Heresiarch

Saint Athanasius, The Father of Orthodoxy by Frances Alice Forbes.

Chapter two, Arius the Heresiarch.

The night before the martyrdom of the Patriarch Peter, as he had lain in prison praying and waiting for that dawn which was to be his last on Earth, there had come to him a few of his faithful clergy.

They had braved many dangers to look once more upon the face of their beloved bishop and to obtain his blessing and his last instructions.

He told me he had before him the article on Akbar in volume 46 of the encyclopedia.

But Heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine.

formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literarily inferior.

He had recalled, "...copulation and mirrors are abominable." The text of the encyclopedia said, "...for one of those Gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion, or, more precisely, a sophism." Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.

On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road.

On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the corridor of his house.

The Heresiarch would deduce from this story the reality, in other words the continuity, of the nine coins which were recovered.

It is absurd, he affirmed, to imagine that four of the coins have not existed between Tuesday and Thursday, three between Tuesday and Friday afternoon, two between Tuesday and Friday morning.