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| Chapter XVII. The duties of youth, and examples suitable to that age, are next put forth.
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Chapter XVII.
The duties of youth, and examples suitable to that age,
are next put forth.
65. Since it has
been made sufficiently plain that there will be punishment for
wickedness and reward for virtue, let us proceed to speak of the duties
which have to be borne in mind from our youth up,108
that they may grow with our years.109
| 109 Thus the
Benedictine edition reads; most others have: “accrescant
simul studia bonorum actuum.” | A good youth ought to have a fear of
God, to be subject to his parents, to give honour to his elders, to
preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love
forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful
years. For as seriousness is the true grace of an old man, and
ardour of a young man, so also is modesty, as though by some gift of
nature, well set off in a youth.
66. Isaac feared the Lord, as was indeed but
natural in the son of Abraham; being subject also to his father to such
an extent that he would not avoid death in opposition to his
father’s will.110
Joseph also,
though he dreamed that sun and moon and stars made obeisance to him,
yet was subject to his father’s will with ready
obedience.111
So chaste was
he, he would not hear even a word unless it were pure; humble was he
even to doing the work of a slave, modest, even to taking flight,
enduring, even to bearing imprisonment, so forgiving of wrong as even
to repay it with good. Whose modesty was such, that, when seized
by a woman, he preferred to leave his garment in her hands in flight,
rather than to lay aside his modesty.112
Moses,113
also, and
Jeremiah,114
chosen by the Lord
to declare the words of God to the people, were for avoiding, through
modesty, that which through grace they could do.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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