in carrying out his purging of the Church against all opposition; but the temperament which favours such virile virtues is not so ready to cultivate the graces of tolerance and gentleness, and Nicon was a stern ecclesiastic. Even his admirer Mouravieff admits that his "ardent zeal for eradicating all that was evil in the Church carried him beyond the bounds which pastoral long-suffering might have observed."[1]
The tirst revised work to be printed was the Slonjebuik or service book, which was followed by the Skreejál ("The Table"), a patristic catena of doctrines. The revision was not left to make its way on its merits. The old MSS. of the corrupt text were violently taken from the monasteries, where they had been used for years, and the revised versions forcibly substituted. Naturally such high-handed acts roused fierce resentment among the ignorant, conservative monks. The result was a schism which issued in the large sect of the Staro-Obriadtsi, or Raskolniks, who have suffered much persecution for their adhesion to the old books.
But while Nicon was severe in the discipline of the Church, he showed a large-minded tactfulness in dealing with foreign affairs. During his patriarchate Little Russia was united with the Church and empire after a war with the Poles. The movement from within was led by Kmeltnitsky, the "Hetman," who asked the army whether they would belong "to the unbelieving khan (the sultan), to the Latin king, or to the orthodox tsar?" He saw and he made the men see that independence was impossible. Faced by this dilemma, they shouted, "We wish to be under the orthodox tsar."
It was more difficult to secure ecclesiastical submission. The metropolitan of Kiev and the archimandrite of the Pechersky Monastery had no inclination to exchange a merely nominal subordination to Constantinople for a very real submission to Moscow with its masterful prelate. But Nicon's flattering reception of the delegates from
- ↑ History, p. 206.
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