mselves Arians. Gregory
entered Alexandria in the evening, meaning to take his seat in the
church on the next day; but the people in their zeal did not wait
quietly for the dreaded morning. They ran at once to the church, and
passed the night there with Athanasius in the greatest anxiety. In
the morning, when Gregory arrived at the church, accompanied with the
troops, he found the doors barricaded and the building full of men and
women, denouncing the sacrilege, and threatening resistance. But the
general gave orders that the church should be stormed, and the new
bishop carried in by force of arms; and Athanasius, seeing that all
resistance was useless, ordered the deacons to give out a psalm, and
they all marched out at the opposite door singing. After these acts of
violence on the part of the troops, and of resistance on the part of the
people, the whole city was thrown into an uproar, and the prefect was
hardly strong enough to carry on the government; the regular supply of
grain for the poor citizens of Alexandria, and for Constantinople, was
stopped; and the blame of the whole thrown upon Athanasius. He was a
second time obliged to leave Egypt, and he fled to Rome, where he was
warmly received by the Emperor Constans and the Roman bishop. But the
zeal of the Athanasian party would not allow Gregory to keep possession
of the church which he had gained only by force; they soon afterwards
set fire to it and burned it to the ground, choosing that there should
be no church at all rather than that it should be in the hands of the
Arians; and the Arian clergy and bishops, though supported by the favour
of the emperor and the troops of the prefect, were everywhere throughout
Egypt driven from their churches and monasteries. During this quarrel it
seems to have been felt by both parties that the choice of the people,
or at least of the clergy, was necessary to make a bishop, and that
Gregory had very little claim to that rank in Alexandria. Julius, the
Bishop of Rome, warmly espoused the cause of Athanasius, and he wrote a
letter to the Alexandrian church, praising their zeal for their bishop,
and ordering them to re-admit him to his former rank, from which he
had been deposed by the council of Antioch, but to which he had been
restored by the Western bishops. Athanasius was also warmly supported
by Constans, the emperor of the West, who at the same time wrote to his
brother Constantius, begging him to replace the Alexandrian