Throughout the whole time of my life I acknowledge that I have delighted in the service of confession; but more earnestly at the present festival, which occupies your solicitude no less in examining the attempts of the heretics than in celebrating the observances of our own party. For since, through a certain yearly contagion, the adversaries have gathered, it must be attended to by you with careful labor, lest by the fraud of another's cunning that spring up again which by God's name your victory has now, though its strength be cut down, been celebrated—albeit, Christ being favorable, it stands against you who are present [another reading: it stands off]. Hence, pressed the more by that solicitude, is the throng of Geneva, which, after the manner of its first origin, has piped into manly minds the venom of serpents with the hiss of womanish speech.
Wherefore, if I deserve it, I desire as soon as possible to know this: whether, with the lord your father of clemency, there has arisen any mention of that arrangement which, contending between Catholics and Arians, admitted the plague of the good roused from the infernal hiding-places; or whether there still survives the guile of that credulity—nay, of that dissimulation—which, not impressed upon minds but scratched upon little papers, gradually recalls to the ancient cruelty of its dogma by a lettered promise. If indeed this is still, as it had begun, mingled by communion with the Arian society, then our triumph shines the more glorious under your rule; since, with two heresies reduced into one, and with you both gaining and convicting, both the number of the schismatics and of the schisms decreases.
Hence, then, look graciously upon the service of my curiosity, and from the feasts of your own peculiar patron the apostle, double the gifts both of our hoped-for prosperity and of your greeting.