diet. The few monasteries and churches, which, in spite of oppression, had maintained a struggling existence, were suppressed and their property confiscated, while all who professed the Orthodox faith were declared incapable of holding public office. From 1718 to 1720 fresh remonstrances of the tsar, then at the zenith of his power, led to an apparent amelioration in the condition of the Orthodox sufferers. Strict orders for their protection were issued by Augustus of Poland, and the papal nuncio at Warsaw threatened with his apostolic curse all who should disturb the peace of the Orthodox Church, but the change was more apparent than real. The government in Poland was never sufficiently strong to repress the intemperate zeal of the clergy and the Jesuits, or to afford efficient protection to the Orthodox peasant from the rapacious exactions of his Catholic lord. Continued persecutions led to renewed appeals of the unhappy sufferers to the Polish king, and to the national diet. Russia, under the successors of Peter the Great, constantly interfered in their behalf, but without effectual result.
In 1762, during the reign of Elizabeth, George Kominski, the Orthodox bishop of White Russia, laid before Bang Stanislas, and the diet, a statement of the sad condition to which the adherents of the Greek faith had been reduced, with an earnest appeal for the redress of their wrongs. Two hundred of their churches had been forcibly seized and given over to the Uniates; they were prevented from repairing their ancient edifices, falling into ruins, and forbidden to erect new ones; their priests were hindered in their ministrations, imprisoned, tortured, and put to death without any form of trial; congregations were dispersed by force; Orthodox believers were deprived of all civil rights; freedom of worship
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