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376 But now the schism which had sprung out of personal and political sources was complicated with a charge of heresy. This charge is significant of much in the life of the orthodox Church during the Middle Ages. We are familiar with the grave accusation of heresy and its terrible consequences in the Western Church; but there it meant some serious departure from what were deemed great and vital elements of the creed. No such thing was seen in the case of the Russian heresy of the twelfth century. The Church was universally and securely settled in its faith. It had not sufficient originality of mind or intellectual interest to dream of loosening its moorings and entering on unknown seas of speculation. The daring heresiarchs of the East who have left their marks for all time on the course of the world's thought belong to the patristic period; those met with later are of the Western Church. The word heresy has shrunk to much narrower limits within the safe orthodoxy of the later Greek and Russian Church. Nestor, the bishop of Rostoff, who had been deprived of his diocese by the metropolitan Constantine, went to the Byzantine capital to defend his case and vindicate his rights. There he was met with a charge of heresy. The heresy was this, that he had forbidden people to break their Wednesday or Friday fasts even when the festivals of the Nativity and Epiphany fell on those days. The irregularity did not begin with Nestor, nor was he the only promoter of it. It was revived by a bishop named Leon, who had come into his diocese during his absence. Leon was first tried by the metropolitan at Kiev, and then at Constantinople by the patriarch. But the heresy was not crushed. It appeared at Kiev in the person of the metropolitan Constantine, who adopted it in all innocence and convoked a synod to establish it; but he was opposed by two valiant champions of sound doctrine with regard to feasts and fasts, Cyril, bishop of Touroff, and Polycarp, archimandrite of the great Pechersky Monastery and continuator of Nestor's Lives of the Saints. This