g at dainty tables, and be
only distinguished from persons of the world by their habit; but that
still, some among them would arise to the spirit of true perfection,
whose crown would be so much the greater, as their virtue would be more
difficult, amid the contagion of bad example. In the discourses which
this saint made to his monks, a rigorous self-examination upon all their
actions, every evening, was a practice which he strongly inculcated.[26]
In an excellent sermon which he made to his disciples, recorded by St.
Athanasius,[27] he pathetically exhorts them to contemn the whole world
for heaven, to spend every day as if they knew it to be the last of
their lives, having death always before their eyes, continually to
advance in fervor, and to be always armed against the assaults of Satan,
whose weakness he shows at length. He extols the efficacy of the sign of
the cross in chasing him, and dissipating his illusions, and lays down
rules for the discernment of spirits, the first of which is, that the
devil leaves in the soul impressions of fear, sadness, confusion, and
disturbance.

{171}

St. Antony performed the visitation of his monks a little before his
death, which he foretold them with his last instructions, but no tears
could move him to die among them. It appears from St. Athanasius, that
the Christians had learned from the pagans their custom of embalming the
bodies of the dead, which abuse, as proceeding from vanity and sometimes
superstition, St. Antony had often condemned: this he would prevent, and
ordered that his body should be buried in the earth, as the patriarchs
were, and privately, on his mountain, by his two disciples Diacarius and
Amathas, who had remained with him the last fifteen years, to serve him
in his remote cell in his old age. He hastened back to that solitude,
and some time after fell sick: he repeated to these two disciples his
orders for their burying his body secretly in that place, adding; "In
the day of the resurrection, I shall receive it incorruptible from the
hand of Christ." He ordered them to give one of his sheep-skins, with a
cloak[28] in which he lay, to the bishop Athanasius, as a public
testimony of his being united in faith and communion with that holy
prelate; to give his other sheep-skin to the bishop Serapion; and to
keep for themselves his sackcloth. He added; "Farewell, my children,
Antony is departing, and will be no longer with you." At these words
they embrace