57. So a different way must be found to solve the difficulty under discussion. First of all, as regards the decree of St. Methodius, the text We gave above is quite different from that found in the much-used Annals of Cardinal Baronius for 842 A.D. The text given by Baronius does not prescribe the use of the words "the sign of the gift of the Holy Spirit" in receiving back an apostate, although it requires that he be anointed with holy oil. The text reads: "Let them be anointed with chrism as those who are baptized are usually anointed." Even admitting that these words are authentic rather than a later addition as there is some reason to believe, their obvious sense will always be that when an apostate is received back, the same parts of the body should be anointed as are anointed when Confirmation is administered after Baptism. And since no mention is made of saying the words: "The sign of the gift of the Holy Spirit," the whole force of the problem is dispersed.

There is the additional consideration that the legates sent by Pope Nicholas I to Bulgaria conferred the sacrament of confirmation on those who had already received it from Greek priests. Their main reason for so doing was that the Greek ministers had not received the faculty for administering this sacrament from the Apostolic See. Photius launched a bitter attack against them in his encyclical letters, accusing them of conferring the sacrament of chrism on people who had been confirmed already. "Who ever heard of such madness as was unwaveringly engaged in by those fools? They have confirmed a second time people already anointed with chrism,

making trivial mockery of exalted mysteries." This proves clearly that St. Methodius did not intend to prescribe that penitent apostates on returning to the church should be given the sacrament of chrism a second time if they had already been confirmed. For Photius, who was Patriarch about forty years after St. Methodius, despite his perverse mind, enjoyed a constant reputation for learning and circumspection. He would never have accused the apostolic legates so bitterly for repeating the sacrament of chrism if St. Methodius had previously decreed or intended that apostates should receive the same sacrament a second time upon returning to the Church. For he would have foreseen that the legates would answer that they had only followed the custom of the eastern church in receiving the wanderers back to unity in accordance with the decree of St. Methodius.