In vain the Patriarch assured the people that the change was a return to the ancient forms still preserved in Greece and Constantinople.

"The Greek Church," it was replied, "is no longer free from heresy.

Orthodoxy has become many-coloured from the violence of the Turkish Mahomet; and the Greeks, under the sons of Hagar, have fallen away from the ancient traditions." An anathema, formally pronounced by an Ecclesiastical Council against these Nonconformists, had no more effect than the admonitions of the Patriarch.

They persevered in their obstinacy, and refused to believe that the blessed saints and holy martyrs who had used the ancient forms had not prayed and crossed themselves aright.

"Not those holy men of old, but the present Patriarch and his counsellors must be heretics." "Woe to us! Woe to us!" cried the monks of Solovetsk when they received the new Liturgies.