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and spleen followed, and Arius instantly died.' Allowing something, perhaps, for exaggeration, and a good deal for mistakes in the attendants, this account is by no means at variance with nature. Put into correct language, it would stand as follows:Arius, either from the effects of strong mental emotion, or from physical causes, or from a combination of both, is seized with internal hæmorrhage, an effusion of blood, that is to say, into the alimentary canal, which compels him to retire; he suffers from violent relaxation, and from faintness, with profuse discharge of blood, accompanied, probably, with prolapsus of the lower bowel; and the death, which is the immediate result, is as natural as any of which we read in the daily bills of mortality. But the fiction, or rather the erroneous part of the narrative, now commences. This hæmorrhage, Socrates says, was followed by the discharge of the small intestines, the liver, and the spleen. Such an occurrence is impossible; but it is by no means impossible that the attendants may have believed, by a succession of very pardonable mistakes, such as, in fact, are still of daily occurrence, that they saw what is here stated; stringy mucus being mistaken by them for the small intestines, and masses of firm coagula, for liver and spleen. In short, the train of symptoms which are mentioned, and the sudden death in which they terminated, are by no means of uncommon occurrence; and if the report of Socrates be divested of its errors, (which very errors may be said to add to its intrinsic truthfulness,) this is just the case we have before us.

What, then, are we to conclude of this most remarkable catastrophe? As, on the one hand, we hold the death of Arius to have been a natural one, requiring the intervention neither of miracle nor of poison to account for it-the former, as caused by an infraction of the laws of nature, or the latter, as involving the wickedness of man ;-so, on the other hand, when we call to mind the unmatched and complicated impieties of that heresiarch; the revolting profanity of his life and writings; his flagitious contempt of the Divine Name, in prostituting it, as he did, to the vilest purposes; his open insults on God's Church and ministers; all crowned and consummated by that last great act of perjury; and all uniting to make his a singular case in the history of the Church, and to point it out as the one in which, perhaps above all others on record, we might expect the manifestation of some peculiar mark of Divine Vengeance: we may well be excused if, with becoming reverence and due fear, we do regard it, as it was regarded in the age in which it happened, and long after,' as a signal and most awful judgment

Socrates says, that a century after its occurrence 'passers-by still pointed the finger at the scene of it as a place accursed.'

from Heaven; an especial act of the wrath of God; vindicating His own outraged majesty, and at once, (by natural means, a guilty conscience acting on the body, directed especially by Him to this end,) cutting off the offender in the very hour of, as he imagined, his perfect triumph and most assured

success.

Constantine died not long after Arius. One of the first acts of the Eusebians, on his demise, was to renew their accusations against S. Athanasius, who was now again in possession of his See, to the sons of Constantine, and Julius, Bishop of Rome. S. Athanasius thereupon held a council at Alexandria consisting of nearly one hundred bishops, the letter of which was sent to Julius as his defence. Julius proposed to the legates of the contending parties to hold a council at Rome, at which they might both meet; an invitation which S. Athanasius readily accepted. The events that followed, and their exact chronology, are involved in much obscurity, and form, in fact, the difficulty of the Athanasian history. The statement and dates of the greater number of historians,-Valesius, the Benedictines in their life of S. Athanasius, Cave, Fleury, and others, are as follows:—

In the year 340, S. Athanasius held the Council at Alexandria. He arrived at Rome soon after Easter of 341, and stayed there three years, being summoned in the fourth year by Constans to meet him at Milan. On the arrival of S. Athanasius, Julius sent two of his presbyters, by name Elpidius and Philoxenus, as legates to the Eusebians at Antioch, inviting them to meet S. Athanasius in council at Rome in the January of the following year, 342. Elpidius and Philoxenus left Rome in the beginning, says Valesius, or about the latter end of May, or according to the Benedictines early in June, of 341; the Eusebians detained the messengers of Julius till the time for holding the Council at Rome was passed, and then sent them away, refusing to come themselves. Elpidius and Philoxenus arrive in Rome with a letter for Julius, (given in substance by Sozomen, book iii. chap. 8,) in the course of the summer of 342. In the October or November of that year a council of fifty bishops was held in the church of Vito a presbyter, in which S. Athanasius was acquitted of all charge, and formally received the Communion of the Western Church. Julius now produced the letter of the Eusebians, (which, he says in his reply to them, he had kept by him for some time, hoping that they, or some of them, might yet come to Rome,) and he was requested by the Council to answer it: this he did, and his letter is found in S. Athanasius's Apology against

the Arians.1 He mentions in it that S. Athanasius had now been eighteen months at Rome, which of course would be the case according to the dates here proposed.

2

This arrangement, however, simple as it is in itself, and consistent with the statements of Julius in his letter, and of S. Athanasius in his works, seems, at first sight, open to more than one objection. S. Athanasius says that he left Alexandria on the report of the intended invasion of his see by Gregory the Arian, (whom the members of the Church of Antioch ordained and sent to Alexandria in his place,) without waiting for his actual arrival; and it may be thought that as Gregory entered Alexandria at the latter end of the Lent of the year in which S. Athanasius came to Rome, there would not have been time, if that year were 341, for the Council to have ordained him at Antioch, and for him to have reached Alexandria so soon afterwards. But the Council was held at Antioch early in the year, and S. Athanasius says that Gregory did not arrive till quite towards Easter (which fell that year on April 19th)Ταῦτα δε ἐγιγνέτο ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ἁγίᾳ Τεσσαρακοστῇ περὶ το πάσχα. If, again, we put his arrival a year later, i. e. in 342, we have a still greater difficulty, we think, to contend with-for there is nothing in this case by which to account for the time that must have elapsed between his ordination and that event. It is plain, too, that the Arians, in so gross a case of usurpation, would be anxious to get their follower established in his sphere of action as soon as possible after they had appointed him to it; and lastly, if Julius answered the Council in 342, the same year in which S. Athanasius in this case came to Rome, there could not have been eighteen months for him to have spent in the city when that letter was written. And we may here glance at a point of little moment in itself, and which, except that Bishop Kaye has touched upon it, we should have passed without notice. The Bishop observes (page 92 and note 1), that Athanasius says himself, in his piece Ad Solitarios, that he left Rome at the first rumour of the entrance of Gregory, and before it actually took place. He is said by Sozomen (iii. 6), to have been in his church at Alexandria when the soldiers came, and to have escaped during the singing of a psalm. Some such arrangement as that suggested by the Benedictines in their life of S. Athanasius is no doubt the solution of the difficulty. They think that when Gregory first entered, and, among other outrages, burnt a church dedicated to Cyrinus, S. Athanasius was at Alexandria, and that being informed of this violence, he fled, remained some days concealed in the neighbourhood, and then sailed for Rome.

1 Vol. i. Benedict. Edit.

2 Encyl. ad Episc. tom. i. § 4, Benedict,

A more serious difficulty, perhaps, is how Julius, if he appointed the Council at Rome for January, could have written to the Eusebians, as he did at the end of the year, and evidently from a Council. Baronius, with a view to this difficulty, has supposed that two councils were held at Rome, the one of fifty bishops, at which S. Athanasius was received, and which he puts in the year 341, and another in the following year, in which Julius answered the Easterns. But Valesius has proved, from the words of S. Athanasius and Julius, whose accounts of the matter exactly agree, that there was only one, which we may easily suppose was adjourned from time to time, or it may have continued its sittings through the summer, as that of Antioch had done the previous year, if it despatched Gregory to Alexandria in Lent, and received the legates of Julius in the autumn, keeping them over the January following, and not till then sending them back to Julius; or, lastly, Julius may have written from the usual autumnal synod.

The final question connected with these events is, whether S. Athanasius visited Rome once only, or twice. Valesius, the Benedictines, Cave, Fleury, and others, are clear that he came to that city only once-leaving before the arrival of Gregory, and not returning again until after the Council of Sardica in 347. Baronius, Tillemont, Cabassutius, and others, oppose them, and adopt the other opinion. Baronius thinks that Athanasius arrived in Rome the first time in 340, and remained there eighteen months, i. e. towards the close of 341, or the beginning of 342-when he supposes him to have returned to Alexandria fortified with the acquittal of Julius and the Roman Council. He then places the invasion of Gregory in the Lent of 342, during or before which he makes S. Athanasius return to Rome the second time, just after the arrival of Elpidius and Philoxenus, and the second Council, which Julius then held, and in which he replied to the Easterns. But this arrangement, among other disadvantages, involves an inordinately long absence of the legates of Julius, whom Baronius despatches to Antioch in 340 and does not bring back to Rome till 342-an absence which, in addition to the above objection, is against the spirit of Julius's letter to the Easterns, as Valesius urges. Tillemont, by an arbitrary alteration of Julius's letter, follows an arrangement of his own. He also makes two journeys of S. Athanasius to Rome, but he dates the first in 339, and puts Athanasius's return to Alexandria in 340, in consequence of the rumours of what was doing at Antioch, which seems directly against S. Athanasius's own account of his movements, that he thereupon left Alexandria for Rome, instead of leaving Rome for Alexandria. The second journey he puts in the Lent of 341, and,

having sent the legates of Julius to the East in the year 340, he puts the Council at Rome in June of the former year, (to which he alters Julius's January,) and considers it to have sat till the autumn, Julius having written his answer to the Easterns not earlier than August or September. But as this arrangement would not allow S. Athanasius to have passed eighteen continuous months at Rome when the Council is held and the letter of Julius written, he is obliged to make them consist of broken periods, part in the first visit and part in the second, for which he has no authority of any kind.

These historians found their opinion on the words of Socrates, who says, (book ii. chap. 11,) that after Gregory had arrived at Alexandria, Athanasius immediately left that city and hastened to Rome, Gregory being installed into his place; and (chap. 15,) that he, with several other bishops, submitted his case to Julius, who restored each bishop to his See, on which they (with Athanasius, as it appears, among them,) returned to their dioceses. On this, he continues, a sedition was raised at Alexandria by the partisans of George the Arian bishop, and (chap. 17,) that Athanasius was accused to Constantius of having sold the corn which Constantine had granted to the poor of Alexandria, on which Constantius threatened to put him to death, and he concealed himself. Julius, hearing of this, invited him to come to Rome, after which, says this historian, Julius received, and replied to, the letters of the Easterns.

It is plain that little reliance can be placed on this account. George was not made Bishop of Alexandria by the Arians till the year 356, and it is therefore impossible that his followers could have molested S. Athanasius at this time. Valesius supposes that Socrates has repeated himself, in the chapter last mentioned, and that we are to understand him as there alluding to the same visit of S. Athanasius to Rome as that in chap. 11. If so, putting Julius's receipt of the letters of the Eusebians, and his reply to them, after this so-called second, but in truth first and only visit of S. Athanasius to Rome, there will be no substantial variation between the accounts of Socrates and of S. Athanasius, Julius, and the majority of modern historians, although of course the ground on which Baronius and Tillemont build their idea of the double visit of S. Athanasius to Rome will be cut from under them. Valesius, moreover, questions the possibility of S. Athanasius having returned to Alexandria without the letters of the Emperor. These he proves him to have had on his restoration to his See from his first exile at Treves, and after the Council of Sardica, but he says there is no trace of them at this time.

If so, as regards the dates of these events, we can only con

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