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St Basil's life as a bishop, in fact was lived in the midst of the sort of miserable muddles so common in the history of the church, when everybody is more or less in the wrong, no one trusts anybody else, and Christian charity is very little in evidence. His own charity never failed, and he worked unceasingly for peace and unity. But he was misunderstood and misrepresented; all his efforts to unite the Catholics seemed to go wrong. He did just live to see the death of Valens, which meant the end of the Arian persecution: but he died very soon after, worn out, at the age of only forty-nine, on January 1st (the date on which the eastern churches keep his chief feast) 379.

For those of us who sweat the small stuff.