The great “reformer” of the Muscovite Church, and also its greatest robber, was the Czar, Ivan the Terrible; and according to him the foulest error of the “Western heretics” was the shaving of the beard. In an edict which this Head of the “Orthodox” Church issued in 1551, being unaware that another Russian Supreme Pontiff, the “great” Peter, would one day enact the contrary, he proclaimed that “the effusion of a martyr’s blood would not atone for this crime.” [Of shaving the beard.]

The same author must have remembered that in the seventeenth century the ecclesiastical Academy of Kiev, speaking through Lazarus Baranowitch, Bishop of Tchernigow, regarded that doctrine as indubitably true;9 and we can scarcely imagine that the Academy could have deemed otherwise when it was accustomed to hear, among other and innumerable evidences furnished by the Russian Liturgy, that passage of the Office for the Nativity of the Virgin:

"We proclaim and celebrate thy birth, and we honor thy Immaculate Conception.”