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Still, even Photius, when raking together the most minute points of difference between him and his adversaries, did not introduce this one. It was reserved for a hot-headed partisan at a later period to bring forward as a subject of public discussion. This was Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, with whose name the Great Schism will forever be associated.
The universally recognized precedence of the See of Peter was intolerable to the ambitious spirit of the patriarch Michael Cerularius. To aid him in casting off the hated yoke, he circulated, like Photius, a document in which the Western Church was loaded with invective and all manner of accusations laid to her charge.
At last the patience of the legates was exhausted, and on July 16, 1054, they proceeded to the Church of St. Sophia, and deposited on the altar, which was prepared for the celebration of the eucharist, a document containing a fierce anathema, by which Michael Cerularius and his adherents were condemned.
Having therefore formally laid their complaints in the most distinct terms before the Emperor and Senate, they proceeded to extremities. On the 16th of July, 1054, they appeared in the church of St. Sophia at the beginning of divine service, and declared solemnly that all their endeavors to re-establish peace and union had been defeated by Cerularius.
Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the Greek schism also took place; now from Michael Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853, Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a longer time has passed in China of a similar political inertness: yet China has preserved at least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical science, with which they respectively passed into their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are still in the less than infancy of art, literature, philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may fairly conclude that, if they have not learned the very alphabet of science in eight hundred years, they are not likely to set to work on it in the nine hundredth.
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