Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/89

74 Gennadius, died heartbroken at the treason of his city; Gelaktion, Bishop of Souzdal, perished in exile rather than acknowledge a pretender; Joseph, Bishop of Kolomna, was dragged in chains from town to town by another usurper for exhorting the marauders to obedience; at Novgorod the metropolitan Isidore kept the citizens true to their allegiance, and led them in a vigorous, though hopeless, resistance against a Swedish army; when the convent of Solovetsk was summoned, by the victorious Swedes, to surrender, with promise of a garrison for its protection, its hegumen Anthony stoutly replied, "The Lavra needs no protection from foreign soldiers, and no stranger shall ever be tsar of Russia;" when Rostov was captured Philaret Romanoff, the bishop, refused to abandon his flock, and endeavored to protect it by the power of the Church; seized by the victorious rebels while he was administering communion at the altar, dragged to the presence of their chief, the third Dimitri, the "Robber of Touschina," whom Marina had joined and married, he defied his authority; the great monastery of the Troïtsa successfully maintained for months a siege against an army of thirty thousand Poles, poured out its treasures without stint, and the blood of its brethren like water for the defence and relief of the capital. When Vassili Shouesky, driven from the throne, was a captive in a Polish jail; when Moscow fell, and Hermogenes, deposed by the invader, was thrust into prison to die of starvation; when the empire was thus without a tsar and the Church without a head, the Holy Lavra of St. Sergius refused to submit or to acknowledge a foreign prince, and, under the leadership of its archimandrite Dionysius and of its bursar Abram Palitsin, bravely continued the almost hopeless struggle for the national existence and the national faith. "Its light," says a chronicle, "shone like a sun over all Russia."