couplet. The Faithful obeyed; they stood firm, making of
their own bodies a bulwark between their Pope and his
enemies. While they chanted, some monks surrounded
Athanasius and carried him away imperceptibly. The
soldiers trampled, shot, and hacked their way through the
people, only to find in the end that they had failed to lay
hands on the one person whom they had been ordered to
take dead or alive.^41
Athanasius was thus saved by God for more
combats and more attainments. That same night, when his
monks had carried him away, he went out in the dark with
that tranquil audacity which had served him most
marvellously in his hours of great peril. He did not leave
his beloved Alexandria, for he knew that should he knock
on the door of any Christian, he would find a place of
refuge. For six years he was lost to sight while all the
efforts of the Arians at finding him went unrewarded.
They were completely baffled, for Athanasius kept
sending his Paschal letters in their due seasons, wrote to
his bishops whenever he found it necessary, and was ever
present in the midst of his people, though his enemies
could not find him. Greater persecutions were meted out,
more violence was committed – but all the rigours could
not extract the confession from one single person of the
followers of Athanasius on his whereabouts. Emperor
Constantius presumed that he must have fled to Ethiopia
to stay with Fromentius, his friend and disciple;
messengers were dispatched there in haste-but Athanasius
was not to be found.
One day, an encyclical epistle from the invisible
Pope circulated with the rapidity of lightning throughout
Egypt. He had heard that the Arians proposed a creed to
his bishops demanding their signatures. So he
immediately dispatched his message to them to uphold
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