An English traveller who visited Edgmiatsin the year after the conclusion of this enactment found the synod with its Russian procurator in full swing. The katholikos was at once reduced to a position of president of the synod, and the synod to one of subservience to Russian policy. [137] Von Haxthausen speaks of the procurator as a Russian and quite an autocrat; this was in 1843. [138] At that time the pontiff Nerses was in occupation of the Chair, and his conspicuous abilities were regarded with suspicion by the Russian authorities. His schemes for the higher education of the Armenians had come to nothing owing to Russian opposition. But the hardest blow was reserved for the year 1885, when the Katholikos Makar was appointed by the Emperor in defiance of the expressed sentiments of the delegates of the nation. It was then realised that the independence of the Church was at an end. The ukase of investiture confirmed this pessimist view. Instead of the usual wording "upon the recommendation of the Armenian people," the appointment was based "upon the recommendation of the clergy." Instead of the pictures from Armenian history which adorned the ukase of the pontiff George, Russian insignia and coats of arms enlivened the scroll. The constitutional phrase has been restored to the ukase confirming the present pontiff, but not the patriotic pictures! [139] Still, in spite of the fetters which have been imposed upon the actions of the katholikos, as much by the manner in which the Polojenye is worked by the Russian bureaucracy as by the provisions which that statute contains, the average Armenian and especially the lower classes are immensely interested in the event of the coming days. At Batum, at Kutais, at Alexandropol, at Erivan--wherever we have been in the society of Armenians, talk has centred upon the triumphal journey and the approaching consecration of His Holiness Mekertich Khrimean. It is not only the ancient ceremony, and it is not merely the assembling of delegates from all parts of the Armenian world that appeals to the heart of the nation. It is the personality and reputation of the man. The people forgets, but it does not change. The imagination of the race still sees in the holder of the pontifical office not alone or so much an archbishop or katholikos--the keystone of the edifice of the Church--as a high priest in the old Biblical sense. Khrimean is the ideal of a high priest. He is a figure which steps straight out from the Old Testament with all the fire and all the poetry. At the ceremony of his consecration it seemed as if at the foot of Ararat the ancient spirit were still alive, and that the holy oil which descended upon that venerable head from the beak of the golden dove anointed a law-giver to the people who announced the Divine Word. This impression was in part derived from the Semitic cast of his features. The large brown eyes and aquiline nose above a