Church of the Assumption and the other to be chief priest of the Church of the Archangel. In this way the suspected teaching was introduced to the very heart of the empire on the highest ecclesiastical authority. The heresy which the Jew had whispered in the closet was now preached on the housetop. But Gennadius, the Prince of Novgorod, would not let the matter rest. He viewed the new teaching with horror, and induced Ivan and Zosimus to summon a synod on the question. Joseph of Volokolamsk appeared as the eloquent champion of orthodoxy, and the heresy was condemned. Alexis had already passed to the silence "beyond these voices." But Dionysius was alive to receive his anathema, and he was punished with imprisonment in a convent. Zosimus himself was spared for the time being. But twelve years later he was required to resign by Ivan and sent off to a monastery on the ostensible ground of drunkenness (a.d. 1496). So grave was the idea of the head of the Church being guilty of heresy that this shocking scandal was hushed up under cover of what was regarded as the milder evil of intemperance.
After this the new metropolitan Simon presided over a synod which was called to bring about a reformation of morals. It ordered that convents for women should be kept apart from the religious houses for men, and that no men should perform Divine service in them—a drastic measure that throws a lurid light on the suspected consequences of the visits of priests to these convents in discharge of the duties of their holy office. The same synod enacted the canon, which has obtained down to our own day, that a priest must give up his cure on the death of his wife and retire into a monastery—so dangerous did the Russian Church consider a celibate priesthood to be. Priests of unworthy characters were to be deprived of their posts and degraded from their orders. The enactments of this synod imply a recognition of serious moral decay in the Church.
Meanwhile practices little better than the doings of savages were witnessed in the court. One physician—who
