Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/638

612 the efforts of men in the East to come to terms with the Western Church. The origin and motives of these efforts were not religious or even ecclesiastical; they were purely political. John Palæologus and other emperors saw the desperate need of a European alliance if the onward march of the Turks was to be stayed and the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire preserved. What interest had that policy for the Copts, already subject to Islam and not of the Greek communion? Nevertheless the Coptic patriarch, John, sent John the abbot of St. Antony as a delegate to Florence. He did not arrive till after the Greeks had left. This will account for the fact that the council decreed union with the Coptic Church. But it had previously effected a nominal union with the Greek Church. And yet these two Churches mutually anathematised one another. The consequences would have been interesting if there had been any reality in the acts of union. But since, in point of fact, they were never accepted by either of the Eastern Churches, they can only be regarded as pious pronouncements in the region of idea. Metrophanes, the metropolitan of Cyzicum, whom the emperor made patriarch of Constantinople on account of his staunch support of the union of the Greeks and Latins, was denounced by the three other Greek patriarchs as a "matricide"—for killing his "mother Church." The union with the Jacobites was no more real, and the Copts still remained in separation from the Latin as well as from the Greek Churches.

The story of Cyril Lucar belongs to the Greek Church, and therefore it has been given earlier in this volume. We are accustomed to think of him as the patriarch of Alexandria before he was translated to the patriarchate of Constantinople. But he was the Melchite patriarch, the representative of the alien Greek communion with its few adherents in Alexandria and its neighbourhood. Still it is a fact of significance in regard to Christianity in Egypt, that although not a member of the