Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/600

574 But he was careful to select for the office a man whose life and character were in high repute even among the national Christians. This was, who came to be surnamed "the Almoner." The immensity of his charities is some evidence of the wealth of the sinecure post that he held as nominal patriarch of Alexandria, and it may help to explain the bitterness felt by the impoverished national Church that had been robbed in order to endow this alien and generally useless office. The Church had a large share in the enormous grain trade which passed between Alexandria and Constantinople, and all the profit of this now went into the coffers of the Melchite patriarch. John did the best thing that seemed possible for him under the circumstances. He did not renounce the wealth which only came to him in his official capacity, and of which he regarded himself as a trustee; but he gave it away with more than princely generosity. He distributed daily relief among 7,500 poor people in Alexandria. After the sack of Jerusalem by the Persians, he sent to that city of many woes gifts of money, food, and clothing, with a modest letter in which he said, "Pardon me that I can send nothing worthy the temples of Christ. Would that I could come myself and work with my own hands at the Church of the Resurrection."

Here we may see one good result of the Persian invasion. It was the indirect means of drawing the Syrian and Egyptian Churches together in bonds of real Christian sympathy. John the Almoner was treading in the footsteps of St. Paul when he sent aid to the "brethren at Jerusalem." In the autumn of the year 615, while John's caravans were crossing the desert, the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius, paid a visit to Anastasias, the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria, meeting him at the Ennanton Monastery on the seacoast west of Alexandria, where some Syrian monks were already staying for a time in order to revise the Syriac Bible by collation with the Greek text, while others had come as refugees from the Persian invasion. This meeting brought about a result which the