Letter 1111: The priesthood is a sacred trust, not a career.
To Posidianus. Injustice is indeed an evil; but the injustice one inflicts is an evil bearing its own sentence, whereas the injustice one suffers is far less severe. For the former is a matter of the will and choice of the one who commits it, carrying certain punishment; the latter, however, takes nothing essential from the one wronged, and actually confirms the wrong done. Therefore let us neither commit injustice, nor, if we happen to be treated unjustly, return injustice with injustice.
On Paul's saying: "They profess to know God, but by their works they deny him." You are in danger, wise friend, of not knowing what everyone knows. For you have written asking what it means: "They profess to know God, but by their works they deny him." The meaning is clear: those who confess God with their lips but deny him by their conduct are the worst kind of deceivers. Their hypocrisy compounds their wickedness, for it adds the sin of pretense to the sin of disobedience. The person who openly denies God at least possesses a certain consistency; but the one who professes faith while living contrary to it makes a mockery of the very truth he claims to uphold. Such a person's confession becomes his condemnation, for he testifies against himself by the contradiction between his words and his deeds. Therefore let your life speak louder than your lips, for actions are the true measure of belief.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
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Revision history
- 2026-03-20v2.1.0-import
Initial corpus import from Patrologia Graeca 78 OCR.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://archive.org/details/PatrologiaGraeca
Related Letters
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