original, upholding even a special order of Notaries to copy out he Scriptures. There is still preserved at Lyons a MS. of the New Testament which belonged to the Albigensian sect, who were the Paulicians of South France in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. It is a remarkably accurate version, far more so than those current among the orthodox Latin Christians of the Middle Ages. It was all-important that every one should read the New Testament; and in illustration of this point Petrus Siculus relates the following: Sergius, the great apostle of the Paulicians (800-834), who wrote several epistles to his Church, which were included by them in their canon of Holy Scripture, was converted by a woman, who asked him, "Why do you not read the Divine Gospels?" He answered, "It is not permitted to us laymen to read them, but only to the priests." She answered, “It is not so as thou supposest. For with God there is no respecting of persons; the Lord desires that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." Here we see how nearly these Paulicians were the forerunners of European Protestantism. The Armenian and Greek Church never explicitly forbade laymen to read the Bible, and it is only the Pope who has put the New Testament on the Index Expurgatorius. But although to-day it is free to any Greek or Armenian to read the Bible if he can, we may be sure that in the eighth and ninth centuries it was reserved to the priests only to do so. They alone would have had copies of it in their monasteries, and made them objects rather of superstitious reverence than of popular instruction.

It was the great stress laid on St. Paul's epistles that led the sect to call themselves Paulicians. Their teachers nicknamed themselves from Paul's epistles, eg., Constantine, founder of the heresy, called himself Sylvanus ; and the various chief congregations were called after the Churches St. Paul founded, as Macedonia, Colossians, etc. The epistles of Peter, who quarrelled with Paul and upheld the Jewish law, they rejected from their canon of the New Testament.

3. They rejected Mariolatry. The Virgin was no more than a conduit pipe through which the phantasm of Christ's body came into the world. She was an ordinary woman in other respects, and bore other children after Jesus was born. Prayer and hymn to her they held to be utterly wrong and objectionable. The Church of Heaven is the true mother of us all, the heavenly Jerusalem. The enormity of such heresy in the East can only be appreciated by one who has entered Eastern or Romish Churches and seen how preponderating a share of popular reverence the Virgin Mary receives. This therefore is another approximation to Protestantism.

4. Christ's body was only phantasmal, for matter is devilish and the Divine Spirit could not really have been confined in it; cp. Marcion. Christ, they said, entered the kingdom of matter to reveal to us the invisible God and rescue us from the thraldom of matter and of the Evil One. Redemption is recovery of spiritual freedom and union with God. 5. They rejected, like the Protestants, the Sacrifice of the Eucharist,

VOL. I.-pt. 2.

EE

and denied that we really partake of the body and blood of Christ, They even denied that it was real bread and wine which Christ gave His disciples. He was only symbolizing by His words and speaking in allegory. The Sacrament of Baptism was rejected in the same way. water was a mere symbol of the Divine Word which cleanses the soul. "I am the living water," was their favourite text.

The

6. The worship of the cross they likewise condemned. It was "the accursed tree," mere wood. The true cross, they said, is the attitude of prayer. They denied that consecrated crosses have a healing and vivifying power and virtue, such as was attributed to them.

7. No priests, where no sacraments. Every one was his own priest. They had only itinerant preachers-Sunecdemi, as St. Paul called themand their spirit is preserved to us in the one solitary fragment preserved to us of the Epistles of Sergius. It might have been penned by Wesley, and runs thus: "I have run from East to West, and from North to South, till my knees are weary, preaching the Gospel of Christ." These preachers had to dress like every one else, and were called pastors or teachers. No precaution, we see, was omitted against sacerdotalism.

9. In spite of the abuse of their orthodox oppressors, we know that a high moral ideal informed the daily life and homes of these Armenian heretics. They resembled our own Quakers, and based their lives on the Gospel, without being rigid or ascetic. "Their sober morality was not dependent on fasts, or feasts, or sacraments," "Politically they seem to have been nationalists, and opposed to extension of any alien power over Armenia. They called the Orthodox Greek Christians, by way of opprobrium, Romans, and denied that they were Christians at all.

10. It remains to notice their missionary efforts in Thessaly. Like other Armenians, they were for that age honest traders and workmen, and brave soldiers. Petrus Siculus relates how he heard in Tephrike that they were sending missionaries to Bulgaria to seduce the Orthodox to their own damned heresy, and adds that these miscreants boldly underwent all toils and dangers in order to disseminate their doctrines. They were clearly animated by a missionary zeal rare among the Eastern Christians of to-day. If the Greek Emperors had been wise, they would have protected these brave and honest heretics, and used them as a bulwark against encroachments of the Khaliphs. But the only idea was to harry and burn them alive. In A.D. 752 colonies of them were removed from Armenia, and planted by the Emperor of Constantinople in Bulgaria as a barrier against Bulgarians and Sclavonians. The subject is obscure from want of authorities; but it is certain that these Armenian colonists diffused their Paulician tenets on such a scale that during succeeding centuries the history of Bulgaria became the history of Paulicianism, only under the name of Bogomilisın, which is Slavonic for the cult of the lovers of God. In the years 813-820 the Paulicians in Armenia were terribly persecuted by a countryman of their own→

1 From article on Paulicians in "Dictionary of Christian Biography."

Leo the Armenian, Emperor of Constantinople. Soon afterwards Theodora the empress, in her reign between 842-857, impaled and beheaded as many as 100,000. At last these naturally peaceful heretics were goaded by cruelty into revolt. They chose apt leaders, allied themselves with the Khaliphs, and overran all Asia Minor. In the mountains near Trebizond they even established a republic of their own, and fortified Tephrike, their chief centre. In 969 a second colony of them was transported by the Greek Emperor Zimiscas to Philippopolis. Crushed out in Armenia, the heresy took firm root among the Bulgarians, then in the act of receiving Christianity. There is ground for supposing that the Glagolitic alphabet in which the earliest Sclavonic works were written, is based on the Armenian letters or on the cognate Georgian characters, which latter may well have been used in Tephrike, the centre of the Paulician missionaries. I believe that much of the old Bulgarian literature, especially the legendary religious lore which circulated unsanctioned by the Orthodox Greek Church among the common people, was translated from Armenian and Georgian. It is in old Bulgarian books that scholars must look for versions of the epistles of Sergius, the great Paulician teacher, and for a mass of Marcionite writings which the zeal of the Orthodox has elsewhere destroyed. This hypothesis of a connection of early Bulgarian literature with Armenian is antecedently so probable that it is worth testing. Many of the old apocryphs which circulated among the South Slavs are still preserved in Armenian, e.g., The Book of Asenath, Vision of Enoch,-Will of Twelve Patriarchs,-Letter of King Abgar to Jesus Christ,-Letter of Pontius Pilate to Tiberios,—Vision of Methodios (? of Patara),-History of Adam and Eve and of How They Were Created,-Progress of the Mother of God through Hell (in Armenian title is: "Vision of the All-holy Mother of God, which she saw in Hell, of the Tortures of the Wicked," etc.),-Revelation of Abraham (Armenian title: "History of Holy Confessor and Mystic Abraham "),-History of the Babylonian Kingdom and of the Three Children 1 (Armenian title: "History of the Prophet Daniel, and Liberation of Shushan from the Condemnation of the Lawless Senate and Unjust Murder; also of the Three Children, Ananias, Azariah and Misaiēli, and of the Terrible Vision of the King "); this is unknown in Greek,-Gospel of Nicodemus,-Martyrdom of the Soldier Georgius,-Life and Miracles of St. Nicolaus,-History of the Magi who Came to Salute Christ,-Questions of St. John put to Christ on Mount Tabor (Armenian title: "On Transfiguration of our Lord on Tabor." The identity of the Armenian tract, which seems to be a translation of Chrysostom, with the Bulgarian is doubtful), -About the Devil which appeared in Wolf's Form,-The History of Gog and Magog,-The Story of Barlaam and Josephat,-Repentance of Adam,-History of Alexander,

1

1 Pypin and Spasovic so give the title: Geschichte der Slavischen Lit., vol. i., p. 102. In "Archiv für Slavische Philologie," band 2, p. 129, A. Wesselofsky gives an account of the Slavonic saga Vom Babylonischen Reich, which seems another apogryph to the Armenian here mentioned, which however agrees in title with that which Pypin mentions.

etc. All, or nearly all, the apocryphal writings which exist in old Bulgarian circulated also in Greek in the Middle Ages; and without a comparison of them in their Bulgarian form with the Armenian, it is not safe to say that they were translated from Armenian rather than from Greek. I throw it out merely as a suggestion of what is historically possible and probable.

The Paulician doctrines were carried from Bulgaria all over Europe, but especially to the North of Italy and the South of France, where they were known as the Albigensian heresy. The sect of Cathari-whence the German word Ketzer (heretic)-were akin to them. It is beyond my limits to follow the movement in Western Europe, and detail the awful persecutions to which the Albigeois were subjected by the Roman Inquisition. Suffice it to say, that in Western Europe they were the mediæval precursors of the Reformation; and it is therefore through their Quaker-like heresies, which have not survived, rather than through their orthodox Church, which has, that the Armenians have contributed in a marked and permanent manner to the spiritual life of Northern Europe. It is equally remarkable that Bulgaria-the ancient Thrace-through which Paulicianism-the characteristic heresy of a hardy race of mountaineers, such as were the Armenians-should be the very country from which, according to Strabo and other ancient authorities, the Armenians originally migrated to the mountain ramparts of Asia Minor. One is tempted to believe that down through the centuries there had lingered in the Balkan highlands a substratum of kindred folk, to admixture with whom the Bulgarian invaders owed the facility with which they sympathized with and adopted the religious radicalism of Constantine and Sarkis. In spite of centuries of political oppression on the part of the Turks and of religious oppression on the part of the Greeks, we have seen the Bulgarians in the last few years reclaim and win back their liberties in both kinds. To-day they are making sure their political independence as an European State, and at the same time have attracted the anathemas of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, because they are determined to manage their religious affairs for themselves. May we hope that, as the Armenians long ago won the anathemas of the Orthodox Greek Church, so they may ere long be able to liberate themselves from the blighting curse of Ottoman misgovernment.

THE ORTHODOX-CATHOLIC EASTERN

CHURCH,

COMMONLY CALLED THE GREEK CHURCH.

BY N. ORLOFF, M.A.

I. GENERAL SKETCH.

THE subject of my present lecture is the Orthodox-Catholic Eastern Church, commonly called the Greek Church; and the following eloquent summary of the present status of the Church is to be found in the pages of one of her latest English historians, Dr. Neale :—

"Extending herself from the Sea of Okhotsk to the palaces of Venice, from the ice-fields that grind against the Solovetsky monastery to the burning jungles of Malabar-embracing a thousand languages and nations and tongues, but binding them together in the golden link of the same faith-offering the tremendous sacrifice in a hundred liturgies, but offering it to the same God, and with the same rites-fixing her patriarchal thrones in the same cities as when the disciples were called Christians, first at Antioch, and James, the brother of our Lord, finished his course at Jerusalem-oppressed by the devotees of the false prophet as once by the worshippers of false gods-she is now as she was from the beginning, multiplex in her arrangements, simple in her faith, difficult of comprehension to strangers, easily intelligible to her sons, widely scattered in her branches, hardly beset by her enemies, as were her Divine founders, yet still and evermore what she delights to call herself-One only, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic."

In early times and, as it would now seem, for ever past, the same Church embraced the whole of the west of the then known world; but in those times even the popes thought and wrote that many of the Roman pontiffs were heretics (Pope Hadrian VI., "Dictates on the Fourth Book of the Sentences"), and that "in matters of faith an obscure layman had just as equal a voice as the highest officer in the Church" (Nicolas I., in his letter to Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople), inasmuch as the definition or determination of that faith does not depend on individuals, however exalted, nor on any number of them, however large, but on the Church as a whole. In those remote times the leaven of rationalism was not permitted to penetrate the united fold of Christ, and the first attempts to foist erroneous teaching of a local Church on the whole body were nipped in the bud by Pope Leo III., who caused the creed in its original, and the only acknowledged and permissible form, to be engraved on the tablets of silver. The poison, however, was not expelled, and the gangrene spread with such rapidity that soon Rome