ℹ️ This corpus has no morphological tagging. Glosses are matched by word form against a dictionary — a match does not prove it is the same word (an inflected form can coincide with another word’s lemma). Verify against the original and a specialist lexicon where precision matters.
ℹ️ The Chinese and English alongside are this site's own translation, made directly from the original text on this page (not the CUV or the WEB, which follow the Masoretic Text and a different textual tradition).
Lately, when according to the custom of the apostolic festival I dispatched to your eminence the offices ever due, you replied in a discourse no less precious in courtesy than conspicuous in declamation, saying that you had for this reason given your rescript the more slowly, that my humility, conscious of itself—which rightly refrains from the boldness of writing—might the longer pay the penalties of its dryness, the more it thirsted for the splendid fountain of your address. Judging it, as you deign to write, a kind of revenge that the bearer, dispatched by me too slowly, should tarry the longer with you. O most caressing recompense of vengeance! O sentence of a cruelty to be wished for! Who indeed could bear so intolerable a punishment with equanimity, as to see you, shut up in the paradise of your presence, with a more blessed delay?
I plainly fear lest you should frequently bid me write, if you resolve to avenge slowness in such a manner. Or if I were certain that I should be punished with a chastisement of this kind, I myself would without doubt hold out writings which I had penned more rarely than was just. And would that it were denied me, while placed with you, to return with speed: and that the words which I read after a long time, I might longer be granted to hear upon the very path of their course. Surely God will see what, before your judgment, I may merit—whether by the boldness of my service or by the trembling of it: yet I shall be guilty toward the bearers of my office, if I am convicted of the fault of having handed them over for the length of your presence to be amended.