Those Who Do Not Live What They Have Learned

There are also some who search out spiritual teachings with shrewd care, but what they grasp with their understanding they trample on in their lives. They are quick to teach what they have learned by study, not by practice; and what they preach in words, they attack by their conduct. So it comes about that when the shepherd walks through steep places, the flock follows him over the cliff. That is why the Lord complains through the prophet about the contemptible knowledge of shepherds, saying, “When you yourselves had drunk the purest water, you fouled the rest with your feet; and my sheep fed on what your feet had trampled, and drank what your feet had fouled.” For the shepherds drink the purest water when they take in the streams of truth with a right understanding. But to foul that same water with their feet is to corrupt the studies of holy meditation by evil living. And truly the sheep drink the water fouled by their feet when those under them do not follow the words they hear, but only imitate the bad examples they see. They thirst for what is said, but they are corrupted by what they see done, and so they swallow mud with their drink, as from polluted springs. [a]

That is also why it is written through the prophet, “Evil priests are a snare for the downfall of my people.” And again the Lord says through the prophet about the priests, “They have become a stumbling block of iniquity to the house of Israel.” For certainly no one does more harm in the church than one who has the name and rank of holiness while he acts perversely. When he goes wrong, no one presumes to call him to account; and the fault spreads with force as an example, when the sinner is honored out of reverence for his rank. But all who are unworthy would flee from the burden of so great a guilt if they weighed, with the attentive ear of the heart, the sentence of the Truth: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him that a millstone were hung around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” The millstone stands for the round and toil of worldly life, and the depth of the sea stands for final damnation. Whoever, then, has come to wear the outward show of holiness and destroys others by word or example, it would truly have been better for him that earthly deeds, done in an openly worldly guise, should press him down to death, than that sacred offices should point him out to others as someone to imitate in his wrongdoing. For surely, if he fell alone, the pains of hell would torment him in a more bearable degree.