Letter 106: Here is another laying before you a letter, of which, if the truth may be said, you are the cause yourself, for you provoke them by the honour you do them. Here too is another petitioner for you, a prisoner of fear, our kinsman Eustratius, who with us and by us entreats your goodness, inasmuch as he cannot endure to be in perpetual rebellion aga...
Gregory to a patron.
Here is yet another letter laid before you -- and if the truth be told, you are the cause of it yourself, for the honor you show to my petitions only encourages more of them. Here too is another petitioner: our kinsman Eustratius, a prisoner of fear who needs your protection.
I commend him to your care. What you do for him, you do for me -- and what you do for me, you do for God, who rewards every act of mercy with a mercy greater still.
Human translation — New Advent (NPNF / ANF series)
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The time is swift, the struggle great, and my sickness severer, reducing me almost to immovability. What is left but to pray to God, and to supplicate your kindness, the one, that He will incline your mind to gentler counsels, the other that you will not roughly dismiss our intercession, but will receive kindly the wretched Paulus, whom justice ...
Ruricius, your humble client, to his holy patron —
Reply of St. Ambrose to the Memorial of Symmachus, in which after complimenting Valentinian he deals with three points of the Memorial. He replies to his opponent's personification of Rome in a singularly telling manner, and proves that the famine spoken of by Symmachus had nothing to do with the cessation of heathen rites.
Chapter 1. Memory may be exercised independently of such images as are presented by the imagination. 1.