On food and drink. Let the food of monks be plain and taken in the evening, avoiding satiety, and their drink avoiding drunkenness: so that it may both sustain and not harm. Let it be vegetables, pulse, flour mixed with water, with a small biscuit of bread, lest the belly be burdened and the mind choked. For provision is to be made only for usefulness and need, by those who long for eternal rewards; and therefore the use is to be tempered just as labor is to be tempered: for this is true discretion, that the possibility of spiritual progress be retained together with an abstinence that mortifies the flesh. For if abstinence exceeds measure, it will be a vice, not a virtue: for virtue sustains and contains many good things.