But when peace was now all but at hand, he returned to Alexandria; and when again there sedition and war arose, since it was not possible for him to oversee all the brethren throughout the city, divided as they were into either party of the sedition, he again at the feast of the Pascha, as though from abroad, addressed them by letter from Alexandria itself.
And afterward, writing another Festal Letter to Hierax, a bishop of those in Egypt, he mentions the sedition at Alexandria in his own day in these words: “But to me, what marvel is it, if it be hard even to communicate by letter with those who dwell farther off, when even conversing with myself, and taking counsel with my own soul, has become for me a thing impossible?
For even to my own bowels—the brethren who share my dwelling and are of one soul with me, and citizens of the same church—I have need of letters by post; and how I might send these through seems past contriving. For one might more easily cross over, not only into the country beyond the border, but even from the east to the west, than come to Alexandria from Alexandria itself.
For the midmost road of the city is more boundless and impassable than that great untrodden desert through which Israel journeyed in two generations; and the calm and waveless harbours have become an image of the sea which they had cloven asunder and walled up to be a path for horses, and in whose highway the Egyptians were drowned—the harbours often appearing, from the murders done in them, like a Red Sea.
And the river that flows by the city has at one time appeared drier than the waterless desert, and more parched than that wilderness through which Israel passed and so thirsted that they cried out against Moses, and there flowed to them from the only Worker of marvels a drink out of the sheer rock;
and at another time it so overflowed that, flooding all the surrounding country and the roads and the fields, it brought the threat of a flood of waters such as occurred in the days of Noah. And it ever comes down defiled with blood and slaughters and drownings, such as it became under Moses for Pharaoh, when it was turned to blood and stank.
And what other water of cleansing could there be for the water that cleanses all things? How could the great and boundless ocean, poured out upon men, scour away this bitter sea? Or how could the great river that goes forth out of Eden, diverting into one—the Gihon—the four heads into which it is parted, wash away the gore?
Or when could the air, befouled on every side by the noisome exhalations, become pure? For such are the vapours that breathe forth from the earth, and the winds from the sea, and the breezes of the rivers and the mists of the harbours, that the dews are as the ichor of corpses rotting in all the underlying elements.
Then they marvel and are perplexed whence come the continual plagues, whence the grievous diseases, whence the manifold corruptions, whence the varied and abundant destruction of men; why the greatest city no longer bears in itself so great a multitude of inhabitants—from infant children up to those grown utterly old—as those whom in former times it nourished, calling them ‘the hale aged.’ But those of forty years and up to seventy were then so much more numerous that their number is now not made up, although there have been enrolled and reckoned together for the public dole those from fourteen years up to eighty; and those youngest in appearance have become, as it were, contemporaries of those formerly the most aged.
And though they thus see the race of men upon the earth ever diminishing and being consumed, they do not tremble, while the utter annihilation of them grows and advances.”