While an unceasing care for the faith and welfare of friends is mine, lately, solicitous among the first tidings of your prosperity, I learned what, as a Catholic bishop familiar with you, I ought not to keep silent: yet the fruit of a reward thus acquired in you I am able to heap up not so much by words as by joys. For unless the reins of a most temperate modesty, with senatorial maturity, restrained you from your own proclamation, perhaps the tongue would worthily praise before your own people the effect of the glorious contest, which marvelously convicts your adversaries. You had, then, as I hear, a conference with the king, from which — so far as I have ascertained, because they did not conduct themselves by gentle means — you passed to battle. By divine nod there was discussed the one who, long known to heaven, might now appear also to men as a defender of religion.
The mouth accustomed to the pomps of secular eloquence, and watered by the overflowing streams of Romulean profundity, seized with due alacrity the theme of worthy disputation sent to it from on high: and the eloquence which, when it took part, was patron either to the delights of describing the world or to the proclamations of royal triumphs, when first the better cause demanded, was not ashamed to serve the establishing of truth. And so, just as elsewhere by praising the king you rendered to Caesar what was Caesar's, so here, in order to render to God the things that are God's, you did not spare Caesar either. Wherefore royal power has here in you something to marvel at, even if it does not follow — power which, at times when you were declaiming, now more evidently perceives itself adorned.
Since that you know not the enticement of flattery, when the matter admonished, you showed even by resisting. Let the wisdom of the powers, therefore, mark those men as able easily to change faith in human affairs, whom they see to prefer earthly things to divine. For the rest, it is readily to be known that the guardian of the first parts will preserve also those which remain. These things, then, are said when we treat of the secular part. But if one comes to the cause of priests — whose school you do not yet increase, whose injury you endure, and whom you first form by example, to be adorned by fellowship — which of these, which, I say, would not know that you have come to the contest of this spiritual wrestling-school, not raw or ignorant of the law, but through a long gymnasium of saving meditations?
Wherefore let it be new to others, that you begin the necessity of this war from the perfection of virtue; but I, in whose soul you hold the citadel of charity, had already long ago recognized without hesitation that, for beholding Catholic thoughts through study and for defending them through the word, to the tested ardor of devotion in you not so much desires as opportunities were lacking. Wherefore, the homage of a salutation being offered, and signifying that I too am refreshed by the food with which you have satisfied your mind while your body fasted — whence this little congratulation of my satiety breaks forth — I beg of God what remains: that on him whom He has already laid the office of a preacher, He may add the honor; and that what is exercised in act may be shown also in habit; and that the chair may receive him not docile but learned, not a learner but a teacher.
In which chair — like a conspicuous conqueror bound with the garlands of victorious glory, amid the voices resounding in unison with the joy of the acclaiming crowd — however greatly you rise up upon the shield, even the enemy proven by experience, however unwilling, will assent, never finding anything to contradict concerning the quality of your merit, but ever having, concerning the inequality of the battle, something to fear.