and sanctioned the innovation, even while they resisted its introduction into the Creed.
Thus was Rome influenced by errour in the interest of her assumed sovereignty. And hence Nicholas felt that the Papacy itself was attacked by the encyclical letter of Photius. At a loss how to reply, he applied to those scholars who, in the Church of France, were the avowed champions of the innovation. Photius had taken no notice of the Latin innovations so long as they remained in the West, and perhaps only knew of them vaguely. But when the Roman priests spread them through Bulgaria, in defiant opposition to the doctrine of the Eastern Church, and among a people brought into the faith by the Church of Constantinople, he could be silent no longer, and he drew up against the Roman Church such a bill of attainder as shall endure for ever as a protest against the abuses and errours of which she has been guilty.
Nicholas so far humbled himself that he applied to Hincmar, a famous Archbishop of Rheims, who had resisted his autocratic pretensions. He felt he had need of this great theologian of the West to resist Photius. He had received the accusations of that Patriarch through the Prince of Bulgaria. "In reading that paper," he says,[1] "we have concluded that the writers dipped their pen in the lake of blasphemy, and that instead of ink they used the mire of errour. They condemn not only our Church, but the whole Latin Church, because we fast on Saturday and teach that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son; for they maintain that He proceeds from the Father only." Nicholas sums up some further complaints of the Greeks. Some of them are not to be found in the circular of Photius to the Easterns. "What is still more senseless," he adds, "before receiving our legates, they would oblige
- ↑ Nichol. Epist. in Labbe's Collection, vol. viii.
