become an adversary of your salvation, that you desired that I be so injured? Why do we repeat these things, except so that at some time you may understand that you do not know what is good? For if you knew, you would never have committed so great a crime yourself, nor pressed us to commit it. Tell me in the midst of this, I pray, why you persecute the bishop of the house of God. For the apostle says that he who hates his brother is a murderer. If you do not want to bear the name of murderer, why do you hate your brother? Prove that Athanasius deserves hatred; show what evil he has done, so that he deserves to be hated even by all of us. You will certainly produce no unjust deed committed by him that makes him hateful. Since this is so, you must hate him because your work is evil and that of Athanasius righteous. For you want to kill him because he has not imitated you, a wicked, criminal and sacrilegious man. It is plain that this is so. For since the glorious apostle introduces the comparison of Cain and Abel, you seem to me to be Cain, and Athanasius Abel, when he says: “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain: everyone who is not righteous is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother; for this is the promise you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; and not as Cain, who was of the evil one and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his works were evil, but his brother's righteous.”

Nor ought you to doubt that your works are evil and those of Athanasius righteous. For you are a murderer, a destroyer of God's religion, a denier of the only Son of God, an assailant of the apostolic faith, a founder of the Arian idolatry; Athanasius, on the contrary, so remains in the fear of God that he is found, as far as can be seen, to have committed nothing that could separate him from those most dear to God. Since this is so, we exhort you to love yourself in Athanasius. You remember that it is written, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and, “He who loves his neighbour has fulfilled the law.” For as you hate yourself in him, not knowing that it is evil to hate the righteous unjustly, so you will begin to love yourself in him, if this ill will of yours is turned into good will. Then you will be able to be rescued from the darkness in which the blessed apostle says you dwell. “Do not wonder, brothers,” he says, “if the world hates us. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brothers. He who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has life abiding in him.” Do not dare any longer to say, “Condemn an innocent man,” you, a man who do not have life abiding in you, a man who has not yet passed from death to life. For if you had passed, that is, if you had believed in the only Son of God as we do, you would not have chosen to be a murderer, lest you should begin to go back again to death. So, placed in a twofold way without hope of life, you have been pleased to command the priests to kill an innocent man. But perhaps you will try to say: “I love those who love God, and I hate those who hate him.” But you will not be able to say this of Athanasius, since it is plain rather that you hate God, because you have both abandoned him and gone over to idolatry. So, since you persecute no fault in the priest of God, but only righteousness, only the religion of God, it remains for you to see further how this blessed apostle John commanded us, whom you were urging to kill the innocent, to be towards our fellow servants: “He laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” I am commanded by the apostle to lay down my life for my brother, and by you, a slave of the Antichrist, I am ordered to kill my brother. And again he says: “Let us have confidence towards God, and whatever we ask we shall receive from him, because we keep the commandments and do what pleases him in his sight, in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” But how shall I be able to be heard by him in every prayer, if I do not keep his commandment? For he commanded me to love my brother, not to kill him. And further on: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God”; and again: “Whoever does not love his brother does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was made known among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we too ought to love one another.” And again: “If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother cannot love God whom he has not seen.” And again: “This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” And again: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, and his commandments are not burdensome.”

Look at these few out of many, and you will find into what darkness you have dragged us, you man of darkness. “By this we know,” he says, “that we love the children of God, when we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments”; and you are pleased to push me to scatter these commandments and to set up others against them, put forward through you at the devil's prompting. How shall I be able to be found loving God, if through you I am found to have become the adversary of his commandments? From these deeds, who do you seem to me to be but one of those tares destined for the fire? Of them the Lord says: “As, then, the tares are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of stumbling and those who do iniquity, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” You see that, if I had condemned an innocent man at the busy urging of you, a heretic, I would have been with you in Gehenna. For we could not attain the kingdom of God, in which we might shine like the sun, if we had either committed murder or violated the apostolic faith. Go on rejoicing that you live in these evils; refuse to recognize the evils you do; and you will undoubtedly find that you are among those wicked men whom the Lord marks out as going to the fire, saying: “The angels will come out and separate the wicked from the company of the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” You are pleased to think it nothing to persecute the servants of the only Son of God, you limb of the devil, who supposed you could bring the whole holy church to stumbling. But see what God promises you and all your fellows in sacrilege: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it is better for him that a donkey's millstone be hung round his neck and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to this world because of stumbling blocks! For stumbling blocks must come; but woe to the man through whom the stumbling block comes! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you”; and further on: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” Since, then, you not only despise those who believe in his divine majesty but kill them, what reward will he whom you deny repay you, he who said it would be better for you to hang a donkey's millstone round your neck and be thrown into the depth of the sea than to have brought one of those who believe in him to stumble, than to have despised one of those who will possess the kingdom of heaven? What will he repay you, who for this cause deserved to be cut off from the members of his holy church, because you are the one through whom the devil has sent stumbling blocks into the people of God in our days? Though you have stirred up stumbling blocks, you have deceived only those who did not know that you have dried up like a stream cut off from its spring, like a branch broken from the tree; but we, who know you are placed outside the church, who see you as the enemy of the only Son of God, knowing you are dead, see your efforts beneath our feet with God's help. For we know that the dead cannot rule over the living. But why do you say that you live in Christ? How are you able to prove it, when you deny him? For none can live but those who confess him to be true God, the true Son of God. How are you living, when you persecute us because we confess ourselves his servants?

Or do you perhaps persecute us for some other cause? Have you perhaps found that we sinned against you, and is that why you are so hostile to us? We do not recall having sinned against you. For how can we be proved to have sinned against you, when we urge you to come from death to life? And yet, if you feel that we have sinned against you, hear what the Lord commanded you to do towards us, saying: “If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him between you and him alone; and if he listens, you will have gained your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take with you one or two more, so that every word may stand on the mouth of two or three witnesses. And if he does not listen to them, tell the church; and if he does not listen to the church, let him be to you as a heathen and a tax collector.” Since you have not done what the Lord commanded to be done; since you did not even admonish between yourself and us, so as to convict Athanasius, one of us, of guilt in our presence, but compelled him to be condemned unheard by us, his fellow priests; since you took away his hearing; how can you justly accuse us of having sinned against you, when you have fulfilled none of these commandments of the Lord? Why do you persecute us so fiercely, when it is rather you who are guilty of transgression, who did not act towards us as the only Son of God gave you commands, but did everything as pleased our enemy the devil? For such counsel is his, such will is his: that the unheard be condemned, that the absent be killed, that innocent blood be shed. Since, I say, you did not carry out the matter in the way the Lord commanded you, you dared to bring it to the blessed church, you dared to say: “Athanasius has sinned, and communion with him must be condemned by all.” But what will you try to say? That he sinned against God? And behold, it cannot be found that he sinned against God, since neither you nor your fellows in sacrilege, sons of the harlot, the Arian heresy, can be admitted as witnesses against a catholic bishop. For the Lord was speaking of three catholic witnesses, servants of his majesty, so that the blessed church might believe them, not you profane men, born of a harlot in adultery. Otherwise, if we did not take this command of the Lord so, the worshippers of Saturn and of all the idols could be admitted as witnesses against the household of God, and so could your fellow blasphemers the Jews, forsaken by God, set without light as you are. For if you heretics, and of every sect, are to be admitted as witnesses against Christians, so ought the heathen and the Jews to be, since, whether Jews or heathen or you heretics, placed outside the Lord's church, you are without God, as were all those who were not in the ark of the most holy Noah. For as they, placed outside the ark, could not be saved, so neither can you, but you will perish so, unless, believing in his only Son, you remain with us in the holy church. If, then, neither you nor your fellow blasphemers can be witnesses, how did you, most witless king, cause a man of complete innocence to be condemned, and that by his fellow priests? I add that you had already accused him of being a murderer at Serdica before a synod of catholics, and your iniquity could not prove it. I add that you yourself gave letters to the church of the Alexandrians declaring him a righteous man, a catholic bishop. Finally, even if he had sinned, Athanasius should have been removed from the people entrusted to him, and that so that the people might ask for another from its own body to be made its bishop; he was not to be assailed with the sword by you, the emperor. But since, in place of an innocent man against whom you have established nothing true, in place of a catholic, you sent your fellow in sacrilege George, and inflicted such outrages and such punishments on those unwilling to be stained by his sacrilege that you proscribed very many, banished them into exile and to the mines, killed very many, and do not cease even today to do to those who will not accept your blasphemy, which is also George's, what furious enemies, the most savage barbarians, would hardly do, how do you think you can be understood to be a Christian, you who are seen to be fiercer than the most savage wild beasts and more monstrous than all monsters? You dared to say that Athanasius must be struck down, not seeing that you Arians were then punished, and by the power of God, when you planned to bring idolatry into the Lord's church.

But perhaps you will still say: “Athanasius sinned against me.” To pass over the fact that you lie in this too, did you not know what is written, what the Lord commanded you to do towards those who sin against you, that you persecuted him with the sword? “Then Peter came to him and said to him: Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often shall I forgive him? Up to seven times? He said to him: I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Or are you ashamed to hear Athanasius called your brother? If you profess yourself a Christian, you ought to call all Christians brothers, and not only Athanasius but also those you see begging for alms. For all who are set in the Lord's church are one before him with whom there is no respect of persons. And yet you would do well not to want him called your brother; for since you are a son of pestilence and he one of the sons of light, since you are a slave of our enemy and he a servant of God, it would be most unjust for the forerunner of the Antichrist to be called the brother of the man of God. If you saw that he had sinned against you in anything, you should have forgiven him at once, so that God might forgive you your own crimes. But now, since you could not forgive because of your obstinacy and ill will, hear what can be repaid to you, who have made the Lord's command void: “Then Peter came to him and said: Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often shall I forgive him? Up to seven times? He said to him: I do not say to you up to seven times, but seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. And when he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents. And since he had nothing to pay, the master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and the debt to be paid. So the servant fell down and begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. And the master, taking pity on that servant, released him and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him he choked him, saying: Pay what you owe. And that servant fell down and begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you. But he refused, and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were grieved, and they went and told their master all that had happened. Then his master called him and said to him: Wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you begged me; should you not also have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you? And his master in anger handed him over to the torturers until he should pay the whole debt. So also my Father who is in heaven will do to you, if you do not each forgive your brother from your hearts.” What do you answer to this, you whose mind's eyes could not see what the Lord commanded to be done? Where do you put the fact that he has sinned neither against you nor against God, but suffers persecution because he holds the apostolic faith, because he will not become sacrilegious as you are? You resolved to kill a preacher of the truth, desiring to be placed in that rank in which are those whom the Lord marks out in the Gospel as killers of the prophets and shows would stretch out their ungodly hands even against himself, saying: “There was a householder who planted a vineyard and put a hedge around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went abroad. When the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to receive his fruit; and the tenants seized his servants and beat one, stoned another, and killed another. Again he sent more servants to them, and they did the same to them. Last of all he sent them his only son, saying: They will respect my son. But the tenants, seeing the son, said among themselves: This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and we shall have his inheritance. And they seized him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. When, then, the lord of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him: He will put those wicked men to a wicked death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the fruit in their seasons.”

Since you greatly desire to be one of these, you were also urging us to become partners in your crimes; for your counsels are no different from the wicked counsels of those who are found to have killed the prophets and who, in the end, stretched out their ungodly hands against the only Son of God; especially since you even bring to nothing the sufferings of those blessed men sent to the tenants, by asserting that they were killed for one who “was when he was not,” though the sacred Scriptures cry out that the only Son of God has always reigned and reigns with the Father. The Lord's writings reveal that the Father and his only Son have one Godhead; and you say that he for whom the glorious prophets were killed was made from nothing. For if what you say is true, it follows that the blessed prophets were killed for a creature. And where will be that the Lord is angry with great indignation at those who serve the creature rather than the Creator? If the blessed prophets were killed for a creature, how does God hold them most dear? How are the Jews, because they did not believe their words, God's enemies today? Why are the Jews God's enemies? Why are they found placed outside the Lord's vineyard? Is it not because they became the killers of the prophets, because the prophets preached the eternal God, the Son of the eternal God, and those fellow blasphemers of yours not only did not believe their prophecy but killed them? For whom do you think the Jews persecuted in the prophets but the only Son of God, as also in the apostles and martyrs? Learn from yourself at least that what I say is true, since you too persecute the true Son of God in Athanasius and in us. Since this is so, you had decided that we should be joined to the killers of the prophets, the shedders of the blood of the righteous, your fellows in sacrilege, that is, the Jews, whose imitator, of course, you are. For you said “Condemn Athanasius” and commanded us to accept also the faith of Arius for no other reason than that we might be equal to the Jews both in shedding the blood of the righteous and in denying the only Son of God, the Jews whose partner you already are in everything. For if they killed the prophets, those who spoke of the coming of the only Son of God, you too kill those who believe as the prophets believed. But how long shall I go on about these things with an unbeliever, when I have set out to show you that you are one of those to whom the Lord says: “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation producing its fruit”? For you are not in this nation which is found to bear the fruits of righteousness, so as not to be declared one of those whom you hear have been driven from the kingdom of God because of the slaughter of the righteous and their own unbelief. Observe that by doing these things you are among those whose wickedness the Lord reveals, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son and sent his servants to those invited to the wedding”; and further on: “and they would not come. Again he sent servants, saying: Tell those who are invited: See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed and all is ready; come to the wedding. But they paid no attention and went off, some to their farm, others to their business; and the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully and killed them. When the king heard, he was angry, and sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their cities. Then he said to his servants: The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy; go, then, to the outlets of the roads and invite to the wedding whomever you find. And the servants went out into the roads and gathered all they found, bad and good, and the wedding was filled with guests. But the king came in to see the guests and saw there a man not clothed in a wedding garment, and said to him: Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants: Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Since, then, you are without the wedding garment, Constantius, you will be for ever, unless you turn, such as the one to whom it is said, “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” and so you will go into the outer darkness.

Nor should you doubt that you will come into the outer darkness, since you have already been wholly turned into darkness. For those who shed the blood of the righteous prophets, who denied the only Son of God, are called both darkness and sons of the devil. Since you are doing these things too, you will certainly continue to be a son both of darkness and of the devil, unless you take thought for yourself. “How,” you say, “shall I be able to take thought for myself?” By ceasing to persecute us and accepting the apostolic faith; and unless you do this, you will always be, as you are now, among those to whom it is said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cummin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” If you do not rightly hear these things with them, where is the just judgment that proceeds from you, who try to kill a righteous man because he preaches the apostolic faith? Where is just judgment, when you persecute with all the forces of your empire those whom you see unwilling either to condemn a man unheard or to desert the catholic faith, and love those whom you know to have shed innocent blood with you and to have rejected the evangelical faith? What mercy is set in you and with you, which the holy law commands to be shown? Surely the mercy that tortures, proscribes, deports, sends to prison, leads into exile, sets in the mines; the mercy that kills by hunger, thirst, scourging and nakedness; and in the end the mercy that punishes with the sword. This is your mercy, Constantius, which comes not from the law of God but from the presumption of the devil. “Justice and mercy and faith,” he says, “these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” Where is your faith? You had condemned the faith which the most blessed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets, apostles and martyrs held, and decreed that all the worshippers of God must accept the faith which the devil vomited up through your teacher Arius against this catholic faith. From these things you are understood to be one of those who are known to hear: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cummin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” Or will you deny that you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, a man who, though you give alms not only when asked but sometimes of your own accord, yet, as has often been said, proscribe, deport, torture and finally kill those who confess themselves Christians? And therefore you ought to observe that you are with those to whom it is said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but within are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” You are one of those killers to whom it is said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and persecute from city to city, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.”

You are proved by your acts to be of that viperous race. For you are found to be one of those to whom these things were said that they would perpetrate. Or if you deny that you are one of those who hear from the mouth of the Lord, “Serpents, brood of vipers,” prove that it was not you but the Jews who sent soldiers to Alexandria, that soldiers of the Jews besieged the doors of the house of God, that Syrianus was the commander of soldiers of the Jews. Prove that Jews entered the basilica with arms and killed a certain number. If you cannot prove it, since it is established that it was you who sent them to attack the religion of God, we say most rightly that you are one of those to whom it was said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?” You will undoubtedly not escape the judgment of Gehenna, but will always burn there with your fellow serpents, unless you look out for yourself. “Then,” he says, “they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will stumble and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because iniquity will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” If your sacrilegious mind does not know that I suffer persecution from you for the sake of the only Son of God, you may not be of that race, not under the sentence of those to whom it is said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and persecute from city to city.” Since you are doing these things today, you will not dare to deny that you are of the brood of the viper. For you have killed very many Christians in many places; others you hold bound in prisons and in workhouses. From this too you will be able to see that you are one of those to whom it is said, “Serpents, brood of vipers,” and further on, “Behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill”: since you are not pleased to curse those whom you see to have departed from the apostolic faith through your abounding iniquity, those whose love has grown cold, but those whom you see remaining in that state of faith in which the blessed prophets, apostles and martyrs remained and deserved to obtain God's eternal friendship. For at Alexandria you do not curse Achetas and Didymus, among the presbyters, who are known to have become Arians instead of Christians, but those whom you know still stand with us. Or if it is not so, why do you not curse Didymus and Achetas now, whom you cursed before? Is it not because they were then held accursed by you, being still, of course, Christians, but now are very dear to you, because, that is, they have begun to be blasphemers, apostate like you? But now, after so many proofs shown you that you are one of those to whom it is said, “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?” we believe that you will take pains to heal the wounds so grave inflicted on you by the devil, since you are both a murderer and a man of sacrilege; and if you will not be freed from these crimes, your blood will be required of you, and we shall be clean of your blood before God, since we have opened the truth to you in every way. From you will be required not only your own blood, but also that of those whom you have either led to accept the heresy or enticed to slaughter an innocent man.

But if you say, “I thought that the faith of those whom you call Arians was catholic”; if you wavered in the cause of the faith; if you did not know that those who say they believe in a creature are heretics, those who say that God has no true Son, did you not know this either, that it is not just to pursue an innocent man with the sword? Had it escaped you that the Lord said to blessed Peter, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword”? What, meanwhile, will you do, Constantius, you who have killed so great a multitude of the servants of Christ, the only Son of God? For you see that he whom you persecute in us says that all who take the sword will perish by the sword. What will you receive, you who, unless you obtain pardon for your crimes by believing in him whom you deny, will deserve to be struck, and that by the sword of God, as many times as you have struck those dedicated to his mercy? What man are you, that you said that the necessity of striking down an absent man, punishing an unheard man, shedding innocent blood, must be laid on the priests of God? Why did you refuse to let our fellow priest Athanasius be heard by us? Why did you want us to slaughter the man of God secretly, in the manner of robbers? Is it not because you are one of those to whose reproach these words were uttered: “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven. For as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not judged; but whoever does not believe in him is judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they have been done in God.” If you knew yourself to be a servant of the only Son of God, you would certainly never deny his majesty, never order his servants to be slaughtered, now secretly, now publicly; but because you are a lover of darkness, being darkness yourself, because your works are evil, you would not let the matter you had reported be examined fully by the priests of God. Why would you not? Is it not because you feared your serpent's work would be exposed? “While we are in the body,” says the apostle, “we are away from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are bold and have the good will rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. And we strive, whether away or at home, to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” And you, Constantius, a heretic, say: “Christians, condemn a Christian!” Why do you say it, unless because you have judged it best to shed the blood of the righteous, and also to forsake God and take up idolatry?

But again I beseech you, most pious emperor, to recognize, since you are both a denier of the only Son of God and a persecutor of those who believe in him, whether you are not found the equal of those whose wickedness is described in the Acts of the Apostles: “When there was great dissension among them, the tribune, fearing that Paul would be torn apart by them, ordered the soldiers to go down and take him away into the barracks. The following night the Lord stood by him and said: Take courage; for as you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome. When day came, some of the Jews gathered and bound themselves by an oath, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. There were about forty who had made this conspiracy, and they went to the chief priests and told them, saying: We have bound ourselves by a solemn oath to taste nothing at all until we have killed Paul. Now, therefore, call a council and inform the tribune, so that he may bring him down to you, as though you were going to inquire about him more thoroughly; and we are ready to kill him before he comes near.” If you did not assail Athanasius, the priest of God, in this same way, if you did not pretend to be doing one thing while having arranged to accomplish another, you may deny that you too are driven by the same hostile spirit by which the Jews were and are driven. For unless you had been roused by that spirit against us who serve God, you would undoubtedly never have ordered an absent man, and an innocent one, to be condemned. But I repeat these things so often as though even you yourself, when at times you are free from the goads of fury, did not consider that you have so departed in every way from the rule of justice that you could not even see in the Acts of the Apostles that, when the Jews asked for the blessed man Paul to be killed, the Gentile governor Festus did not lend his assent to the assembly of the Jews, but promised that he would hear both them and Paul together. A Gentile kept the law of equity; you destroyed it. Or is it equity to condemn a man unheard, to kill a man absent, to deny a hearing to a righteous man, a man for whom the whole people of God is witness that he, a Christian, was falsely assailed by you and yours, you Arians? So, to tell, as I had begun, what was done by Festus between the Jews and the blessed Paul, hear: “Now Festus, when he had come into the province as governor, went up to Jerusalem … laying an ambush to kill him on the way. Festus answered that Paul was being kept at Caesarea and that he himself was going there shortly. So let those among you who are able go down and, if there is any crime in the man, accuse him. After staying among them not more than eight or ten days, he went down to Caesarea, and the next day he took his seat on the tribunal and ordered Paul to be brought. When he had been brought, the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem stood around him, bringing many serious charges which they could not prove, while Paul made his defence, that he had done no wrong either against the law of the Jews or against the temple or against Caesar.” A heathen kept the way of equity between the blessed Paul and your fellow murderers the Jews; and you, desiring to obey the wishes of your evil designs, had decided that equity and justice should be taken out of our minds.

But how could we have done what you were compelling us to do against justice, we who remembered that it is written, “Do not judge by appearance, but judge just judgment”? When you said, “Condemn the unheard,” why did you not remember that Nicodemus said, “Does our law judge a man unless it first hears from him and learns what he has done?” Why would you not let the man you called guilty of death be heard, unless because you had brought false charges? The Lord says to the Jews, “He who speaks a lie speaks from his own, for he is a liar and so is his father”; and you, since you have been shown to be a liar, do you think you are not the son of the liar, and do you dare, a son of the liar, to resist, a deceiver resisting the truthful, a man of sacrilege resisting the priests of the Lord? Do you dare, you whom we observe to be that robber and thief whom the Lord foreshowed, saying: “Truly, truly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in another way, that man is a thief and a robber”? You did stretch out your hands to the sheep of Christ to claim them for the Antichrist; but since you were recognized as a thief and a robber, you have been avoided and rejected. Why have God's sheep not followed you or your fellow in sacrilege George? Why do they follow him whom you grieve so bitterly to see bishop of the Alexandrians? Is it not because God appointed him their bishop, while the devil sent you and George in, like robbers and thieves, to slaughter them? “He who enters by the door,” he says, “is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out; and when he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know his voice.” Since, then, you have not entered the church by the door, you are seen to be a robber and a thief; for you do not know the Son of God, so as to say that you entered by the door, since he called them thieves and robbers because then too they did not believe in his divine mercy, nor would believe afterwards, and would try to teach his sheep otherwise. Since, then, you are spreading mad teaching because you have not believed in him, you are proved most plainly from your blasphemies to be that thief and robber who was already foreshown then. That this is so the following words prove: “Jesus said to them: Truly, truly I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal.” O you thief, then, who are found to have entered God's sheepfold for this, to steal and to kill, with what voice can you still say, “Athanasius must not be bishop of the Alexandrians, but George,” when you see that you and George and all your fellows in sacrilege are nothing but thieves and robbers? God willed his servants to be shepherds over the flock, so that, recognizing you and yours as robbers and thieves, they might drive you away.

But you decided that you and yours should be set over the Lord's flock instead of us whom God ordained, so that you could ravage God's flock freely. Since you are such, we cannot wonder that you said that an absent worshipper of God must be punished. For you could not keep in mind that the Lord said: “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he abides with you and is in you.” But tell me, I beg you, how could the Holy Spirit the Paraclete dwell in us, if we had done your will or your father's? Further on he says: “He who hears my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and show myself to him. Judas, not Iscariot, said to him: Lord, how is it that you will show yourself to us and not to this world? Jesus answered and said to him: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words.” From these sayings of the Lord one can infer how much of an enemy you have been to us: “He who hears my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.” How would we have shown that we loved him, if like you we had trampled on his commandments? For you are trampling on the Lord's commandments, since you not only order that what he decreed must be kept is not to be kept, but command that he himself be denied. Or how could his Father love me for keeping his Son's commandments, if I condemned an innocent man? The Son of God says, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him”; and you, food for the fire, an apostate, say: “Condemn an innocent man.” In what way would we have been found to love the Son of God, if against his commandments we slaughtered a righteous man? How could it have come about that the Father loved us and that the Father and the Son came and deigned to dwell in us, if we had torn up the Lord's commandments and kept the precepts of you, a man of sacrilege? See, Constantius, from what glory that envious lover of your will, the devil, tried to drive us through you, his client, had not the Lord's kindness come to our help, so that, considering you no longer a man, whom God made in his image and likeness, but the filth of all the sewers, we trampled on your sacrilegious orders. For who, unless more unhappy than you Arians, would not want to be loved by the only Son of God? Who is there who would not want to be loved by his Father? Who would refuse to be the temple of the Father and of his only Son? These things certainly cannot be obtained by one who, like you, has been both a murderer and a man of sacrilege; yet even you could obtain them, if you turned and truly repented. The Lord says further: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love than this no one has, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, but friends”; and again: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain, and that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.”

How shall we be able to be friends of the only Son of God, if, against the prohibition of his kindness, we have condemned an absent man and killed an innocent one? How will our fruit be able to increase? How shall we receive from the Father whatever we ask in his name, if, as you were compelling us, we not only punished his worshipper but even denied him? Had you not found that the blessed apostle wrote to Titus, a man dedicated to God, about the blameless office of a bishop, what it is fitting to offer God, that you desired us to become murderers? “For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might correct what was lacking and appoint presbyters in the cities, as I directed you: if anyone is without crime, the husband of one wife, having faithful children, not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordinate. For a bishop must be without crime, as God's steward, not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not given to wine, not a striker, not greedy for gain, but hospitable, kind, sober, just, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word according to the teaching, so that he may be able to exhort in sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, who must be refuted, who upset whole households, teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain.” Since, then, he wanted the bishop to be such a man as would live keeping this way of righteousness, by what authority did you deign to give new commands to shut out the commands of the blessed apostle? Those, namely, which are known to have arisen from the will of the devil. The apostle wants me to be not quick-tempered, not a striker, and you want me to become a murderer. From these things one can gather that the Holy Spirit spoke by the mouth of the blessed apostle, but a wicked spirit by the mouth of you Arians. You see meanwhile that the apostle commanded that you who resist the truth be refuted by the intervention of a bishop, so that by sound teaching your blasphemy might be punished. I have not put forward the blessed apostle's saying that a bishop must be without crime in order to deny that I am a sinner, since I know my conscience and hear that righteous man Job say: “For who is clean from filth? No one, even if his life on earth be but one day”; and since I observe that blessed John too says: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” I did not put forward the apostle's command, then, in order to proclaim that I, who remember that I am a sinner, am without stain, but so that you could see how evil it is that you commanded to be done. “Likewise,” he says, “urge the young men to be sober in all things, showing yourself in all respects a pattern of good works, in teaching, in integrity, in gravity, sound in speech, beyond reproach, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say of us.”

How would I have offered myself to others as a pattern of good works, if I had shed the blood of a servant of God? How would the peoples of God have known me as preaching the whole teaching which the apostles handed down, if I had accepted your heresy, if, in short, I had communicated, even in pretence, with your henchmen, the Arian false bishops? How could my speech be brought forth sound and beyond reproach, if I had deserted the evangelical and apostolic faith and accepted your blasphemy? How could the opponent have been put to shame? How could he have had nothing evil to say of me, when, if I had decided to give in to you, he would have caught me made a murderer and a man of sacrilege? Again, when he was urging that slaves should be subject to their masters, he says: “For the grace of God our Saviour has shone upon all men, correcting us, so that, renouncing ungodliness and worldly desires, we may live soberly and godly and justly in this age, awaiting the blessed hope, the coming of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to free us from all iniquity and to cleanse for himself an abundant people, zealous for good works.” Since he has commanded us to walk in these good works, what did you have in mind, that you strive to commit murder? For how could we have been seen renouncing ungodliness and living godly and justly, if we had shed innocent blood with you? And since he says that the Lord gave himself up for our sins to rescue us from the works of Satan and to set us to be zealous for good works, if we too had committed this work of yours with you, on what side would we be but on Cain's? “For the grace of God our Saviour has shone upon all men,” he says, “correcting us, so that, renouncing ungodliness and worldly desires, we may live soberly and justly and godly in this age.” And you, emperor Constantius, are pleased to say: “Let us be ungodly, wicked, lost, malignant, iniquitous, unjust.” Where shall I find this blessed hope which the blessed apostle teaches me I must await, if I not only kill the servants of him who is able to grant all blessedness, but even deny him? For you do both, Constantius: you persecute and kill his servants, and, deserting him, you have decided to enslave yourself to idols. Why do you do these things, unless because the grace of God our Saviour has not shone upon you? For if it had shone, you would remember the apostle's commands, when he says: “See, then, how you walk carefully, not as unwise but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not become imprudent, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” If it is the Lord's will to kill the innocent and to abandon the evangelical faith, not only this part but the whole body of the blessed apostle's letters will be able to give support to your rulings; but if no part of the sacred Scriptures favours your rulings, it is clearer than light that you live under the power of darkness; and so it has come about that you have drawn nothing from the springs of the sacred Scriptures that could have removed you from such great dangers. For if the power of darkness had not brought you under its rule, you would surely keep in mind what the Philippians hear: “Be my fellow imitators, brothers, and observe those who walk as you have us for a pattern. For many walk, of whom I often told you and now tell you even weeping, as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.”

I want you to tell me, most prudent emperor, in what we ought to become fellow imitators of the apostle. Teach us, apostate: was the apostle a murderer, a blasphemer, a destroyer of the evangelical faith, a man of sacrilege? For he professes that he did all these things before he believed in the only Son of God. But you, who do today what he did before he knew the only Son of God, for what reason did you dare to order us, the priests of the Lord, to condemn an innocent man, to accept your heresy and spit on the apostolic faith? For what reason did you command these things, which are put forward against the pattern of the apostle, unless because you are one of the enemies of the cross of Christ, one of those who were already marked out then by the mouth of the holy apostle? Should we have listened to you and yours, whose end the apostle says is destruction? To those henchmen of yours, who, abandoning the pattern of discipline and the rule of faith handed down through the apostles, have handed themselves over to you for the sake of shameful gain; those who have made more of the abundance of your table than of what the Lord promises his own; those who have chosen to be your guests rather than the guests of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles or martyrs, to whom it is most rightly said, “Your god is the belly”? “Test all things,” says the apostle, “hold fast what is good, keep yourselves from every form of evil”; and because we have seen the accursed work of you Arians and avoided it, we suffer hatred. But how good and how pleasant it is to be hated by you and loved by God! You have driven us from the charge entrusted to us, thinking you could destroy what God has built. “But to each one of us,” he says, writing to the Ephesians, “grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it says: Ascending on high he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men. Now that he ascended, what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same who ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine, in the wickedness of men, in craftiness for the remedy of error. But doing the truth in love, let us grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint of supply, according to the measure of each part, makes the growth of the body for its own building up in love.”

Since you read that this is so, why did you dare to take away the shepherds whom God willed to be over his flock? Why, unless so that the shepherds of God over the Lord's flock might be carried around with you by every wind of doctrine? So that those coming to the faith might not be led like children by every wind of doctrine? So that, by the craftiness of you most wicked men, they might not withdraw from the apostolic and evangelical faith to the remedies of the devil, your prince? You took bishops away from the peoples over whom we preside by divine favour, for this purpose surely, that you might teach doctrine not apostolic but heretical. Woe to you, wretched man, through whom Satan does these things. You found, wise man that you are, a pretext fit for your deceit, by which you might claim God's sheep for your father, who, so that you might stay in these evils, has already pierced your heart with those darts with which he wounded the minds of Eve and Adam, so as to set you in this depravity. You found, I say, wise man, a pretext fit for your deceit, by which you might lay waste the Lord's flock, saying: “Athanasius has sinned, and therefore whoever destroys him with me shall be bishop; whoever decides to treat it as nothing shall not be”; and those who condemned Athanasius were joined to the false bishops of your Arian doctrine. If any did this out of fear of your anger, they incurred through you, a murderer and man of sacrilege, a threefold crime: in condemning an innocent man, in communicating as catholics with heretics, and in letting you wolves into the flock of God; although the apostle says that shepherds were given so that every doctrine of demons put forward through you heretics and all the adversaries of the church might be shut out, and the servants of God, running in the truth, might remain unmoved until they came to the highest perfection. And you, darkness, have deigned to take away the shepherds appointed by God's judgment, so that you, a wolf, might turn all into the prey of the devil, your lover. “So that we may no longer,” he says, “be children, tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine, in the wickedness of men, in craftiness for the remedy of error. But doing the truth in love, let us grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ.” How could we grow up into him, if we had followed you, darkness that you are, since you deny that he is true God, since you say that he was not born of the substance of the Father, but assert that he was made from nothing? How could we have grown up into him, who would not have walked in the truth, once we had followed you, an apostate? Then, since he says, “Doing the truth, let us grow up in love,” and it is plain that Athanasius, the priest of God, has been assailed with false charges by you and yours, if we had done what you command, how would we have been seen running either in truth or in love, we who would have extinguished the love we hold with our fellow bishop Athanasius? And because we had yielded to a false charge, we ourselves, joined with you, a deceiver, in the death of an innocent man, would deserve to be struck with you by the divine indignation. Is it so, then, Constantius, that the house of God is built: by deceit, by the shedding of innocent blood, by blasphemous preaching? Woe to you, who live for this, that the devil may do all these evils through you.

You say to me: “Punish an innocent man, abandon the catholic faith and accept the poisons of my heresy”; and there is the apostle saying: “This, then, I say and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” Which of you shall I obey? You, or the apostle? You, a sacrilegious apostate, or him who is found to have already shed his blood for the only Son of God? Which of you shall I follow? You, the temple of demons, or him, the temple of God? You, who declare by your works that you are either a Jew or a heathen, or him who has already attained the heavenly kingdoms through this faith which you curse? For if you do not show by your works that you are a Gentile, you will be able to maintain that these things are not rightly said against you. First, because you deny the Son of God, you are to us a Gentile or a Jew; then, since you proscribe, deport, torture, load the innocent with false charges and kill them, you cannot be found a Christian, one who by his way is known to be a man of God, but certainly one of those of whom the Spirit of God says through the apostle that they are in the vanity of their mind, senseless, alienated from the life of God through the blindness of their heart. Since, then, the voice of the apostle shows that those blinded in heart do the things you do, with what face do you dare, a deceiver to the truthful, to say to those sound in heart and mind, “You have erred; you are liars”? The apostle says: “As the truth is in Jesus, put off, according to your former way of life, the old man, who is corrupted according to the lust of error; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who has been created according to God in righteousness and holiness and truth. Putting off falsehood, speak the truth each to his neighbour.” Where did you pass over these saving warnings which the apostle urges us to keep? For how could we have been found to have put off the old man and put on the new man who is according to God? How would we have been seen remaining in righteousness and holiness and truth, we who, doing unjust things with you, would have extinguished that new man who has been created according to God, and would have begun again to carry that old man who is corrupted according to the lust of error, as he was corrupted before he began to know God? For all those who do the things you do are not of God's household but henchmen of the Antichrist. “Putting off falsehood, speak the truth each to his neighbour, for we are members of one another.” If you had been one of the members of God's church, believe me, you would never have brought a lie to the church; it is only because you are the man of him who deceived Adam and Eve by deceit that you brought a lie, so that you might ensnare us as the devil ensnared the first-formed human beings. You said: “Condemn Athanasius, because he has sinned gravely; otherwise you will be in the greatest guilt before God. Accept the faith of Arius, and you will live for ever.”

Hear also what your dearest friend did to Adam and Eve, and you will find that you are now doing to us what he did then to them. “And they were both naked,” says Moses in Genesis, “Adam and his wife, and they were not ashamed. Now the serpent was wiser than all the beasts there were”; and further on: “And the serpent said to the woman: Why is it that the Lord God said that you shall not eat of every tree that is in paradise? And the woman said to the serpent: Of every tree that is in paradise we will eat; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God said, you shall not eat of it, nor even touch it, lest you die.” We say to you, who in the serpent's place persuade us to condemn an unheard man and slaughter an innocent one: The Lord has commanded that the innocent and righteous are not to be killed. “And the serpent said to the woman: You will not die. For God knew that on whatever day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” And as this serpent says to us through you, “You will be more righteous if you shed righteous blood; you will be more blessed if you anathematize the apostolic and evangelical faith and accept the Arian faithlessness” … his deceit is trampled underfoot, by God's favour, by us in you, since we know it already. But God is witness that we grieve for you, because the serpent has set himself through you to ensnare us; for it is clear that then he assailed Adam and Eve by himself. I beg you not to take hard what is put forward for the sake of your salvation. For I suppose you are grieved that I have said the serpent assailed us through you and that in many places I have put you among those who have been called serpents. Consider your work and theirs, and if you do not recognize that you are one body, say that I speak unjustly. You hear that your teachers in faithlessness, the Jews, are often called serpents by the Lord in the holy Gospels: “Serpents, brood of vipers.” Why did they deserve to be called by this name? Surely because of their wicked work, surely because of their unbelief. Hence too John the Baptist says to them: “Brood of vipers, who showed you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear, then, fruits worthy of repentance.” As, then, some of them, who believed in the only Son of God and corrected their ways, deserved to become sons of light, while others are called serpents, so you too, unless you bear fruits worthy of repentance, unless you correct your ways, will be called a son of the viper and of the serpent. For which of the servants of God, seeing you to be a murderer and a blasphemer, would not call you by the name by which the Jews are called? Who among those who fear God will hesitate to declare what you are, when he sees that the scribes, Pharisees and rulers of the Jews are called serpents because they both shed the blood of the prophets and denied the only Son of God?

Since this is so, it remains for you to repent of your deeds, observing that God has shown the mercy of his clemency to all who turn from evil ways, and having the example of the Ninevites; if you imitate them, you must obtain the help of mercy as they did. Hear what was done in their regard, and what they themselves did, terrified by the preaching of Jonah. “The whale was commanded,” says holy Scripture, “and it cast Jonah out upon the land. And the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying: Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and preach in it according to the former preaching which I spoke to you. And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to what the Lord had spoken to him. Now Nineveh was a great city, a journey of about three days. And Jonah began to go into the city about a day's journey, and he preached and said: Three days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown. And the men of Nineveh believed God and proclaimed a fast and clothed themselves in sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. And the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he rose from his throne and took off his robe and put sackcloth around himself and sat on ashes. And it was proclaimed by the king of Nineveh and by his magistrates, saying: Let men and beasts and oxen and sheep taste nothing, nor feed, nor drink water. And the men put sackcloth around themselves, and men and beasts cried out to God earnestly, and each turned from his evil way and from the iniquity of his hands, saying: Who knows whether God will repent and turn from the anger of his fury, and we shall not perish? And God saw their work, that each had turned from his evil way; and God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. And Jonah was grieved with a great grief and was confounded, and he prayed to God, saying: O Lord, are these not my words, when I was still in my land? That is why I hastened to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are compassionate and kind, patient and merciful, and repenting of evils”; and further on: “And God said to Jonah: Are you very grieved over the gourd? I am very grieved, even to death. And the Lord said: You have spared the gourd, for which you did not labour nor make it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night; and shall I not spare Nineveh, the great city, in which live more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left?” And if God sees that you have cast off your wicked work, Constantius, if he sees your ruined ways corrected and you reformed in everything, believe me, you will begin to be in great happiness among the servants of God.

You have besides the example of the most blessed apostle Paul, in case you, like him, do these things in ignorance: that as soon as you turn to confess the only Son of God, he will grant you pardon for your crimes as he did him. Follow him, take hold of his way, hear him speaking to the Philippians, both what he was before he knew Christ and how great a blessedness he deserved to obtain after he knew him: “If anyone thinks he has confidence in the flesh, I more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee; as to zeal a persecutor of the church; as to the righteousness which is in the law, living without blame. Whatever gains I had, these I counted loss for Christ's sake. Indeed I count all things loss because of the surpassing worth of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them dung, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Jesus Christ, the righteousness from God in faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain to his resurrection from the dead.” As has already been said, imitate him, follow him, so that, since he too was what you are now, a persecutor of the church, a denier of the only Son of God, you may be found to have been converted in the same way to obtain the heavenly kingdoms, from faithlessness to accepting the catholic faith, so that you too may pass from death to life. For hear further that he persecuted the church out of ignorance of God, as he himself reveals to Timothy: “But we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the righteous, but for the unjust and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the wicked and profane, for parricides and matricides, for murderers, the indecent, men who lie with males, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God which was entrusted to me. And I give thanks to him who strengthened me, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his ministry, though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and insolent; but I obtained mercy, because I acted ignorantly in unbelief. And the grace of our Lord overflowed with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” So you too, from a persecutor, an insolent man and a blasphemer, can become blessed and truly most dear to God, if, like the blessed Paul, you believe that Jesus Christ is the true Son of God; if you confess that he has always reigned and will reign with the Father, that is, without beginning and without end; if you do not resist the sacred Scriptures, which cry out that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one eternity; if, in short, you believe that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one Godhead. Believe me, you will be in the choir of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs; otherwise you will blame yourself, when you begin to see yourself tormented with the devil and all his henchmen, for having despised these so healthful admonitions of ours.