1.  I have received the letter of your holiness, by the most reverend brother Helenius, and what you have intimated he has told me in plain terms.  How I felt on hearing it, you cannot doubt at all.  However, since I have determined that my affection for you shall outweigh my pain, whatever it is, I have accepted it as I ought to do, and I pray the holy God, that my remaining days or hours may be as carefully conducted in their disposition towards you as they have been in past time, during which, my conscience tells me, I have been wanting to you in nothing small or great.  [But that the man who boasts that he is now just beginning to take a look at the life of Christians, and thinks he will get some credit by having something to do with me, should invent what he has not heard, and narrate what he has never experienced, is not at all surprising.  What is surprising and extraordinary is that he has got my best friends among the brethren at Nazianzus to listen to him; and not only to listen to him, but as it seems, to take in what he says.  On most grounds it might be surprising that the slanderer is of such a character, and that I am the victim, but these troublous times have taught us to bear everything with patience.  Slights greater than this have, for my sins, long been things of common occurrence with me.  I have never yet given this man’s brethren any evidence of my sentiments προαιρέσεως , as in three mss. about God, and I have no answer to make now.  Men who are not convinced by long experience are not likely to be convinced by a short letter.  If the former is enough let the charges of the slanderers be counted as idle tales.  But if I give license to unbridled mouths, and uninstructed hearts, to talk about whom they will, all the while keeping my ears ready to listen, I shall not be alone in hearing what is said by other people; they will have to hear what I have to say.]