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BUT that you may be able fairly to measure the amount of your strength
by a certain test of strictness I will point out to you what was done by a
certain old man; viz., Abbot Apollos that if your secret scrutiny of
your heart decides that you are not behind this man in purpose and
goodness, you may venture on remaining in your country and living near your
kinsfolk without detriment to your purpose or injury to your mode of life,
and be sure that neither the feeling of nearness nor your love for the
district can interfere with the strictness of this humble lot, which not
only your own will but the needs also of your pilgrimage enforce upon you
in this country. When then his own brother had come to this old man, whom
we have mentioned, in the dead of night, begging him to come out for a
little while from his monastery, to help him to rescue an ox, which as he
sadly complained had stuck in the mire of a swamp a little way off, because
he could not possibly rescue it alone, Abbot Apollos stolidly replied to
his entreaties: "Why did you not ask our younger brother who was nearer to
you as you passed by than I?" and when the other, thinking that he had
forgotten the death of his brother who had been long ago buried, and that
he was almost weak in his mind from excessive abstinence and continual
solitude, replied: "How could I summon one who died fifteen years ago?"
Abbot Apollos said: "Don't you know that I too have been dead to this world
for twenty years, and that I can't from my tomb in this cell give you any
assistance in what belongs to the affairs of this present life? And Christ
is so far from allowing me ever so little to relax my purpose of
mortification on which I have entered, for extricating your ox, that He did
not even permit the very shortest intermission of it for my father's
funeral, which would have been undertaken much more readily properly and
piously." And so do ye now search out the secrets of your breast and
carefully consider whether you also can continually preserve such
strictness of mind with regard to your kinsfolk, and when you find that you
are like him in this mortification of soul, then at last you may know that
in the same way the neighbourhood of your kinsfolk and brothers will not
hurt you, when, I mean, you hold that though they are very close to you,
you are dead to them, in such a way that you suffer neither them to be
benefited by your assistance, nor yourselves to be relaxed by duties
towards them.
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