Athanasius, with nearly the whole of the nation for his friends, easily escaped the vengeance of the emperor; and, withdrawing for a third time from public life, he passed the remainder of this reign in concealment.  He did not, however, neglect the interests of his flock.  He encouraged them with his letters, and even privately visited his friends in Alexandria.  As the greater part of the population was eager to befriend him, he was there able to hide himself for six years.  Disregarding the scandal that might arise from it, he lived in the house of a young woman, who concealed him in her chamber, and waited on him with untiring zeal.  She was then in the flower of her youth, only twenty years of age; and fifty years afterwards, in the reign of Theodosius II., when the name of the archbishop ranked with those of the apostles, this woman used to boast among the monks of Alexandria that in her youth she had for six years concealed the great Athanasius.

But though the general was not wholly successful, yet the Athanasian party was for the time crushed.  Sebastianus, the new prefect, was sent into Egypt with orders to seize Athanasius dead or alive, wherever he should be found within the province; and under his protection the Arian party in Alexandria again ventured to meet in public, and proceeded to choose a bishop.  They elected to this high position the celebrated George of Cappadocia, a man who, while he equalled his more popular rival in learning and in ambition, fell far behind him in coolness of judgment, and in that political skill which is as much wanted in the guidance of a religious party as in the government of an empire.

George was born at Epiphania in Cilicia, and was the son of a clothier, but his ambition led him into the Church, as being at that time the fairest field for the display of talent; and he rose from one station to another till he reached the high post of Bishop of Alexandria.  The fickle, irritable Alexandrians needed no such firebrand to light up the flames of discontent.  George took no pains to conceal the fact that he held his bishopric by the favour of the emperor and the power of the army against the wishes of his flock.  To support his authority, he opened his doors to informers of the worst description; anybody who stood in the way of his grasp at power was accused of being an enemy to the emperor.  He proposed to the emperor to lay a house-tax on Alexandria, thereby to repay the expense incurred by Alexander the Great in building the city; and he made the imperial government more unpopular than it had ever been since Augustus landed in Egypt.  He used the army as the means of terrifying the Homoousians into an acknowledgment of the Arian opinions.  He banished fifteen bishops to the Great Oasis, besides others of lower rank.  He beat, tortured, and put to death; the persecution was more cruel than any suffered from the pagans, except perhaps that in the reign of Diocletian; and thirty