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288 which comes to their aid and prevents in families those strifes from which nature shrinks. She easily checks dissensions between friends, and persuades them to kindly and friendly intercourse. As for those who have the same thoughts concerning God and divine things, although distance separate them, and they never behold each other, she unites them and identifies them in thought, and makes true friends of them, and if perchance one of them should too inconsiderately raise accusations against the other, she cures the evil, sets all things to right, and rivets the bond of union."

This picture of the benefits of charity was intended for Nicholas, who had not practised it toward Photius, but had shown an excessive eagerness to rebuke him. The Patriarch of Constantinople continues:

"It is this charity that has made me bear without difficulty the reproaches that your paternal Holiness has hurled at me like darts; that has forbidden me to consider your words as the results of anger or of a soul greedy of insults and enmities; that on the contrary has made me regard them as the proof of an affection which cannot dissimulate, and of a scrupulous zeal for ecclesiastical discipline, a zeal that would have every thing perfect. For if charity will not permit us even to consider evil as wrong, how shall she permit us to call any thing wrong? Such is the nature of true charity, that she will even regard as an intended benefit that which causes us pain. But since there is no reason why truth should not be spoken between brothers or fathers and sons, (for what is there more friendly than truth?) let me speak and write to you with perfect freedom, not from a desire to contradict you, but with intent to defend myself.

"Perfect as you are, you should have considered at the outset that it was quite against our will that we were placed under this yoke, and therefore have had pity upon