Evil thoughts go be­fore a fall

emA haugh­ty spir­it goeth be­fore a fall/em(Prov. 16:18).[1] There­fore, do not al­low evil thoughts to come in, and there will be no falls. And yet what are peo­ple most care­less a­bout? A­bout their thoughts. They al­low them to seethe as much and how­ev­er they like, not even thinking to sub­due them, or to di­rect them to ra­tio­nal pur­suits. Mean­while, with­in this in­ner tur­moil the en­e­my ap­proach­es, places evil in the heart, se­duces it and in­clines it to­ward evil. And the per­son un­no­tice­ab­ly pre­pares him­self for evil. It re­mains for him to ei­ther car­ry out the evil fixed to his heart, or to strug­gle with it. But this is our sor­row: that al­most no­body takes on the strug­gle; while all are led to the evil as if bound.[1] The Sla­von­ic for Prov. 16:18 reads: emEvil thoughts go be­fore a fall./emProb­a­bly St. The­o­phan used the Sla­von­ic ver­sion as he wrote, but the ed­i­tor used the Rus­sian ver­sion, and so the ed­i­tor add­ed the words, “evil thoughts” in pa­ren­the­ses in my ver­sion of the text)