throne." Of his ruthless temper there can be no doubt: when he arrived, as Gregory had done, in Lent-the Lent of 356, we may safely infer from Athanasius, for the government would not defer his intrusion for a year-Arian violences had, as in Gregory's case, preceded him; for the Count Heraclius, sent by Constantius expressly to announce his approval of Syrianus's proceedings, had encouraged a mob of the younger pagan working-men to attack with stones and clubs the worshippers at a Wednesday service or "Station" in the great "Cæsarean" church. The Easter of 356, in the first week of April, brought special trouble to bishops and ecclesiastics, virgins, widows, the poor of Athanasius's flock, and even private Catholic householders. We find Sebastian, a Manichean holding high military command, employed in the interests of George to break up a congregation which, on a June evening, the Sunday after Pentecost, was worshipping in a cemetery, the churches being now in the hands of the Arians. As it was, he came too late, for the service was over; but he seized some virgins and others, and, on their refusal to embrace the Arian communion, caused them to be beaten so brutally that some died from the blows, and their corpses were kept without burial. Then came the banishment of sixteen orthodox bishops, the flight of more than thirty, the installation of old Arians in the bishoprics thus vacated, or of "men notorious for their wealth," or of profligate young men who had not even gone through the catechumenate. Monasteries were destroyed, houses plundered, alms-women beaten on the soles of their feet, presbyters. expelled from their churches and exposed to varieties of barbarous treatment; in short, a reign of terror was virtually proclaimed. Under such a trial of constancy, one can hardly wonder that some were induced to dissemble their belief, among whom were probably the two priests Achetas and Didymus, who, according to Lucifer, disowned their archbishop's faith, and professed Arianism; it is said also that Theodotus, bishop of Oxyrinchos, accepted reordination from George, and was in consequence disowned by his own flock, who were conspicuous for Catholic zeal.

Even after being informed of these tragic incidents, Athanasius appears not to have wholly abandoned his plan of personally confronting Constantius, and trying to recall him to better feelings, until he learned that one imperial letter had denounced him as a fugitive criminal who richly merited death, and that another had exhorted the two princes ruling in Ethiopia, Aizan

and Sazan, to send Frumentius, bishop of Axum, to Alexandria, that he might be instructed by George and other prelates in the knowledge of "the Supreme God," i.e. as we must interpret it, in the belief of the sole Divinity of the Father. Nothing came, however, of this attempt to disturb Frumentius; and we cannot give credit to the statement of Philostorgius, that Theophilus the Indian, an Arian missionary bishop, after visiting his native island of Diu and parts of Hindostan, arrived among the Axumites, and there "arranged the affairs" of religion, that is, established (or confirmed) the Arian faith. It is very likely that Theophilus had visited Axum, but incredible that he should have been the first preacher of Christianity in that district, and very improbable that he should have made any such impression as to supplant the Catholicism represented by Frumentius. But the tidings that Frumentius was to be sent, if possible, to Alexandria, and that he himself was to be sought for as far as the Ethiopian frontier, in order to be lodged in "the prison of the prefects," finally convinced Athanasius that he must, for his church's sake, give up his daydream of an "appeal unto Cæsar," and accept the condition of an exile. General Church history is not greatly concerned with the circumstances of his veiled and mysterious life during the next six years enough to say that it was chiefly spent amid the cells of the Egyptian monks-partly, no doubt, on the hill of Nitria, or in the wilderness, so-called, "of the Cells," or in the yet remoter Scetis; partly, also, in the "monasteries and hermitages of the Thebaid," including an ancient tomb at Thebes. Antony had been taken to his rest a few weeks before the irruption of Syrianus and the flight of Athanasius; the latter doubtless had, before quitting Alexandria, received back, as Antony's legacy, a sheepskin cloak which had been his own gift, and which had been worn out in the service of his venerated "father." Pachomius, also, had died eight years previously, and his abbacy had passed through the hands of Petronius and Orsisius into those of Theodore, commonly called "the Sanctified," whom Pachomius had trusted with high duties at an early age, and who was said to have predicted the great increase of Arian persecution. Amon, the founder of the solitaries of Nitria, had died, perhaps, earlier than Pachomius; but at Nitria Athanasius might converse with Pior, Antony's disciple, who, according to a strange characteristic story, contrived, while visiting his old home at his superior's bidding, to keep his absurdly superstitious vow of never looking at the face of a relative :

there too, perhaps, he would find Pambon, celebrated alike for his humility, his tender charity, and his earnest vigilance against sins of the tongue; at Scetis he might admire the austerity and holiness of the priest Macarius "of Egypt," whose recorded sayings exhibit so much knowledge of the heart, and so much kindliness of nature. In the Thebaid, Macarius "the Alexandrian," whom Athanasius might have seen of old as a vendor of sweetmeats in the great city where every one was busy at some occupation, had already become famous among monks. He who had all his life reverenced the very name of Antony, and had been hailed at his election as a "proficient in self-discipline," would be at home in any monastic settlement, would readily content himself with the rough fare of the recluses, would put on the "colobium " or the "melotes" as readily as an episcopal habit, would sit at work on tracts or letters in a cell whose chief furniture was a mat of palm-leaves, would join as fervently as any monk in the daily psalmody, would naturally accept on a Sunday or a Saturday the office of celebrating the monastic Eucharist. We can thus picture him as listening to what Mrs. Oliphant, in her "Makers of Modern Rome," describes as "the evensong that rose as from every crevice of the earth, while the Egyptian afterglow burned in one great circle of colour round the vast globe of sky." And all the time, the "royal-hearted" fugitive would be the true though "invisible patriarch," most effectively and systematically governing his church by a network of correspondence, which would be kept up by means of that rapid and secret intercourse which linked the Egyptian monasteries to each other. And that facility of communication would often doubtless secure the archbishop against those who were sent in pursuit of him: as a deacon of his in earlier days had found Arsenius gone when he had all but "run him down" in Upper Egypt, so, on the nearer approach of danger, Athanasius would be swiftly removed to another hiding-place-perhaps only just in time, and with such "hair-breadth 'scapes" as might anticipate the experience of a fugitive Jacobite or Vendéan. And yet it is to this period of exciting and perilous adventure that we owe some of his most important works: for in him the balance and equipoise of high qualities involved a signal power of concentrating all his faculties on the duty of the day or the hour; his strength had in it a serene presence of mind. The great theological "Discourses against the Arians" were composed during this "exile;" so were the theological letters to Serapion on that

newly arisen variation of Arianism which described the Holy Spirit as the highest of ministrant beings, the theory commonly known as Macedonianism; so, too, the short letter to the same Serapion, giving an account of the death of Arius. Historically the most interesting of the writings now under consideration is the "Defence concerning the Flight." It was called forth (probably late in 357) by Arian sarcasms about his "cowardice," set on foot by Leontius of Antioch and other members of the party. He is thus led to narrate the circumstances which had rendered such "flight" inevitable, and, on New Testament grounds, justifiable; and in the concluding part he shows that he has at last utterly given up all hope of justice from Constantius, although we may reasonably follow Professor Gwatkin in doubting the genuineness of a single and abrupt reference to Constantius as "the heretic." A "Letter to the Monks" introduces the Arian History, in which we can hardly help discerning in various passages a hand that is not his own, betrayed by inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and overdone declamation; and a recent French biographer of "St. Athanase," while accepting it as his work in the proper sense, treats it as one of the party pamphlets, intended for secret circulation, which were frequent in the literature of the age, and to which he finds a parallel in a little work which Aetius, as quoted by Epiphanius, describes as "privately composed" by him, and published in a corrupt form by his opponents. We may now look away from the actual persecution to the disintegration of the Arian body itself.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE VARIATIONS OF ARIANISM.

SELDOM, perhaps, have the faith and patience of Catholic Christians been more severely tried than in the two years that followed after the Council of Milan, and the successful terrorising of so many Western bishops. It might seem that the work of Nicæa was practically undone, and that a relentless autocrat, as yet, like his father, extraneous to Christian communion, was to be the instrument of heresy for securing its position within the Church. And yet, just about this time, the radical incoherences of that rationalistic Christology which Lucifer so often designates as Arian "idolatry," and Athanasius as Arian "fanaticism," but which may be best regarded as in effect a method of adapting Christianity to certain un-Christian forms of thought, and evacuating its cardinal doctrines of their real life and power, began to show themselves more and more distinctly, and to prepare the dissolution of what had once seemed an organized mass.

The original Arianism, as it confronted Alexander of Alexandria, was an outspoken assertion of what appeared to Arius, Achillas, Euzoius, and their companions, to follow inevitably from the Sonship of our Lord. It consisted chiefly of a series of negations, with which we are already familiar, and which were based, more or less directly, on the original negation of the Son's existence from all eternity. At the same time, there was in this original Arianism a recognition of His dignity as superior to that of all other creatures, and of His office as the agent of God in creating them. so, when it became necessary for Arius, after his departure from Alexandria, to present his opinions in some form which would not startle or shock the ordinary Christian mind so seriously as their first utterance had startled and shocked the faithful of Alexandria, he had but to emphasize one part of his teaching, and disguise the

And