Sometimes the wild beasts of the forest destroyed his modest harvest, till he drove them away forever with the expostulation, "Why do you injure me, who never have done you the slightest harm? Away with you all, in the name of the Lord, and never come into my neighborhood again." He slept on bare ground, or at best on a pallet of straw; but often he watched the whole night through in prayer. The anointing of the body with oil he despised, and in later years never washed his feet, as if filthiness was an essential element of ascetic perfection. His whole wardrobe consisted of a hair shirt, a sheepskin, and a girdle. But notwithstanding all, he had a winning friendliness and cheerfulness in his face.

Conflicts with the devil and his hosts of demons were, as with other solitary saints, a prominent part of Anthony's experience, and continued through all his life. The devil appeared to him in visions and dreams, or even in daylight, in all possible forms; now as a friend, now as a fascinating woman, now as a dragon, tempting him by reminding him of his former wealth, of his noble family, of the care due to his sister; by promises of wealth, honor, and renown; by exhibitions of the difficulty of virtue and the facility of vice; by unchaste thoughts and images; by terrible threatenings of the dangers and punishments of the ascetic life. Once he struck the hermit so violently, Athanasius says, that a friend, who brought him bread, found him on the ground apparently dead. At another time he broke through the walls of his cave and filled the room with roaring lions, howling wolves, growling bears, fierce hyenas, crawling serpents, and scorpions; but Anthony turned manfully toward the monsters, till a supernatural light broke in from the roof and dispersed them. His sermon, which he delivered to the hermits at their request, treats principally of these wars with demons, and gives also the key to the interpretation of them. "Fear not Satan and his angels," he said; "Christ has broken their power. The best weapon against them is faith and piety. The presence of evil spirits reveals itself in perplexity, despondency, hatred of the ascetics, evil desires, fear of death. They take the form answering to the spiritual state they find in us at the time. They are the reflex of our thoughts and fantasies. If thou art carnally minded, thou art their prey; but if thou rejoicest in the Lord and occu

piest thyself with divine things they are powerless. The devil is afraid of fasting, of prayer, of humility and good works. His illusions soon vanish where one arms himself with the sign of the cross."

Only in exceptional cases did Anthony leave his solitude, and then he made a powerful impression on both Christians and heathens with his hairy dress and his emaciated, ghost-like form. In the year 311, during the persecution under Maximinus, he appeared in Alexandria, in the hope of himself gaining the martyr's crown. He visited the confessors in the mines and prisons, encouraged them before the tribunal, accompanied them to the scaffold; but no one ventured to lay 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 faith of his friend Athanasius against Arianism, and in a few days converted more heathen 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 worshiped 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 went 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 reminded them of the word, "Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven." To Martianus, an officer, who urgently besought 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." Martianus prayed, and on his return found his daughter whole.

Anthony distinguished himself above most of his countless disciples and successors by his fresh originality of mind. Though uneducated and contracted, 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, which 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 Constantine, 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 worshipest Christ.

Be not proud of thy earthly power. Think of the future judgment, and know that Christ is the only true and eternal king. Practice justice and love for men, and care for the poor." To his disciples he said on this occasion, "Wonder not that the emperor writes to me, for he is a man. Wonder much more that God has written the law for man, and has spoken to us by his own Son."

During the last years of his life the patriarch of monasticism withdrew as much as possible from the sight of visitors, but allowed two disciples to live with him, and to take care of him in his infirm old age. When he felt his end approaching he commanded them not to embalm his body, according to the Egyptian custom, but to bury it in the earth, and keep the spot of his interment secret. One of his two sheep-skins he bequeathed to the Bishop Serapion; the other, with his underclothing, to Athanasius, who had once given it to him new, and now received it back, worn out and loaded with honor. What became of the robe woven from palm leaves, which, according to Jerome, he had inherited from Paul of Thebes, and wore at Easter and Pentecost, Athanasius does not tell us. After this disposition of his property Anthony said to his disciples, "Children, farewell; for Anthony goes away, and will be no more with you." With these words he stretched out his feet and expired with a smiling face, in the year 356, a hundred and five years old. His grave remained for centuries unknown. His last will was thus a protest against the worship of saints and relics, which, however, it nevertheless greatly helped to promote. Under Justinian, in 561, his bones, as the Bollandists and Butler minutely relate, were miraculously discovered, brought to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and at last to Vienna, in South France; and in the eleventh century, during the raging of an epidemic disease—the so-called holy fire, or St. Anthony's fire-they are said to have performed great wonders.

Athanasius, the greatest man of the Nicene age, concludes his biography of his friend with this sketch of his character: "From this short narrative you may judge how great a man Anthony was, who persevered in the ascetic life from youth to the highest age. In his advanced age he never allowed himself better food nor change of raiment, nor did he even wash his feet. Yet he continued healthy in all his parts. His eyesight

was clear to the end, and his teeth sound, though by long use worn to mere stumps. He retained also the perfect use of his hands and feet, and was more robust and vigorous than those who are accustomed to a change of food and clothing and to washing. His fame spread from his remote dwelling on the lone mountain over the whole Roman empire. What gave him his renown was not learning, nor worldly wisdom, nor human art, but alone his piety toward God. And let all the brethren know that the Lord will not only take holy monks to heaven, but give them celebrity in all the earth, however deep they may bury themselves in the wilderness."

The whole Nicene age venerated in Anthony a model saint. This fact brings out most characteristically the vast difference between the ancient and the modern, the old Catholic and the evangelical Protestant conception of the nature of Christian religion. The specifically Christian element in the life of Anthony, especially as measured by the Pauline standard, is very small. Nevertheless we can but admire the miserable magnificence, the simple, rude grandeur of this hermit sanctity, even in its aberration. Anthony concealed under his sheep-skin a childlike humility, an amiable simplicity, a rare energy of will, and a glowing love to God, which maintained itself for almost ninety years in the absence of all the comforts and pleasures of natural life, and triumphed over all the temptations of the flesh. By piety alone, without the help of education or learning, he became one of the most remarkable and influential men in the history of the ancient Church.

Even heathen cotemporaries could not withhold from him their reverence, and the celebrated philosopher Synesius, afterward a bishop, before his conversion reckoned Anthony among those rare men in whom flashes of thought take the place of reasonings, and natural power of mind makes schooling needless.

The example of Anthony acted like magic upon his generation, and his biography by Athanasius, which was soon translated also into Latin, was a tract for the times. Chrysostom, the prince of ancient preachers, recommended it to all as instructive and edifying reading. Even Augustine, the most evangelical of the fathers, was powerfully affected by the read