Sermons & Letters 118

We have come to this supreme empire by the providence of God and the choice of the most excellent senate and of the whole army. Wherefore, on behalf of the reverend and catholic religion of the Christians' faith—by the aids of whose virtues we trust that the powers of our sovereignty are governed—we believe that your holiness, possessing the primacy in the episcopate of the divine faith, ought at the outset to be addressed with sacred letters: inviting and asking that, for the firmness and stability of our empire, your holiness would beseech the eternal Divinity, so that we may have such a purpose and desire, that—every impious error being removed, through a synod to be celebrated at your instigation—the greatest peace may come to be among all the bishops of the catholic faith, standing pure and unstained from every crime.

Done at Constantinople, in the seventh consulship of our lord Valentinian Augustus, perpetual father, and of Avienus, most illustrious.