In opposition to the anathematised confession the council endorsed Peter Mogila's confession. That was thoroughly Oriental. But this council in its antagonism to Calvinism went further and leaned towards Rome. It adopted a modified doctrine of purgatory, declaring that a certain period of suffering in Hades would be assigned to "those who had begun to repent, but who had not brought forth works meet for repentance." The synod of Bethlehem in a small way corresponds in the Greek Church to the council of Trent in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a deliberate condemnation of the Reformation and re-endorsement of the old teaching and practice.
Although Cyril's attempt to originate a reformation in the Greek Church had ended in failure, this fact must not be set down to the brave man's discredit. He had not displayed any intellectual originality; he had not developed reformed doctrine from within his Church; he had only tried to transplant an exotic, and it is not surprising that this would not take root in a strange soil. The Reformation in England was not indigenous. It too was a foreign importation, first from Wittenberg, then from Geneva. But the case of the remote Eastern Church is very different. Greek thought had been rarely much interested in movements of the Western mind. It was hardly touched by the Novatian and Donatist schisms, and but slightly affected by the great Pelagian controversy. We should not have expected therefore that it would
that the Greeks had never worked out a metaphysical theory of the transmutation of the elements as the Latins had done, and had never accepted the Roman Catholic theory of essence and accidents, leaving the subject a mystery. But their doctrine was practically the same as the Roman doctrine, which indeed first appeared in the East, most distinctly, for instance, in Gregory of Nyssa. Now Cyril denies it. He asserts that only the faithful participate—a Calvinistic idea going even beyond Luther, who held that the unworthy do receive the body of Christ, but to their hurt, and certainly as foreign to the Greek as to the Latin Church. Then Cyril goes on to denounce the popular cult of icons. "As to image worship," he writes, "it is impossible to say how pernicious under present circumstances it is." He also pronounces against the invocation of saints—all Protestant and some of them advanced Calvinistic declarations.
