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As then we were anxious to learn from his teaching, we came in some
agitation to his cell towards evening. And after a short silence he began
to commend our undertaking, because we had left our homes, and had visited
so many countries out of love for the Lord, and were endeavouring with all
our might to endure want and the trials of the desert, and to imitate their
severe life, which even those who had been born and bred in the same state
of want and penury, could scarcely put up with; and we replied that we had
come for his teaching and instruction in order that we might be to some
extent initiated in the customs of so great a man, and in that perfection
which we had known from many evidences to exist in him, not that we might
be honoured by any commendations to which we had no right, or be puffed up
with any elation of mind, (with which we were sometimes exercised in our
own cells at the suggestion of our enemy) in consequence of any words of
his. Wherefore we begged him rather to lay before us what would make us
humble and contrite, and not what would flatter us and puff us up.
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