St Athanasius stood contra mundum for the Trinitarian doctrine 'whole and undefiled,' when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius, into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which then, as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. The glory of St Athanasius is that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, like all others, have passed away. "When I first opened De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece, for only a mastermind could have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity" ¿ C. S. Lewis, from the Introduction