Verse 10. — From the naked and those going about without clothing, and from the hungry, they took away the ears of grain. 66. Heretics take away the doctrine of the holy Fathers from the idle and the incautious. — What he said, 'from the naked,' this he repeats, 'without clothing'; but it is one thing to be naked, another to go about naked. For everyone who works neither good nor evil is naked and idle; but he who does evil goes about naked, because he proceeds without the covering of good work along the path of depravity. But there are some who, recognizing the evil of their wickedness, hasten to be satisfied with the bread of righteousness, and desire to receive the words of the sacred utterance. These, as often as they turn over the sentences of the Fathers in their thought for the building up of their minds, carry, as it were, ears of grain from a good field.
The heretics, therefore, take away the ears of grain from the naked and those going about without clothing and from the hungry, because whether certain persons are idle and exercise themselves in no good works, or proceed along the path of shamelessness without the covering of good work — even if at some time they now desire to return to penitence and long for the food of the word — the heretics take away the ears of grain from them as they hunger, because in their mind they destroy the sentences of the Fathers by pernicious persuasions. And not undeservedly do we say that ears of grain signify the sentences of the Fathers, because often, when they are brought forth through figurative expressions, we strip from them the covering of the letter as though it were the chaff of the husks, that we may be refreshed by the marrow of the spirit. There follows: