Moralia in Job 462

Verse 3.—'For thee alone shall men hold their peace, and when thou hast mocked others, shalt thou be confuted by no man?' 3. How the depraved and the upright are diversely affected toward reproof.—The unskilled mind, as we have said, grievously bears the sentences of truth, and thinks silence a punishment, and judges everything that is rightly said to be the disgrace of its own mockery, because when the true voice of the depraved moves itself to their ears, guilt bites the memory, and, in the refutation of vices, in proportion as the mind is inwardly touched by recognition, it is outwardly stirred up to the zeal of contradiction. It cannot bear the voice, because, touched in the wound of its own guilt, it grieves, and by this—that it is spoken generally against the perverse—it suspects itself to be assailed specially.

For what it remembers to have done within, it blushes to hear without. Whence it soon prepares itself for defence, that it may cover the shame of its own guilt by words of depraved refutation. For just as the upright esteem the voice of correction concerning certain things not rightly done by them a ministry of charity, so the perverse think it the insult of derision. The former prostrate themselves at once to obedience, the latter rise up to the madness of their own defence. The former reckon the help of correction the patronage of their own life, whereby, while the fault of the present life is corrected, the wrath of the coming Judge is tempered;

the latter, when they perceive themselves assailed by refutation, believe it the sword of percussion, because while the fault is uncovered through the voice of correction, the opinion of present glory is defiled. Hence indeed in praise of the just, Truth says through Solomon: 'Teach a just man, and he will make haste to receive it' (Proverbs ix, 10). Hence it despises the contumacy of the depraved, saying: 'He that instructeth a scorner doth himself an injury' (Ibid., 7). For it often comes to pass that, when they cannot defend the evils rebuked in themselves, out of shame they become worse; and so they grow proud in their own defence, that they seek out certain vices against the life of the one correcting them; and they think themselves not criminal, if they impute crimes to others also.

And when they cannot find these true, they feign them, so that they too may have wherewith they seem to reproach with no unequal justice. Whence also Sophar, because he grieved as it were to be derided through rebuke, straightway subjoins by lying: