Macarius what the matter was, and when they came to inform him they found him standing inside [his cell] and praying for her, for God had already revealed this matter unto him, and he was praying for the woman. And the holy man Macarius answered and said unto his disciples: “Ye are mares which have the eyes of horses; but that mare is a woman. She hath not been changed from her nature of a woman except in the sight to those who have made a mistake; and that she appeareth as a mare is only an error of the sight of those who see her.” Then the blessed man took water and blessed it, and he threw it over her head and it ran down all over her body; and the blessed man prayed and straightway he made her to appear in the form of a woman to every man. Then he gave her some sacramental bread and made her to eat it before every man, and then he sent her away healed with her husband; and they departed from him rejoicing and praising God. And the blessed man exhorted the woman, and said unto her, “Be not at any time remote from the Church, and deprive not thyself of the Holy Mysteries, for all these things have happened unto thee because for five weeks thou didst not partake of the Offering.”
Let us now speak about his other excellences, and also of his sad and stern habits of self-denial in other particulars. Now because the large numbers of people who came to be blessed by him gave him much trouble, he thought out the following plan in his mind. He dug out a passage (or trench) in his cell which was about twenty measures [in width], and he made from it a tunnel of considerable length, [and it extended] from his cell to the distance of half a mile; at the place where the passage came to an end he made above the end of it a small cave. And when large numbers of people came to him and troubled him, he used to leave his cell secretly and pass along hidden by the tunnel and hide himself in the cave, where no one could find him. Now he used to do this whenever he wished to escape from the vain praise (or glory) of the children of men. And one of his most strenuous disciples told us, saying, “As he was going from his cell to the cave he used to recite four and twenty antiphons, and as he was coming back four and twenty also; and whenever he went from his cell to the church he used to pray four and twenty prayers during his passage [thither], and four and twenty as he was coming back.” And moreover, they say that he gave life to a dead man in order that he might convert a certain heathen who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and this was spoken of throughout the desert.
Once a certain unmarried man who was vexed by an evil
