Day, that he may celebrate it with them and share their
misery and their suffering. Easter, being God's guarantee
for the final triumph of Good over Evil, gave comfort to
the sorely afflicted people. After the celebration of this
glorious festival, Abba Athanasius quietly disappeared, in
compliance with the insistent wishes of his people.
The Arians, disappointed at their failure to kill
Abba Athanasius, vented their rage on his people; they
doubled their oppression, committing against them all the
horrors which but a few decades earlier were committed
by Diocletian and his soldiery. To these atrocities they
added the most odious calumniations against the person of
St. Mark's successor, who had chosen the city of Rome as
the place for his self exile, for it was beyond the power
and jurisdiction of Constantius.
- Gregory, backed by the Emperor and his civil
authority, gave strict orders that no Orthodox priest was
to be permitted to officiate at any Church, still less to visit
the people. The Copts now had two bitter alternatives:
either to accept the services of an Arian priest, or to die
without any spiritual succour; to bow the head under the
hand of a heretic, or to go unbaptised. Most of them
elected what to them was the lesser of the two evils – they
boycotted Arianism and the intruding ‘self-styled’
patriarch, and worshipped God behind the closed doors of
their homes. All the efforts Gregory made to win or
influence them went unrewarded. They disdained him,
refused to go near him, and deprived him of the honours
he longed and hoped for. All their sentiments and their
fervent prayers were with their legitimate leader, who,
they hoped was only temporarily absent from their midst;
and it was his spirit together with the Grace of God that
sustained them during this most difficult period and