I have read the books which you sent, brief in style, rich in learning, easy in the reading, perfect in instruction, equal to your mind and piety. Nor do I wonder that you composed so useful and beautiful a work chiefly for the instruction of holy and blessed offspring. For since you have built in them an excellent temple to God, you have adorned it, as it were, with the very summit of your building, by the teaching of a nine-fold erudition; and that these holy natures might be made illustrious by learning as well as by life, those whom you had formed by moral instruction you have graced by spiritual teaching. It remains that the Lord our God, by whose gift these most admirable young men are such as they are, may make them equal to your books—that is, that whatever those books contain in mystery, each of these two may possess in understanding.
And since now, by divine dispensation and judgment, they have even begun to be teachers of the Church, may the most kind piety of God grant this, that their teaching may be the fruit of the churches and yours, and that by a most excellent advancement they may adorn both him from whom they were begotten, and those whom they themselves shall have begotten by their own instruction. And to me too may the merciful God grant this—if not among all things, at least after all things—that those who were once my disciples may now daily be my intercessors. Farewell, my lord and my sweet one.