§ 152.1. Roman Catholic Hopes.—The Jesuit missions among the Turks and schismatic Greeks failed, but among the Abyssinians some progress was made. By promising Spanish aid, the Jesuit Paez succeeded, in A.D. 1621, in inducing the Sultan Segued to abjure the Jacobite heresy. Mendez was made Abyssinian patriarch by Urban VIII. in A.D. 1626, but the clergy and people repeatedly rebelled against sultan and patriarch. In A.D. 1642 the next sultan drove the Jesuits out of his kingdom, and in it henceforth no traces of Catholicism were to be found.—In Russia the false Demetrius, in A.D. 1605, working in Polish Catholic interests, sought to catholicize the empire; but this only convinced the Russians that he was no true czar’s son. When his Catholic Polish bride entered Moscow with 200 Poles, a riot ensued, in which Demetrius lost his life.445

§ 152.2. Calvinistic Hopes.—Cyril Lucar, a native of Crete, then under Venetian rule, by long residence in Geneva had come to entertain a strong liking to the Reformed church. Expelled from his situation as rector of a Greek seminary at Ostrog by Jesuit machinations, he was made Patriarch of Alexandria in A.D. 1602 and of Constantinople in A.D. 1621. He maintained a regular correspondence with Reformed divines in Holland, Switzerland, and England. In A.D. 1628 he sent the famous Codex Alexandrinus as a present to James I. He wrought expressly for a union of the Greek and Reformed churches, and for this end sent, in A.D. 1629, to Geneva an almost purely Calvinistic confession. But the other Greek bishops opposed his union schemes, and influential Jesuits in Constantinople accused him of political faults. Four times the sultan deposed and banished him, and at last, in A.D. 1638, he was strangled as a traitor and cast into the sea.—One of his Alexandrian clergy, Metrophanes Critopulus, whom in A.D. 1616 he had sent for his education to England, studied several years at Oxford, then at German Protestant universities, ending with Helmstadt, where, in A.D. 1625, he composed in Greek a confession of the faith of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was pointedly antagonistic to the Romish doctrine, conciliatory toward Protestantism, while abandoning nothing essential in the Greek Orthodox creed, and showing signs of the possession of independent speculative power. Afterwards Metrophanes became Patriarch of Alexandria, and in the synod, presided over by Lucar’s successor, Cyril of Berrhoë, at Constantinople in A.D. 1638, gave his vote for the formal condemnation of the man who had been already executed.446

§ 152.3. Orthodox Constancy.—The Russian Orthodox church, after its emancipation from Constantinople and the erection of an independent patriarchate at Moscow in A.D. 1589 (§ 73, 4), had decidedly the pre-eminence over the Greek Orthodox church, and the Russian czar took the place formerly occupied by the East Roman emperor as protector of the whole Orthodox church. The dangers to the Orthodox faith threatened by schemes of union with Catholics and Protestants induced the learned metropolitan, Peter Mogilas of Kiev, to compose a new confession in catechetical form, which, in A.D. 1643, was formally authorized by the Orthodox patriarchs as Ὀρθόδοξος ὁμολογία τῆς καθολικῆς καὶ ἀποστολικῆς ἐκκλησίας τῆς ἀνατολικῆς.—Thirty years later a controversy on the eucharist broke out between the Jansenists Nicole and Arnauld, on the one side, and the Calvinists Claude and Jurieu, on the other (§ 157, 1), in which both claimed to be in agreement with the Greek church. A synod was convened under Dositheus of Jerusalem in A.D. 1672, at the instigation of French diplomatists, where the questions raised by Cyril were again taken into consideration. Maintaining a friendly attitude toward the Romish church, it directed a violent polemic against Calvinism. In order to save the character of the Constantinopolitan chair for constant Orthodoxy, Cyril’s confession of A.D. 1629 was pronounced a spurious, heretical invention, and a confession composed by Dositheus, in which Cyril’s Calvinistic heresies were repudiated, was incorporated with the synod’s acts.