1. The saints endure by patience those whom they cannot correct by admonition. — It is commonly the mark of the perverse that they hurl their own evils as reproaches against the good before they themselves are truly accused of them; and while they dread being rebuked for the things they do, they testify that the just, being opposed to their depravities, are the ones who do these things. But holy men patiently listen even to charges of deeds they never remember having committed, although they know that the very evils they perceive to be cast at them were perpetrated by these very accusers; and when they cannot correct such men by preaching, they bear with them by patience, so that, if they cannot gain the fruit of their conversion, they may nevertheless acquire from them the reward of long-suffering.
Hence also holy Church says, in the words of the prophet David: The sinners built upon my back (Ps. 128:3); for indeed, while she tolerates the heretics or any of the reprobate whom she cannot correct, she bears the deeds of the sinful upon her back. And so blessed Job, seeing his friend Eliphaz make many complaints against him about hypocrisy — one who had burst forth from words of consolation into the bitterness of rebuke, and appeared as a feigned comforter — preserves by his patience the type of the Church, which knows how to bear such things by listening, and, when its speech is admitted, to destroy them by reasoning; and he says: