The Twelve Books of John Cassian on the Institutes of the Coenobia, and the Remedies for the Eight Principal Faults · Book V. Of the Spirit of Gluttony
Chapter XXVIII
Page 381 of 1,144
The lesson and example which Abbot John when dying left to his disciples.
When the same old man, as one who was readily going to depart to his own, was lying at his last gasp, and the brethren were standing round, they implored and intreated that he would leave them, as a sort of legacy, some special charge by which they could attain to the height of perfection, the more easily from the brevity of the charge: he sighed and said, "I never did my own will, nor taught any one what I had not first done myself."
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Volume 11, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (1890–1900). Public domain. Text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.