authority of the Church in the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and condemns the adoration of pictures: in his account of the will and in many other questions, he inclines rather to Calvinism than to the teachings of the Orthodox Church. [507] The promulgation of this Confession of Faith as representing the teaching of the whole Church of which he was the spiritual head, excited violent opposition among the mass of the Greek clergy, and a few weeks after Cyril’s death a synod was held to condemn his opinions and pronounce him to be Anathema; in 1642 a second synod was held at Constantinople for the same purpose, which after refuting each article of Cyril’s Confession in detail, as the first had done, thus fulminated its curse upon him and his followers:—“With one consent and in unqualified terms, we condemn this whole Confession as full of heresies and utterly opposed to our orthodoxy, and likewise declare that its compiler has nothing in common with our faith, but in calumnious fashion has falsely charged his own Calvinism on us. All those who read and keep it as true and blameless, and defend it by written word or speech, we thrust out of the community of the faithful as followers and partakers of his heresy and corruptors of the Christian Church, and command that whatever be their rank and station, they be treated as heathen and publicans. Let them be laid under an anathema for ever and cut off from the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in this life and in the life to come, accursed, excommunicated, be lost after death, and be partakers of everlasting punishment.” [508] In 1672 a third synod met at Jerusalem to repudiate the heretical articles of this Confession of Faith and vindicate the orthodoxy of the Greek Church against those who represented her as infected with Calvinism. The attempt to Protestantise the Greek Church thus completely failed to achieve success: the doctrines of Calvin were diametrically opposed to her teachings, and indeed inculcated many articles of faith that were more in harmony with the tenets of Muslim theologians than with those of the Orthodox Church, and which moreover she had often attacked in her controversies with her Muhammadan adversaries. It is this approximation to Islamic thought which gives this movement towards Calvinism a place in a history of the spread of Islam: a man who inveighed against the adoration of pictures, decried the authority and the very institution of the priesthood, maintained the doctrines of absolute Predestination, denied freedom to the human will and was in sympathy with the stern spirit of Calvinism that had more in common with the Old than the New Testament—would certainly find a more congenial atmosphere in Islam than in the Greek Church of the seventeenth century, and there can be little doubt that among the numerous converts of Islam during that century were to be found men who had been alienated from the Church of their fathers through their leanings towards Calvinism.