acrifices they were called
upon to make in order to preserve their national independence.

In the mean time the emperor Constantine celebrated his union with the
papal Church, in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, on December 12, 1452. The
court and the great body of the dignified clergy ratified the act by
their presence; but the monks and the people repudiated the connection.
In their opinion, the Church of St. Sophia was polluted by the ceremony,
and from that day it was deserted by the orthodox. The historian Ducas
declares that they looked upon it as a haunt of demons, and no better
than a pagan shrine. The monks, the nuns, and the populace publicly
proclaimed their detestation of the union; and their opposition was
inflamed by the bigotry of an ambitious pedant, who, under the name of
Georgius Scholarius, acted as a warm partisan of the union at the Council
of Florence, and under the ecclesiastical name of Gennadius is known in
history as the subservient patriarch of Sultan Mahomet II. On returning
from Italy, he made a great parade of his repentance for complying
with the unionists at Florence. He shut himself up in the monastery
of Pantokrator, where he assumed the monastic habit and the name of
Gennadius, under which he consummated the union between the Greek Church
and the Ottoman administration.

At the present crisis he stepped forward as the leader of the most
bigoted party, and excited his followers to the most furious opposition
to measures which he had once advocated as salutary for the Church, and
indispensable to the preservation of the State. The unionists were now
accused of sacrificing true religion to the delusion of human policy, of
insulting God to serve the Pope, and of preferring the interests of their
bodies to the care of their souls. In place of exhorting their countrymen
to aid the Emperor, who was straining every nerve to defend their
country--in place of infusing into their minds the spirit of patriotism
and religion, these teachers of the people were incessantly inveighing
against the wickedness of the unionists and the apostasy of the Emperor.
So completely did their bigotry extinguish every feeling of patriotism
that the grand duke Notaras declared he would rather see Constantinople
subjected to the turban of the Sultan than to the tiara of the Pope.

His wish was gratified; but, in dying, he must have felt how fearfully he
had erred in comparing the effects of papal arrogance with the crue