Chapter XIV.
How manual labour
978
prevents many faults.
And
so he loses no time in at
once applying a suitable remedy to the incentive to so many faults, and
laying aside that apostolic power of his which he had made use of a
little before, he adopts once more the tender character of a good
father, or of a kind physician, and, as if they were his children or
his patients, applies by his healing counsel remedies to cure them,
saying: “Now we charge them that are such, and beseech them by
the Lord Jesus, that working with silence they would eat their own
bread.” The cause of all these ulcers, which spring from the root
of idleness, he heals like some well-skilled physician by a single
salutary charge to work; as he knows that all the other bad symptoms,
which spring as it were from the same clump, will at once disappear
when the cause of the chief malady has been removed.
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The text of
Gazæus has
oratio
, but the reading which Petschenig gives,
operatio manuum
, is clearly so.