Letter 89: Theodore Studite, Letter 89; Greek heading: Εὐσχήμονι Λαμψάκου.

I have learned that your Holiness has been seized by the persecutors; and this too is of [God's] providence, that through your confession the Church of God may also be supported and made firm against the earthquake of impiety that has overtaken it. For you see, O dear friend, what the calamities are: how the unconquered, drawn from all the [ecclesiastical] ranks, are by now nearly few enough to count, while all the rest lie prostrate. Oh, the wrath that has been kindled! Oh, the relapse into the ways of old! We have become as we were at the beginning, when the order of the Church had been taken away and the law of God scattered to pieces. Such are the present things: pitiable, gloomy; altars outraged through the dishonoring of the holy icons [eikones, the sacred images of Christ and the saints], temples profaned through the accursed priests. What need is there to multiply words? Christ is dishonored and persecuted through the rejection of His sacred image [charakter, the imprinted likeness]. And if [it goes] thus with Christ, what of the Theotokos [the God-bearer, the Virgin Mary] or of any whatsoever of the servants of God? These are matters for laments and wailings; these things were once made to ring in our ears by our own fathers, who knew by experience the things that had befallen in those times, and now they stand before us also, the lowly ones, grieving us exceedingly. But lift up, O father, your hands toward your heaven; but make God propitious; but stretch out an intercessory right hand to me also, the feeble and sinful one, that we may bear with joy all that Christ may grant us to suffer for His sake, not fearing, as God commands, those who are able to kill the body, but Him who has the power to cast both this and the soul into the unquenchable fire of Gehenna.