The Young Should Not Debate the Elders’ Orders

So if, as we believe, it is God’s cause that has drawn you to try to copy what we know, you must set aside entirely all the rules in which your early beginnings were trained. With all humility you must follow whatever you see our elders do or teach. Do not be troubled, or drawn away and turned aside from imitating it, even if for the moment the cause or reason of some deed or action is not clear to you. For when men think well and simply of everything, and are eager to copy faithfully whatever they see taught or done by their elders instead of arguing about it, the knowledge of all things follows through experience of the work.

But the man who begins to learn by arguing will never enter into the reason of the truth. The enemy sees that he trusts his own judgment rather than the judgment of the fathers, and easily urges him on until the very things that are most useful and helpful seem to him unnecessary or harmful. The crafty foe plays on his presumption so well that, by obstinately clinging to his own opinion, he persuades himself that nothing is holy except what he himself, in his pig-headed error, thinks good and right.