Page:Ante-Nicene Christian Library Vol 3.djvu/474

462 Peter: for Anubion also, who is very friendly with me, began to inform me in a certain mysterious way of his plots; but unhappily I did not believe him, because I had done him no harm."

And when all of us, along with my father, were agitated with sorrow and weeping, meantime Anubion came to us, intimating to us that Simon had fled during the night, making for Judæa. But seeing our father lamenting and bewailing himself, and saying, "Wretch that I am, not to believe when I heard that he is a magician! What has befallen wretched me, that on one day, being recognised by my wife and my sons, I have not been able to rejoice with them, but have been rolled back to the former miseries which I endured in my wandering!"—but my mother, tearing her dishevelled hair, bewailed much more bitterly,—we also, confounded at the change of our father's countenance, were, as it were, thunderstruck and beside ourselves, and could not understand what was the matter. But Anubion, seeing us all thus afflicted, stood like one dumb. Then Peter, looking at us his sons, said: "Believe me that this is your very father; wherefore also I charge you that you respect him as your father. For God will afford some opportunity on which he shall be able to put off the countenance of Simon, and to recover the manifest figure of your father—that is, his own."

Then, turning to my father, he said: "I gave you leave to salute Appion and Anubion, who, you said, were your friends from boyhood, but not that you should speak with Simon." Then my father said: "I confess I have sinned." Then said Anubion: "I also with him beg and entreat of you to pardon the old man—good and noble man as he is. He was unhappily seduced and imposed upon by the magician in question; for I will tell you how the thing was done. When he came to salute us, it happened that at that very time we were standing around him, hearing him tell that he