Abbot John’s Last Words

When the same old man lay at his last breath, as one gladly going home to his own, the brothers stood around him. They begged and pleaded that he would leave them, as a kind of legacy, some special charge by which they could reach the height of perfection, all the more easily because the charge was short. He sighed and said, “I never did my own will, and I never taught anyone what I had not first done myself.”