house, he became his pupil, his deacon, his coadjutor, his successor in the see, and finally a saint and a doctor of the Church: he is St. Athanasius.
II
At the other end of the city there lived another clergyman. His name was Arius, and it was a very long time indeed since the Bishop had asked him to lunch. He took duty at St. Mark's, a small church that stood on the brink of the Mediterranean. The neighbourhood was of the best—palaces, zoological gardens, lecture-rooms, etc.—and over some trees rose the long back of the temple that Cleopatra had built to Antony. That temple would make a seemly cathedral, Arius often thought, and the obelisks in its forecourt—Cleopatra's Needles—would be improved if they supported statues of God the Father. The whole of Egypt was ripe for Christianity—for the right kind of Christianity, that is to say: not for the kind that was preached at the western end of the town.
Arius was elderly by now. Learned and sincere, tall, simple in his dress, persuasive in his manner, he was accused by his enemies of looking like a snake and of seducing, in the theological sense, seven hundred virgins. The accusation amazed him. He had only preached what is obviously true. Since Christ is the Son of God, it follows that Christ is younger than God, and that there must have been a condition—no doubt before time began—when the First Person of the Trinity existed, and the Second did not. This has only to be stated to be believed, and only those who
