Hannah conducted Arsinoe to Paulina’s villa, first into a small room at the side of the entrance hall, where the deaconesses took off their veils and their warm wraps in winter evenings.  There the girl could be alone, and safe from inquisitive questionings which could not fail to be painful to her.  Hannah desired her to await her return, and then joined her colleagues.

In order to do so she had to pass through the room where the elders and deacons were sitting in council.  The bishop, who presided over the assembly, sat on a raised seat at the head of an oblong table, and on his right hand and his left sat a number of elderly men, some of whom seemed to be of Jewish or Egyptian extraction but most of them were Greeks.  In these the lofty intellectual brow was conspicuous, in those a bright, ecstatic expression particularly in the eyes.  Hannah went past the assembly with a reverential greeting into the adjoining room in which the deaconesses sat waiting, for women were not admitted to join or hear the deliberations of the elders.  The bishop, a fine old man with a full white beard; raised his kindly eyes as the door closed upon Hannah, fixed them for a few moments on the tips of his fingers that he had raised and then addressed the presbyter who had presented for baptism several candidates who had been grounded during the past year in the Christian faith and doctrine, as follows: 

“Most of the catechumens you have presented to me cling faithfully no doubt to the Redeemer.  They believe in Him and love Him.  But have they attained to that sanctification, that new birth in Christ, which alone can justify us in admitting them through baptism among the lambs of our Good Shepherd?  Let us beware of the tainted sheep which may infect the whole flock.  Verily, in these latter years there has been no lack of them, and they have been received among us and have brought the name of Christian into evil repute.  Shall I give you an example?  There was an Egyptian in Rhakotis; few seemed to strive so fervently as he for the remission of his sins.  He could fast for many days, and yet no sooner was he baptized than he broke into a goldsmith’s shop.  He was condemned to death, and before his end he sent for me and confessed to me that in former years he had soiled his soul with many robberies and murders.  He had hoped to win forgiveness of his sins by the act of baptism, the mere washing in water, not by repentance and a new birth to a pure and holy life; and he had gone on boldly in new sin because he confidently hoped that he might again count on the unwearying mercy of the Saviour.  Others again, who had been brought up in the practice of the ablutions which have to be performed by those who are initiated into the deeper secrets of the heathen mysteries, regarded baptism as an act of purification, a mystical process of happy augury, or at the best a figurative purification of the soul, and crowded to receive it.  Here, in Alexandria, the number of these deluded ones