Although I compassionate with all my heart the labors of your Charity, which you have undertaken for the observance of the Catholic faith, and take those things which were inflicted upon you by the heretics no otherwise than as if I myself had endured them, I nevertheless understand that there is more of joy than of grief, that — the Lord Jesus Christ strengthening you — you have stood insuperable in the evangelical and apostolic doctrine. And when the enemies of the Christian faith drove you from the see of your Churches, you preferred to suffer the injury of exile rather than to be defiled by any contagion of their impiety. Wherefore, directing a letter to our most Christian prince, I gave thanks to his piety, that he received you — as was indicated to us — with that charity of which it was worthy.
By whose benevolence I do not doubt that this confidence has been conferred upon you, that for the state of the universal Church you may be able constantly to carry out what things are to be done; because his clemency also burns with priestly affection for defending the decrees of the holy Synod of Chalcedon, and nothing more wholesome and more blessed can be furnished to the whole world than that the sacrament disposed before the ages be preserved inviolably through all things, in ecclesiastical peace and in royal.
Each one of you, therefore, whom the same mind and the same cause of the faith has joined together, or who, despising the persecution of the heretics, followed you out of Egypt with unwearied ardor of faith, I exhort with both brotherly and fatherly affection, that with an even and strong mind you may endure these trials; recognizing that you have not lost your own, but have merited greater things, whose brief weariness — by which one arrives at the crowns of the confessors — the providence of God so employs, that through your patience the devotion of many may be strengthened, and that, with the glory of the venerable prince, the Alexandrian Church, the heretics being driven off, may recover its ancient dignity. Given on the fifth day before the Ides of October, in the consulship of Constantine and Rufus.