ngth was failing, but his soul, still
young and vigorous, was undaunted and heroic as ever. The seven last
years of his rule at Alexandria were no more years of rest than those
which had gone before. He was one of the few bishops still living who
had been present at the Council of Nicea. The whole Catholic world,
West as well as East, venerated him as a Confessor of the Faith and
looked to him for advice and help.

His pen was still busy. One of his first acts on his return to
Alexandria was to write the life of St. Antony of the Desert, a last
tribute of love and gratitude to the memory of his dear old friend.
The book was eagerly read; we are told in the Confessions of St.
Augustine how two young officers of the Imperial army, finding it on
the table of a certain hermitage near Milan and reading it, were so
inspired by enthusiasm for the religious life that they embraced it
then and there.

In the other parts of the Eastern empire Valens and the Arians were
still at work, and persecution was raging as of old. Many of the
persecuted Bishops looked to Athanasius for the comfort and
encouragement which they never sought in vain. He was always ready to
forget the past and to make advances even to those who had been his
bitterest enemies. Let them only accept the Creed of Nicea, he said,
and he would admit them to communion.

There was a splendid chivalry about the man who could so generously
hold out the right hand of fellowship to those who had never ceased to
plot his ruin. The triumph of truth and the salvation of souls was his
first, and indeed his only thought; everything else could be safely
forgotten. Unfortunately, it was not so with the leaders of the
Arians, and they refused to respond to his appeal. There were,
however, among them good men who had been deceived into signing false
creeds and who were beginning to see things in their true light. Many
of these were received back into the Church and became true and firm
friends of the Patriarch, who was always more ready to see the good in
his fellowmen than the evil.

God had not given to everyone the clear instinct and the wide learning
of an Athanasius. It was sometimes really difficult to see where the
truth lay, for the Arians always tried to conceal their real doctrines
from those who would have shrunk from them in horror. Their old trick
of declaring that they believed all that the Church believed had led
many astray. For misled men such as these, hones