Secular authority and accountability

Meaning

Via expects secular authority to restrain incompetent practitioners who cause harm by assuming medical expertise they do not possess. This is distinct from their obligation to answer before God for giving poisons instead of medicines. Earlier, the narrator also says that misleading teachers must answer to God for impoverishing followers contrary to the command to love the neighbour. Accountability therefore has civic and religious dimensions, with different immediate targets. The English “will know how to restrain” preserves the narrator’s expectation; it is not evidence that a particular prosecution occurred or a statement of a defined contemporary law.