De recta ratione audiendi

The discourse which I gave on the subject of listening to lectures I have written out and sent to you, my dear Nicander, so that you may know how rightly to listen to the voice of persuasion, now that you are no longer subject to authority, having assumed the garb of a man. Now absence of control, which some of the young men, for want of education, think to be freedom, establishes the sway of a set of masters, harsher than the teachers and attendants of childhood, in the form of the desires, which are now, as it were, unchained. And just as Herodotus says that women put off their modesty along with their undergarments, so some of our young men, as soon as they lay aside the garb of childhood, lay aside also their sense of modesty and fear, and, undoing the habit that invests them, straightway become full of unruliness. But you have often heard that to follow God and to obey reason are the same tiling, and so I ask you to believe that in persons of good sense the passing from childhood to manhood is not a casting off of control, but a recasting of the controlling agent, since instead of some hired person or slave purchased with money they now take as the divine guide of their life reason, whose followers alone may deservedly be considered free. For they alone, having learned to wish for what they ought, live as they wish; but in untrained and irrational impulses and actions there is something ignoble, and changing one’s mind many times involves but little freedom of will.