NOTE: — 77 —

...[God-]given commandments, to conduct oneself as it becometh a priest; and especially to adorn oneself with humility, and with meekness, and by being slow to anger, whereby one doth exceedingly edify the peoples. For there is nothing else so great a good and consummate a virtue for a vardapet, than to condescend unto the humble and to order one's life in poverty; whereby our Lord excelled in virtue, and left us a goodly example to walk in this world with the very same virtue-loving religious conduct. For there is naught else that seemeth so terrible to the Slanderer and to his host of demons, as humility” (*In the Commentary on 1 Peter, Discourse XI*). In like manner, our great vardapet Hovhannēs Erznkatsʻi, in his encomiastic discourse on our holy Father Grigor Lusaworichʻ, having drawn from the truth-welling fountains of Holy Scripture, writeth unto the spiritual ministers of the holy Church of Christ: “O guides of the heavenly path, and shepherds of Christ's flock and of the precious lambs—which the Only-Begotten of the only Father inherited by His blood and death, [and which] through the fifteen years' sufferings of our Lusaworichʻ He acquired as His own people and gave unto you freely and without price for an inheritance—lead [them] not astray upon the mountains and into untrodden ways, and deliver [them] not over unto wolves and wild beasts, whom the Good Shepherd took upon His shoulders, and carried up unto the heavens, and mingled with those who go not astray. Be ye not like unto the hirelings . . . who neglect the souls of the rational sheep. Be ye not careless, merciless, and unvisiting toward the pierced and wounded, for whose sake Christ took upon Himself the piercing and the wounds . . . . O mariners of the ship of the Church, deliver not the ship of the Church unto the tempest and the turbulence of the winds upon the troubled sea of this life, lest, by submerging those whom ye undertook to bring forth from the suffocating sea, ye become the destroyers of innocent souls. Ye who were appointed dressers and keepers of the rational and heavenly plants of the divine vineyard, and who taste of the fruits of the vineyard and look for the reward of the denarius from the all-creating Lord, suffer not the wild beast to corrupt the fruitful branches of the divine vineyard, rooted in the true vine. Move not the bulwark of vigilance of God's commandments; trample not upon the order of the canons of the divinely established covenant of faith; do not pull down...