Letter 237

237. To Eusebius, bishop of Samosata.

I both wrote to your Reverence through the vicar of Thrace, and I wrote other letters by a certain superintendent of the treasuries at Philippopolis who was crossing from our country into Thrace, and I asked him to take them up when he set off. But the vicar did not receive our letters. For while we were going round on visitation through the parish, he reached the city in the evening and rode away again at deep dawn, so that the stewards of the church did not learn of the man's arrival, and so the letters remained with us. And the superintendent, perhaps held back by some unwished-for circumstance, set off without either taking up the letters or seeing us. And there was no one else to be found. Hence we remained in distress, that we can neither write to you nor receive letters from your Reverence. And yet I wished, if it were possible for me, to announce to you the things that befall us day by day. For so many and so strange are these matters that they require the record of a daybook—which indeed I have composed, be assured, except that, by the continual press of what befalls me, my reckonings are knocked off the things before me.

A vicar arrived among us—the first and greatest of our troubles. Whether the man is also a heretic in mind, I do not know (for I think him without experience of any argument, and that he has no zeal or study about such matters; for I see him occupied in other things, soul and body, night and day), but he is at any rate fond of heretics, loving them no more than he hates us. For he convened, in the middle of winter, a synod of men who set the faith aside, in Galatia; and he expelled Hypsis and set up Ecdicius in his place. And he ordered my brother to be brought in by force, accused by a single man, and that an obscure one. Then, after busying himself a little about the imperial court, he came upon us again breathing anger and slaughter, and with one voice handed over all the clergy of the church in Caesarea to the council; and at Sebasteia he sat for many days dividing men by class, naming as councillors those who are in communion with us, and condemning them to the service of public duties, while he surrounded those attached to Eustathius with the greatest honours.

Again he ordered a synod of Galatians and Pontics to be convened near Nyssa. And they obeyed, and, running together, sent to the churches a man whom I would not choose to describe, but your prudence may guess what kind of man it is likely to be who serves the purposes of such men. And now, as I write this, this same body has set off for Sebasteia, to join Eustathius and with him to overthrow the affairs of the Nicopolitans. For the blessed Theodotus has fallen asleep. And for a while they repelled the vicar's first assaults nobly and stoutly; for he tried to persuade them to receive Eustathius and through him to take a bishop; but when he saw that they would not willingly yield, he is now trying to install the one given them with a more violent hand. And there is a rumour, too, of an expected synod, at which they intend to summon us and either receive us into communion or use their accustomed methods. Such, then, is the state of the churches. As for myself, how I am in body, I think it better to be silent than to write, since by telling the truth I shall grieve you, and to lie I cannot endure.