I agree that there are many who appear to have forsaken the world, who do fall away and have fallen away in the past; and instead of becoming God’s servants and his contemplatives, have become the devil’s, because they would not permit themselves to be governed by true spiritual counsel. And so they turn out to be hypocrites or heretics, or they fall into frenzies and many other kinds of misfortune, to the scandal of all holy Church.
–Cloud of Unknowing (Fourteenth Century)
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