on account of the daemons' blows, he prayed prostrate. And after
his prayer, he said with a shout, "Here am I, Antony: I do not fly
from your stripes; yea, if you do yet more, nothing shall separate
me from the love of Christ." And then he sang, "If an host be laid
against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid." Thus thought and
spoke the man who was training himself. But the enemy, hater of
what is noble, and envious, wondering that he dared to return after
the stripes, called together his dogs, and bursting with rage,--"Ye
see," he said, "that we have not stopped this man by the spirit of
impurity; nor by blows: but he is even growing bolder against us.
Let us attack him some other way." {41} For it is easy for the
devil to invent schemes of mischief. So then in the night they made
such a crash, that the whole place seemed shaken, and the daemons,
as if breaking in the four walls of the room, seemed to enter
through them, changing themselves into the shapes of beasts and
creeping things; {42} and the place was forthwith filled with shapes
of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and snakes, asps, scorpions, and
wolves, and each of them moved according to his own fashion. The
lion roared, longing to attack; the bull seemed to toss; the serpent
did not cease creeping, and the wolf rushed upon him; and altogether
the noises of all the apparitions were dreadful, and their tempers
cruel. But Antony, scourged and pierced by them, felt a more
dreadful bodily pain than before: but he lay unshaken and awake in
spirit. He groaned at the pain of his body: but clear in
intellect, and as it were mocking, he said, "If there were any power
in you, it were enough that one of you should come on; but since the
Lord has made you weak, therefore you try to frighten me by mere
numbers. And a proof of your weakness is, that you imitate the
shapes of brute animals." And taking courage, he said again, "If ye
can, and have received power against me, delay not, but attack; but