Let your ear now be attentive, and your eyes open, that you may hear the prayer of your servant, which I pray before you now, day and night, for the children of Israel your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against you: both I and my father's house have sinned.
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Bede
AD 735
And it came to pass, when Sanballat, Tobiah, Geshem the Arabian, and the rest of our enemies heard that I had built the wall, and the rest until they say: 'Come and let us make a pact together in calves on one plain'.3 But they were scheming to harm me. So I sent messengers to them saying : 'I am doing a great work and cannot go down, in case the work is neglected when I come and go down to you'.1 The enemies of the holy city are urging Nehemiah to go down to the plains and to enter into a peace pact with them by together slaughtering calves as testimony to the arranged treaty, but he perseveres in “362” the mountains so that the devout work is not neglected. So too, heretics and false Catholics want to have a fellowship of peace with true Catholics but with this stipulation, that they do not agree to ascend to the citadel of ecclesiastical faith or duty themselves, but rather they compel those whom they see dwelling on the peak of the virtues to go down to the lowest depths of wicked works or dogmas. And it is well that they want to enter into a pact with Nehemiah on one plain, doubtless because they desire that all those whom they are able to seduce be relaxed in the same freedom of the broader life that they themselves follow; and it is well that they wish to enter into a pact with him by together slaughtering calves, because false brethren are eager to offer the sacrifices of their prayer and action to God together with true Catholics, so that, when they are believed to be genuinely faithful, they might be able to corrupt these same true Catholics through the proximity of their association. But Nehemiah, representing the person of faithful teachers, by no means agrees to go down to the impious nor /925/ to be defiled with their sacrifices but remains devout in the virtuous works he has undertaken; and the more severely his enemies tried to frighten him, the more he himself strove to become terrifying to these same enemies by doing a good work. For this reason, it is said in what follows:
