In the beginning of 1846 the patriarch, alarmed at the extent as well as the power of the reform movement, inaugurated more coercive measures. On Sunday morning, January 25, at the close of the regular service in the Patriarchal Church, darkening the house and drawing a great veil in front of the main altar, a bull of excision was read against Priest Vartanes, an evangelical, and all of the followers of the “modern sectaries.” Heaping every conceivable epithet of condemnation upon him he was expelled from the Church and forbidden as “a devil and the child of the devil to enter into the company of believers.” All the faithful were forbidden to admit him into their dwellings or to receive his salutation or to look upon his face. A wild spirit of fanaticism reigned. This most thorough and fanatical persecution began to search out the evangelicals, who were ordered to repair to the patriarchate and recant, or be forever cast out from society, from every social privilege, and from the Church. On the following Sabbath, with passions still more inflamed, a second anathema was read in all the churches, accompanied by the most violent denunciations by the patriarch, the bishop and the vartabeds. All of the evangelicals were pronounced “accursed, and excommunicated, and anathematized by God, and by all his saints, and by Matteos Patriarch.” The patriarch not only cursed those who were readers of the Bible and believers in its teachings, but grave malediction was hurled against all who should harbor them or communicate with them. Printed copies of the last two anathemas were sent to every part of Turkey to be read in all the churches. Even to this point the evangelical Armenians had made no move to form a community separate from the old Church. On the 21st of June, 1846, a day of solemn festival in the Church, the patriarch issued a new bull of excommunication and anathema against all who remained firm to their evangelical principles, decreeing that it should be publicly read at each annual return of this festival in all the Armenian churches throughout the Ottoman empire. By this act the Protestant or evangelical Armenians were completely cut off from any lot or part in the Gregorian Church. There was no hope of their being received back again except by their repudiating every principle of reform. This, of course, they could not do.