Letters26 Letter XXVI. To Guy, bishop of Lausanne (Circa A.D. 1130)

St Bernard of Clairvaux († 1153) · Epistolae · c. 1120-1153

Letter XXVI. To Guy, bishop of Lausanne (Circa A.D. 1130)

You have undertaken great things; you have need of courage. You have become a watcher for the house of Israel; you have need of prudence. You are a debtor both to the wise and unwise; you have need of righteousness.

Lastly, you have, above all, need of temperance and self-control, so that one who has preached to others may not become (which may God forbid!) a reprobate.

Manum vestram misistis ad fortia, opus est fortitudine. Speculator domui Israel factus estis; opus est prudentia. Sapientibus et insipientibus debitor estis, opus est justitia. Postremo maxime temperantia opus est: ne qui aliis praedicat, ipse (quod absit) reprobus fiat.

Samuel J. Eales (active by 1879; M.A., Principal of S. Boniface College, Warminster, in 1882), Life and Works of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, edited by Dom John Mabillon, vols. I-III, London: Burns & Oates / John Hodges, 1889-1896. Digital text: OCR of Internet Archive scans saintbernardlife00bernuoft, saintbernardlife02bernuoft, lifeworksofsaint03bern, word-repaired against second copies (lifeworksofsaint01bern, lifeworksofsaint02bern, LifeWorksOfSBernardClairvauxV3). Original text: Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich) TEI of the Patrologia Latina, via the CatholicCorpus mirror. Public domain in the US and Canada: published 1889-1896; translator active by 1879, an M.A. and principal in 1882; necessarily died before 1972. Latin: Migne, Patrologia Latina 182-183 (1854), public domain.