do alms with a good and acceptable intent to those who are sick, or to those who have lost their riches and become poor, and that though he giveth his gift in a niggardly manner, and may murmur [at the expense] and wax wroth, his motive in giving will be found to be a right one. Now the deed is not [to be thought] equal to the motive. For it is right for the man who would shew mercy to make his gift gladly and with a good eye.”
And they also spoke the following: “There is a difference between the gifts which exist in various souls. Some of them possess keenness of mind, and some of them find it exceedingly easy and simple to acquire the habits of ascetic self-denial, or to do that which is difficult for other souls to do; but when a man maketh use of [his] gift of keenness of mind without a good object for so doing, or when he exerteth his faculty of performing things because it is easy for him to do so, or when men exercise the gifts which they have received, they do not ascribe, as would be right, the correctness of their spiritual excellences unto God, but to their own desire, and to their own keenness of mind. And those to whom it is sufficient to perform fair works are permitted by the Divine Providence to be caught in a snare, either by filthy deeds or filthy passions, or by the contempt or by the disgrace which cometh unto them from the children of men, so that through the shame and the contempt which [they receive] from the multitude they may little by little and by degrees cast away from them their boasting about the spiritual excellence which they imagine they possess.
For he who is inflated and unduly exalted at the keenness of speech [which he possesseth] doth not ascribe to God, as is right, such keenness, or the discovery of the knowledge which is from Him, but to his own training, forsooth, or to his own naturally keen disposition; [therefore] doth God remove from him the Angel of His Divine Providence, and the Angel being separated from him, this man is immediately vanquished by his Adversary, and he who was [unduly] lifted up in his keenness [of mind and speech] falleth into lasciviousness, or into some kind of filthy passion, because he was [unduly] exalted. And because he was lifted up, and because the witness of chastity hath separated himself from him, the things which are said by him become unworthy of credence, and those who fear God flee from the teaching of the mouth of the man who is in this condition, even as they would flee from a fountain which is full of leeches, so that there may be fulfilled that which is written, ‘Unto the sinner God saith, What hast thou to do with the Books of My Commandments?
