To Andrew, Bishop of Samosata, from Ephesus

I greet your holiness from Ephesus. I congratulate you on your illness, and I count you dear to God, because you have known the evil deeds that have been going on here only by report and not by your own experience. Evil indeed! They go beyond anything one could imagine and anything recorded in history. They force a constant flood of tears. The body of the church is in danger of being torn limb from limb. No, rather, I may say it has already received the first cut, unless the wise Healer restores and joins together again the unsound and severed limbs. Once again the Egyptian is raging against God and making war on Moses and Aaron his servants, and most of Israel is on the side of the enemy. For all too few are the sound, who willingly suffer for the sake of true religion. Ancient principles are trampled underfoot. Deposed men carry out priestly duties, and those who deposed them sit sighing at home. Men excommunicated by the same sentence as the deposed have, of their own accord, released the deposed from their deposition. Such is the mockery of a synod held by Egyptians, by Palestinians, by men from the dioceses of Pontus and Asia, and by the West in their company. [a] What mime actors in the days of paganism ever held religion up to such ridicule, even in any farce? Indeed, what writer of farces ever staged such a play? What dramatist ever wrote so sad a tragedy? Such and so great are the troubles that have beset God’s church, and I have told you only a very small part of them. [d]