When I recounted these and similar things, you regretted having accepted the episcopate, which, just as it gives luster to its administrator if he discharges it rightly, so it condemns the one who despises it. In short, when you wished to abandon the Church entrusted to you, as though unequal to governing it, and to withdraw into some solitude, not so much from a desire for quiet as from despair over your very office, no other consideration compelled you to change your resolve for the better except that you feared to incur a greater peril: for if it is dangerous not to steer a ship carefully amid the waves, how much more dangerous is it to abandon her, tossing in the tempest while the swelling waters rise?
Just as it is better not to embark upon her, so once she has been undertaken it is fitting—the fear of the surging sea cast aside, and the hope of arrival conceived—to bring her safely into port without any loss of cargo. Since this comparison pleased you, I added: And therefore the Church, which like a great ship sails across the sea of this world, which is buffeted in this life by the diverse waves of temptations, which is tossed this way and that by the persecutions of unclean spirits as though by certain stormy billows, which is dashed against the shoaling rocks of scandals, which is encompassed by sandbanks that threaten to run her aground—she must not be abandoned, but governed:
for just as, when steered by the vigilance of her helmsman, she brings unharmed all whom she carries, so, if she be submerged by the waves or broken apart, she will lose not only all whom she holds but even the helmsman himself.