There was, however, one other great body of Christians towards whom, after a time, the nonjuring separatists turned with proposals of amity and intercommunion.  This was the Eastern Church.  Various causes had contributed to remove something of the obscurity which had once shrouded this vast communion from the knowledge of Englishmen.  As far back as the earlier part of Charles I.’s reign, the attention of either party in the English Church had been fixed for a time on the overtures made by Cyrillus Lukaris,[133] patriarch, first of Alexandria, and then of Constantinople, to whom we owe the precious gift of the ’Alexandrian manuscript’ of the Scriptures.  Archbishop Abbot, a Calvinist, and one of the first representatives of the so-called Latitudinarian party, had been attracted by the inclinations evinced by this remarkable man towards the theology of Holland and Geneva.  His successor and complete opposite, Archbishop Laud, had been no less fascinated by the idea of closer intercourse with a Church of such ancient splendour and such pretensions to primitive orthodoxy.  At the close of the seventeenth century this interest had been renewed by the visit of Peter the Great to this island.  With a mind greedy after all manner of information, he had not omitted to inquire closely into ecclesiastical matters.  People heard of his conversations on these subjects with Tenison and Burnet,[134] and wondered how far a monarch who was a kind of Pope in his own empire would be leavened with Western and Protestant ideas.  In learned and literary circles too the Eastern Church had been discussed.  The Oxford and Cambridge Platonists, than whom England has never produced more thoughtful and scholarlike divines, had profoundly studied the Alexandrian fathers.  Patristic reading, which no one could yet neglect who advanced the smallest pretensions to theological acquirements, might naturally lead men to think with longing of an ideal of united faith ‘professed’ (to use Bishop Ken’s familiar words) ’by the whole Church before the disunion of East and West.’[135] Missionary feeling, which at the beginning of the eighteenth century was showing so many signs of nascent activity, had not failed to take notice of the gross ignorance into which many parts of Greek Christendom had fallen.[136] Henry Ludolph, a German by birth, and late secretary to Prince George of Denmark, on his return to London in 1694 from some lengthened travels in Russia, and after further wanderings a few years later in Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Holy Land, persuaded some English Churchmen to publish an impression of the New Testament in modern Greek, which was dispersed in those countries through the Greeks with whom Ludolph kept up a correspondence.[137] In 1701 University men at Cambridge, when Bentley was Vice-Chancellor, were much interested by the visit of Neophytos, Archbishop of Philippopolis, and Exarch of Thrace.  He was presented with a Doctor of Divinity’s degree, and afterwards made a speech