That you blame me for not having brought to your notice the royal conference — I had reserved it for my meeting with you when the festival was over: because in truth the prolixity and perplexity of the debate does not allow all things to be shown to you in order by written service. For as much as I think I perceived in the mind of my lord, your father, a contest rages in his zeal beneath a feigned front of leisure. For that which we believed to have been laid aside with its animosity, tempered by silence, was in fact seeking a sudden opportunity rather than rest: it did not cease during the past brevity of the truce, but lay hidden.
So much so that not even the very weapons of contention, which had, as it were, already failed in our region, need be demanded from without, nor does the fervor of his meditation wait until the return of his legates. Therefore, as I was returning from the journey you know of, and meanwhile supposing nothing about propositions of this kind, whatever a shrewd industry had over a long space labored to plow through the most tangled knots of questions of falsehood was stirred up. The discussion burns, vigorous with a lengthy disputation; yet he remained placid, inserting nothing of turbulent commotion from the haughtiness of domineering; but he took care prudently, the opportunity of necessity and of the matter being provided, that whatever the outcome of the contention might be, he might not suffer the one overcome to blush with shame. Why say more?
Without boasting I say to you freely: to the propositions, as much as it seems to me, whatever — had you heard it — could have pleased was suggested. Which indeed I fear satisfied the judgment of the hearer more than it pleased his zeal. But when, God granting, I shall have merited your presence, I will myself set forth the whole sequence of the altercation. Meanwhile, gather the course of the discourse from its end, and from what he charged me as I was departing estimate whether he was moved toward my responses. For he commanded that whatever testimony from our Scriptures I had brought forward to the questions — or, if anything else had perhaps occurred to me — I should transmit to him, noted down and set in order according to the several points I had fitted at the time of the conference.
And since he declared this for the most part unknown to him, he simply added that I should have sent what was thus written to the priests — nay rather to the seducers, or, to speak yet more truly, to his sectaries. Hence your piety can conjecture that, although he is an intent gainsayer, yet a wise arbiter, those things did not seem to him weak or without force, by which the intention of his own followers — even if he does not wish it corrected — he desires to be worn down. But I, though knowing how much (by divine command too) one must not yield, even to kings, for the sake of truth, wavered long in doubt whether I should obey:
knowing, and certainly fearing the man's temper, that I should never satisfy him by these things, and that he must be guarded against no less than an enemy, while the hostile battle-line surrounds private hatreds with a public siege. But by the height of eminence, the zeal of religion, and the privilege of authority in which — God granting — you prevail, drive off the discord walled up like a sea; and the wars raging in the camps, as though across the plains of Emathia, scatter these more-than-civil wars. For since we have long been wearied by a doubled weight — both by the complaint of those crying out and by the hardness of those who will not hear — it is fair, if you deign, that your severity too should either take counsel there for those to be chastised, or here have compassion on those who blush for shame.