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Longer Rules

St Basil the Great, tr. Lowther Clarke, 1925

Rule 53: How Instructors in Arts are to Correct Delinquent Boys

Those who teach crafts, when their pupils’ sin concerns the craft itself, must rebuke the fault themselves and correct the errors. But whatever sins argue moral perversion, such as disobedience and answering back, slothfulness at work, idle talk, falsehood, or whatever else of this sort is forbidden to the religious,¹ such they must correct by taking the offenders to the superintendent of the common discipline, so that the amount and manner of the healing of their sins may be devised by him. For if rebuke is a doctoring of the soul, it is not every man’s duty to rebuke, any more than to be a doctor, but only the duty of him to whom the Superior himself has entrusted it after full examination.

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