The Roman Catholics were openly opposed to the circulation of the Bible among the people, and used their influence to check the movement for a revival of righteousness and learning. By constant effort, even in the days of Pashtimaljian, they cast suspicion upon the movement into the minds of some of the leaders among the old Church people. An anti-reform party was gradually formed, led largely by uneducated ecclesiastics, who saw that if only educated men were to be ordained to the priesthood and were to exercise a leading influence in the Church, their power would soon be destroyed. They succeeded in exalting to patriarchal power in 1839 an astute and bigoted man from the interior of the country. He began at once to arrest and throw into prison some of the leading men in the evangelical movement. Some even were banished into the interior for the sole crime of reading the Bible. The Armenian Evangelical Union, a secret organization, had in 1839 some twenty-two members. It was an organized company of intelligent, advanced thinkers, who came together to plan and pray for the reformation of their Church and of the country, and for Bible study. They carried on secret correspondence with men of enlightenment throughout the empire. None of them were separated from the Church nor did they contemplate such a step nor encourage it in others. They were planning solely for the salvation of the Gregorian Church. These unions were continued and multiplied in the country, but not as a secret society after the organization of the Protestant churches. On the third of March, 1839, a patriarchal bull was issued by Hagopos, adjunct patriarch, forbidding the reading of all books printed or circulated by the missionaries, and all who possessed such books were ordered to deliver them up. A few days later the sympathetic and gentle patriarch Stepan was deposed and Hagopos was installed in his place. Spurred on by the same Romanists, the Greek patriarch issued a similar bull to all Greeks against the books of the missionaries. The reign of terror thus begun raged in the capital and throughout the interior of the country for many years. April 28th, 1839, the Armenian patriarch issued a new bull threatening terrible anathemas, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, against all who should be found communicating with the missionaries or reading their books. Arrests and imprisonments were of constant occurrence. The native evangelicals were at their wits’ end and the missionaries could see no way of deliverance.