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184 there he installed them as archpriests or deans, one in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the other in the Church of the Archangel. At the capital their efforts were, for a while, crowned with success; many in high position, among them Feodor Kouritsin, secretary of the prince, Helena, his daughter-in-law, and Zosimus, an archimandrite, became their disciples. The latter, by the influence of Alexis over the tsar, was, by him, arbitrarily appointed metropolitan of Moscow in 1491. Gennadius, Bishop of Novgorod, was the first whose suspicions were aroused; his representations were unheeded by Gerontius, then metropolitan, an aged and indolent prelate; but subsequent and more earnest appeals to the tsar, as defender of the faith, induced him to convene a council of the Church in 1505. Notwithstanding the protection and connivance of Zosimos, who presided as metropolitan, this assembly, moved by the vehement denunciations of Gennadius, aided by the hegumen of the Volokamsk monastery, St. Joseph, one of the most learned and enlightened men of his day, anathematized these schismatic and dangerous doctrines.

Alexis, meanwhile, had died, but Dlonysius, with the tsar's secretary, and many of their adherents in high ecclesiastic and civil office, were condemned and handed over to the secular arm for punishment at the stake; Zosimos was deposed, but his deposition was attributed to intemperance and incapacity, in order to avert from the Church the scandal of punishing the apostasy of its head. The heresy was stifled, if not thoroughly eradicated.

Popular sympathy with these early religious movements seems to have been excited, both by the dislike and contempt felt for an ignorant, greedy, and rapacious priesthood, and by a preference, already manifested, for