confession, but the Jesuits broke in and seized the types. Cyril then sent the document to Geneva, where the confession was printed in a Latin version. The publication of it created a sensation in Europe. Here was the first ecclesiastic in the Greek Church professing the most thorough-going Protestant tenets, even echoing arrant Calvinism! Most people took the document for a forgery. Then Cyril issued a new edition of the confession, this time in Greek, and with significant additions. He declared that the faithful ought to read the Holy Scriptures. The doctrines necessary to be believed, he said, may be discovered for themselves by regenerate persons, the Holy Spirit aiding them, and Scripture being compared with Scripture—most outspoken Protestantism again, and that on its basal principle and central point of difference from the Church, the question of the source of authority in doctrine! On the other hand, Cyril says nothing about the authority of the Church. He adds an expression of his detestation of the adoration of images—practically the chief popular religious function in his own Church.
Cyril did not find his patriarchate a bed of roses. No patriarch could have been at his ease in the office under the anomalous circumstances, but a reformer amidst stereotyped Eastern orthodoxy and papal intrigue was doubly threatened in this post of danger. The Greeks, however, did not at first trouble themselves to interfere with their patriarch, and it was by the machinations of his most deadly enemies, the Jesuits, that he was molested. Cyril issued a pastoral calling upon the faithful to withdraw from communion with all members of the Latin Church. But he had not the authority to maintain his policy. Five times he was banished; and five times he was restored to his office. He was fortunate in having for his friend the grand vizier, who was not to be deceived by the lies that were circulated about him. At last his enemies found their chance. The Sultan Amurath was absent from Constantiniople and marching to Bagdad, when the Jesuits contrived to get a message sent to him informing
