Prophets as physicians of souls

Physicians of bodies, coming beside the sick and always giving themselves to the therapy of the sick according to the will of the medical art, see dreadful things and touch unpleasant things; on others' misfortunes they reap their own griefs, and their life is always in circumstance. For they are never with the healthy, but always with the wounded, with those who have spreading sores, with those filled with pus, fevers, various diseases. And if someone wants to practice medicine, he will not be irritated nor neglect the will of the art he has taken up when he is with such people as we have said beforehand.

This preface of mine has been spoken because the prophets too are as it were physicians of souls and always spend time where those needing therapy are; for 'the healthy have no need of a physician but those who are badly off.' And what physicians suffer from the undisciplined sick, this the prophets and teachers also suffer from those who do not want to be healed. For from there they are hated, as arranging contrary to the choice of the desire of the sick, as preventing luxury and pleasure for those who even in diseases want not to take what the diseases deserve. So the undisciplined among the sick flee physicians, often also abusing them and speaking ill of them and doing whatever an enemy would do to an enemy.

For these forget that they come as friends, looking to the toilsome character of the regimen, to the toilsome character of the blow from physicians' iron—not to the end after the toil—and hate them as fathers of toils only, and not of toils that bring those being healed toward health.