The pope was so struck by the force of the argument that he promised to consecrate the young priest as bishop of Cæsarea, or Banias, as it is now called. Then the bishop-elect went through France, preaching a kind of new crusade. His idea was novel and striking, and met with enthusiastic approval. Indeed, with such eloquence did he appeal for the proposed diocese that he became immensely popular throughout all France, and gifts for the Bishopric of Banias continued to flow in from that country as long as Butrus lived. In 1897 the highest ecclesiastics of the Greek Catholic Church gathered in solemn convention at Serba to elect a new patriarch. Butrus Jureijery was the people’s choice; but the odds against him seemed overwhelming. He was too active and too honest for the hierarchy. The Turkish government was inimical to him, the powerful Jesuit order fought him, the papal nuncio objected to his nomination, and the bishops, almost to a man, opposed him. For once, however, the Syrian peasants defied their ecclesiastical lords. Word was sent to the convention that its members need not return to their dioceses unless they cast their votes for Butrus. So, in spite of government, Jesuits, papal nuncio, and the wishes of the very electors themselves, the enterprising bishop of Banias became “Patriarch of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and the Whole East,” and, subject to a hardly more than nominal allegiance to the Vatican, the supreme head of a great church whose five million adherents are scattered throughout the Near East from Hungary to Persia and from the Black Sea to the upper Nile. He had been elected as the “People’s Patriarch,” and such he remained. A religious and political autocrat, with every opportunity and every precedent for using his office to enrich himself and his family, he remained poor and honest to the end. This means more than the American reader realizes. Throughout the East, political or ecclesiastical office is supposed to afford a quasi-legitimate means of amassing wealth. Few princes of the church have ended their lives in poverty, nor have their families known want. Yet when Butrus died, his own brother would have been unable to attend the funeral, if a popular subscription had not raised sufficient money to buy him a decent coat.