Rome impossible, because of her later corruptions. The followers of one Artemon (an obscure heretic of the 3rd century) "say that all the ancients and the Apostles received and taught just what they themselves teach, and that the true doctrine had been kept down to the time of Victor, who was the thirteenth Bishop of Rome after Peter, but that the truth has been corrupted since the time of his successor Zephyrinus."[1]
After our long discussion about the order of the hierarchy we need hardly produce more texts to prove that in the East the Church was ruled and served by the ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. Here, too, minor orders were founded later to give a share in the deacon's office to lesser clerks. Sub-deacons (first mentioned in the East by St. Athanasius, † 373)[2] as well as Readers, Exorcists,[3] and Doorkeepers,[4] were counted as having minor orders.
The fruits of Redemption were applied in the Seven Great Mysteries, our Sacraments. They do not seem to have been drawn up into a list till later (the "Orthodox Confession" of Peter Mogilas does so in 1640), but there is abundant evidence of their use in the Byzantine Church.[5] A very long list of Eastern Fathers might be quoted to prove that they believed in the Real Presence and in the real and objective change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Macarius the Great, an Egyptian monk († 390), wrote a sentence that is famous as condemning the Reformers of the 1 6th century 1,200 years before their time with a force of expression that we should now not allow ourselves: "He said: This is my Body; therefore the Eucharist is not the figure of his Body and Blood, as some have said, talking nonsense in their stupid minds, but it is in very truth the Blood and Body of Christ."[6] St. Gregory of Nyssa,[7] St. Cyril of
- ↑ Eusebius, H.E. v. 28.
- ↑ Hist. Arian. 60, M.P.G. xxv. 765.
- ↑ Both mentioned by the Synod of Antioch in 341, Can. 10.
- ↑ Syn. Laod. 370, Can. 24.
- ↑ Pargoire: Église byzantine, pp. 93, 224, 336. They must have been tabulated long before 1640. At Lyons in 1274 the number seven was recognized by the Greeks.
- ↑ M.P.G. x. 1374.
- ↑ Or. Cat. M.P.G. xlv. 93, seq.
