§ 35. PAUL OF THEBES AND ST. AJ^fTIIONY. ISo
tiie martyr's crown. He visited the confessors in tlie mines and prisons, encouraged them before the tribmial, accompanied them to the scaffold ; but no one ventured to h\y hands on the saint of the wilderness. In the year 351, when a hundred years old, he showed himself for the second and last time in the metropolis of Egypt, to bear witness for the orthodox fiiith of his friend Athanasius against Arianism, and in a few days converted more heathens and heretics than had otherwise been gained in a whole year. He declared the Arian denial of the divinity of Christ worse than the venom of the serpent, and no better than heathenism which worshipped the creature instead of the Creator. He would have nothing to do with heretics, and warned his disciples against intercourse with them. Athanasius attended him to the gate of the city, where he cast out an evil spirit from a girl. An invitation to stay longer in Alexandria he declined, saying : " As a fish out of water, so a monk out of his solitude dies." Imitating his example, the monks afterward forsook the wilderness in swarms whenever orthodoxy was in danger, and wont in long processions with wax tapers and responsive singing through the streets, or appeared at the councils, to contend for the orthodox faith with all the energy of fanaticism, often even with physical force.
Though Anthony shunned the society of men, yet he was frequently visited in his solitude and resorted to for consolation and aid by Christians and heathens, by ascetics, sick, and needy, as a heaven-descended physician of Egypt for body and soul. He enjoined prayer, labor, and care of the poor, exhorted those at strife to the love of God, and healed the sick and demoniac with his prayer. Athanasius relates several miracles performed by him, the truth of which we leave undecided, though they are far less incredible and absurd than many other monkish stories of that age. Anthony, his biographer assures us, never boasted when his prayer was heard, nor murmured when it was not, but in either case thanked God. He cautioned monks against overrating the gift of miracles, since it is not our work, but the grace of the Lord ; and he reminds them of the word: "Kejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in
186 THIRD TEEIOD. A.D. 311-590.
heaven." To Martianns, an officer, who nrgently bcsougll him to heal his possessed daughter, he said : "Man, why dost thou call on me ? I am a man, as thou art. If thou believest, pray to God, and he will hear thee." Martianns prayed, and 071 bis return found his daughter whole.
Anthony distinguished himself above most of his countless disciples and successors, by his fresh originality of mind, Tliough uneducated and limited, he had sound sense and ready mother wit. Many of his striking answers and felicitous sentences have come down to us. When some heathen philosophers once visited him, he asked them : " Why do you give yourselves so much trouble to see a fool ? " They explained, perhaps ironically, that they took him rather for a wise man. He replied : '* If you take me for a fool, your labor is lost ; but if I am a wise man, you should imitate me, and be Christians, as I am." At another time, when taunted with his ignorance, he asked: "Which is older and better, mind or learning?" The mind, was the answer. "Then," said the hermit, "the mind can do without learning." "My book," he remarked on a similar occasion, " is the whole creation, wdiich lies open before me, and in which I can read the word of God as often as I will." The blind church-teacher, Didymus, whom he met in Alexandria, he comforted with the words : " Trouble not thyself for the loss of the outward eye, with which even flies see ; but rejoice in the possession of the spiritual eye, with which also angels behold the face of God, and receive his light." ' Even the emperor Coustantine, with his sons, wrote to him as a spiritual father, and begged an answer from him. The hermit at first would not so much as receive the letter, since, in any case, being unable to write, he could not answer it, and cared as little for the great of this world as Diogenes for Alexander. When told that the emperor was a Christian, he dictated the answer: "Happy thou, that thou worshippcst Christ. Be not proud of thy earthly power. Think of the future judgment, and know that Christ is the only true and eternal king. Practise justice and love for men, and care for the poor." To
' This is not toM indeed by Athanasius, but by Rufimis, Jerome, and Socratea ^Ilist. Eccl. iv, 25) Comp. Ti.lemont, 1. c. p. 129.