Gregory to Leander bishop of Hispalis (Seville). With what ardor I thirst to see you, because you love me greatly, you read in the tablets of your heart. But because, separated by a long stretch of lands, I cannot see you, I have done the one thing which charity dictated to me concerning you: that I should send to your Holiness, by the coming of our common son Probus the presbyter, the book of the Pastoral Rule, which I wrote at the beginning of my episcopate, and the books which you have known me to have made some time ago in exposition of the blessed Job. And indeed to your charity I have not sent the volumes of the third and fourth part in that work, because I have already given only the volumes of those same parts to the monasteries.
Let your Holiness, therefore, diligently peruse these, and still more diligently bewail my sins, lest it be to me the cause of a graver fault that I seem, as it were, to know what I neglect to do. But with how many tumults of affairs I am pressed in this Church, the very brevity of my letter to your charity makes known, since I speak but little to him whom I love more than all.