combination of devotion, zeal, quarrelsomeness and restlessness, which make him so typical a son of his nation.
It did not take him long to quarrel with his diocese—"because they were utterly given to idolatry and Magianism," says his biographer, though one would like to hear their side of the case also. Whatever the cause, he was stoned in the streets, and left the city in a rage, solemnly cursing it as he did so. The biographer is at some pains to tell us how destruction fell on the city, in accordance with the word of the holy man. After this, he went wandering "to countries," much in the fashion that men of his race still do, equipped with the clothes he stood up in and a copy of the Gospels in a satchel. Neither traveller nor beggar ever starves in the East, and Miles arrived safely in Jerusalem; whence, "drawn by the fame of Ammonius,"[1] he descended to Egypt. Here a hermit, unnamed, received the wanderer; but very soon found, as his flock had done before, that the saint was no comfortable man to live with. In this case the casus belli was a tame snake of huge size that lived with the hermit (who apparently had not warned his guest of the fact), and that came in and disturbed the saint at prayers. Miles promptly destroyed it—miraculously, says his biographer—and when the hermit not unnaturally protested at this treatment of his dumb friend, rebuked him severely for un-Christian conduct in making a pet of a creature between which and mankind Heaven had established enmity. The hermit left his rather difficult guest in sole possession of the cell, and went to seek another. Miles, however, soon abandoned it, and returned to the East by way of Nisibis; where he scented the quarrel with Papa from afar, and hastened to join in the fray.
- ↑ Ammonius must be a slip for Ammon, pupil of Anthony.
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