Greek Bible of an openly Protestant type, which was made and printed at Geneva. All the same, Lukaris as Patriarch had to canonize a Saint—St. Gerasimos the New († 1579). One wonders how he felt while he was doing it.
At last, in 1629, Lukaris published his famous Confession.[1] This Confession is quite frankly Protestant and Calvinistic:—The Bible has more authority than the Church, God has absolutely predestined the Elect and rejected the Reprobate without any regard to their merits, Christ alone intercedes for us, the Church is the congregation of the faithful of Christ throughout the world, and only the Elect really belong to it, the Church can err, men are justified by faith alone, there is no free will, all the works of the unregenerate are sins, there are only two Sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist, in which Christ is present by the spiritual apprehension of faith, without faith there is no Presence; there is no middle state between Heaven and Hell.[2] Lukaris had now quite formed a Protestantizing party to oppose the Latinizers. But in 1638 his enemies persuaded the Sultan (Murad IV, 1623–1640) that he was stirring up rebellion among the Cossacks. He had already been deposed so often that this time Murad meant to make an end of him altogether. So he sent some Janissaries to throttle him and throw his body into the sea.[3] His friends found it washed down far from Constantinople and gave him Orthodox burial with the repeated prayers for his soul that he would himself have abhorred when alive. But his party did not die with him. Meletios Pantogallos,
- ↑ Oriental Confession of the Christian Faith, Latin version in the same year, and French, English and German versions almost at once. Printed in Greek and Latin in Kimmel, pp. 25–44.
- ↑ D. Kyriakos (iii. p. 94), who is anxious to minimize this quarrel and to represent the whole story as a Jesuit intrigue, denies that this Confession is authentic, and thinks it was a forgery of the Jesuits to bring Lukaris into disgrace. It is the worst thing in his History. There is no sort of doubt that Lukaris wrote the Confession; he speaks of it with pride as his own work continually. See Meyer, l.c. p. 688.
- ↑ June 27, 1638. Naturally the Jesuits have been accused of having him killed. They had nothing whatever to do with his death really. The enemies who accused him to the Sultan were Cyril, Metropolitan of Berrhœa, and his party. Cyril of Berrhœa was the rival Patriarch. Cf. E. d'Or. vi. pp. 97–107: Les dernières années du Patriarche Cyrille Lucar.
