Recently indeed, when a few of my homilies had been gathered into one body, at the urging of friends I entered upon the hazard of publication. But now, with you persuading me to still greater things, I advance with hardened brow onto the buskin of a more wanton audacity. For you enjoin that, if anything on any subjects whatever has been written according to the law of meter, it be dedicated to your name under the profession of a little work. I recall indeed that I have said not a few things in verse—so much so that, were they set in order, a multitude of epigrams could be bound in no small volume. But while I was meaning to do this, keeping the order of subjects or times, almost all of them were scattered in that necessity of the notorious upheaval.
Since these things were either difficult to seek out one by one, or impossible to find, I cast out of my mind those whose ordering, if saved, or whose recovery, if dispersed, seemed to me hard. Some little books, indeed, I afterward found in the keeping of a certain intimate of mine: which, although they answer to their proper names and titles, yet touch upon other matters too, as the opportunity of the material was found. These, then, since you bid it, though they are obscure in my working, shall at least be made illustrious by your name. And yet, however keen and learned a man may be, if he has kept the style of a religious purpose no less by the law of faith than by the law of style, he can scarcely be fit for poetry.
For indeed the license of lying, which is granted equally to painters and to poets, must be driven far enough from the seriousness of subjects. For in composing a worldly work of verses, a man is called the more skilled the more elegantly—nay, to speak truly, the more ineptly—he has woven falsehoods. I pass over now those words or names which it is not permitted us even to frequent in others' works, not to say to write in our own: which, for the abridgments of poets, avail greatly, one thing signifying another. Wherefore, by the judgment of worldly men, who will set it down either to inexperience or to sloth that we do not use the license of poets, having undertaken a work more arduous than fruitful, we have distinguished the divine censure but slightly from human estimation.
Since in asserting any matters whatever, or even in explaining them so far as means allow, if we must err in any part, it is more wholesome that, when a clergyman speaks, pomp rather than the rule be left unfulfilled, and it is safer to limp with the foot of art than with the footprint of truth. For the liberty of eloquence is no excuse for the perpetration of sin. For if men shall be compelled to render account for every idle word which they have spoken (Matt. xii, 36), it is readily recognized that this wounds more perilously, which, being handled and pondered and set above the laws of living, is presumed under the law of speaking.