Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 515

The preacher of the almighty Lord, the apostle Paul, says: 'Rebuke not an elder' (1 Timothy 5:1). But this rule of his must be observed in the case where the elder's fault does not by its example drag down the hearts of the younger to ruin. But where an elder offers to the young an example that leads to ruin, there he must be struck with sharp rebuke. For it is written: 'A snare are the young men, all of you' (Isaiah 42:22). And again the prophet says: 'And the sinner of a hundred years shall be accursed' (Isaiah 65:20). Now so great a wickedness

has come to my ears concerning your old age, that, did we not still weigh it with human compassion, we would have struck it with a firm curse. For it was told me that on the Lord's Day, before you had celebrated the solemn rites of the Mass, you went out to reap the harvest of the bearer of these presents, and after reaping it you then celebrated the solemn Mass. And after the solemn Mass you did not even fear to grub up the boundary-markers of that man's property. What punishment ought to follow such a deed, all who hear it know. We had been in doubt about so great a perversity as this; but our son Cyriacus the abbot, questioned by us while he was at Cagliari, declared that he had come to know it to be so.

And because we still spare your grey hairs, we exhort you: repent at last, old man, and restrain yourself from so great a levity of conduct and perversity of deeds. The nearer you draw to death, the more anxious and fearful you ought to become. And indeed a sentence of punishment ought to have been hurled against you; but because we know your simplicity together with your old age, we keep silence for the present. But those by whose counsel you did these things we have decreed to be excommunicated for two months, yet so that, if anything should befall them in human wise within the space of two months, they shall not be deprived of the blessing of the viaticum. Henceforth, however, keep yourself wary of their counsels;

and guard yourself carefully, lest, if you become a disciple to them in evil, to whom you ought to have been a master in good, we spare no longer either your simplicity or your old age (Cf. John the Deacon, Book III, chapters 32, 44).