I greatly wonder that the person on whose behalf you deign to intercede, while I was at Lyons, alone denied the crime which the whole community was loudly proclaiming, and afterwards came to such repentance as to supplicate you for pardon. But if he asks it in plain earnest, it is clear that the man confesses even the whole sequence of his guilt. Wherefore, although in all cases, out of the regard you bestow on me, I am not free to do anything other than you command, yet I cannot—since it has so seemed good to you—grant remission before first setting out at length the thing I grieve over. For your piety knows, and has often heard read in church, how many degrees the divine Scripture sets forth within the very evil of adultery.
By a first lapse of fornication he sinned, who, inflamed with lust, sought after a woman lacking a marriage-bond. By a second and worse, who by a theft damnable above all things violated the chastity of an unwedded bed. And since the human mind reckons nothing graver than this wrong, do you conjecture how the chastity of heavenly justice is stirred, if—to say nothing further—he even wantonly looked upon a bride devoted to Christ and endowed with blessing in the bridal-chamber of the holy altar. Yet I hear the young man himself say that he did not violate a virgin, since the carnality of many others had earlier abused her shameful vows.
Wherefore, since nothing but his own satisfaction and your intercession can free one guilty of a manifest crime, it cannot be told how wretched a thing it is that, for his own reconciliation, he confesses the crimes of others. In this regard I accuse the priestly negligence of our time. We do not go seeking out these things: the unexplored magnitude of crimes offers itself to us. Who would seek a partner in evils? Who would insert himself into others' stains? Would that his own obscenity had at least so restrained itself as to remain hidden. Then let him choose which of the two he wills. If he first sinned in the flesh against the girl, there still awaits him what the Apostle foretells: If any man violate the temple of God, God shall destroy him (1 Cor. 3:17).
But if he aggravated by increase a corruption he had not begun, what more shameful, what more horrible can be devised, than that not even this should keep him back from a harlot—the very thing for which alone God permits a man to be separated from his wife? Nor, if you consider, am I the only one moved on this account. The devout parents groan at the crime committed, and, mourning as it were a lost offspring, profess their bereavement in laments. What shall I say of the mother's grief, whom the aforesaid husband's shameful life has this long while widowed, worse than any death? And although accustomed to be stirred by intercourse, yet he had patiently borne to be a son without filial love, a husband without offspring, a father without heir:
and there was moreover nourished by his zeal a noble evil, though sprung from well-born adulterers; yet in such wise that in the birth of that longed-for portent there is no increase of lineage, but a proof of infamy. And indeed, saving the defense which God has granted me in you, I dread the guilt of the aforesaid man more than his penance. But I beg him not to be angered with the one who says these things. I am a watchman, I hold the trumpet, it is not permitted me to be silent. And would that he had sinned with a human mind, which is wont to slip through frailty and to return through satisfaction: but to burn with wrath, to swell with pride, to reek with lasciviousness—that is bovine.
Wherefore, though he vomit forth diverse flames against me again, and perhaps summon me to the hearing of the Roman Church, and, if it still please him, even say that I have sons, I will neither appease his threats with flattery, nor fear the weariness of journeys—I who am wearied more by civic charges in my homeland—nor will I deny that I have many sons, I who already grieve to have brought forth one of them. And indeed error has wrung these few words from me. But you, to whom by the privilege of the highest power a greater capacity of chastising is available, rebuke the man forcefully. Make known to him my reconciliation, since you so command; and proclaim that I will take care that this evil be not renewed either by commands or by messengers:
so that from him, if not by correcting through his own will, then at least by restraining through custody, the opportunity of fault may be plucked away, if the wholesomeness of penance cannot be brought to persuade him.