offices, and do not in the least depend on moral perfection of individuals, to the attainment of which it is everbody's duty to strive, and which therefore cannot be the privilege of anyone. The pope, with his pretensions, cannot be looked upon as a bishop, and is therefore consecrated by those who are immeasurably below him. Who should blame then presbyterians? What, again, do we see as a consequence of the rejection of orders as a sacrament? More than seven hundred she-reverends in America, and yet with them it is the Bible and nothing but the Bible. Where is then St. Paul with his "I suffer not a woman to teach or usurp (1 Tim. ii. 12) the dominion over a man, but to be in quietness"? If the imposition of hands in the sacrament of orders had ceased, all the other sacraments would cease also (baptism only excepted), and the human race would be deprived of all grace, for then the whole Church would have proclaimed that Christ had rejected her. "Not so was in the beginning," said our Saviour: God created husband and wife (not man and woman). For the husband his wife is not a woman, just as for the wife her husband is not one of many men; the whole world for the couple is sexless. Therein lies the difference in the idea of marriage entertained by the Church and other Christian communities. Marriage is neither a treaty, a duty, nor a legalized slavery; it is an organic and, therefore, mutual unification of the two children of God. It is a sacrament and a mystery. The Church never sanctions separation of the newly baptized from their (former) wives. Protestants having rejected sacramental character of the marriage, were obliged to admit freedom of divorce, and have thus turned the married state into legalized adultery; and the Roman Catholics, who do not admit divorce at all, even in cases of adultery, changed it into slavery. The idea of organic and mutual unification,-viz., inner sanctity of the married state -is lost in both cases, for, from strictly Christian point of view, adultery is the death-blow to the marriage, just as divorce is legalized adultery. In the sacrament of oil the Church sits, as it were, in judgment over the earthly frame of man, and either cures him when nothing else does, or suffers death to destroy that frame as one not more necessary for the visible Church and God's unfathomable ways. It is not the extreme unction with us, and cannot produce "Peculiar People," with their faith-healing, as they appeared among Protestants in consequence of the rejection of the sacra

ment.

Such is the teaching of the Church with regard to sacraments, and this is the outcome of the Roman Church having once forgotten how indispensable love is, and having introduced into the creed unwarranted innovation, without even so much as announcing the fact to her sister, the, at that time great, Church of the East, thus implicitly treating the latter as a flock of helots not worthy to be taken any notice of. The fratricide Cain had also once answered that he was not a custodian to his brother... Once a part of a body arrogates to itself such a right, such privilege of the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the inevitable consequence for that body can

be but one, viz., a revolt within her own told until individual particles come to arrogate to themselves the same right. . . The deification of the pope (or shall we call it the eighth Christian sacrament, in virtue of which he becomes the oracle of God) to stop the process of disintegration, would not, we venture to think, achieve the purpose. And therein lies our firm belief and fondest Christian hope that our brethren in the West will see at last the absurdities to which they have, unintentionally and unwillingly, no doubt, arrived.

But what did the Church do in her councils and in her creed? Do these not prove that truth was not wholly revealed to her from the beginning? No; what the Church did do in her councils and her creed had been to more explicitly, on account of special circumstances, bear witness to what she implicitly knew before. In her Nicean Creed she defined the Godhead itself. Later, in the schools of Nestorius and Eutichus, there appeared the tendency to pervert the tradition of the Church as to the relation of God to His intellectual creatures. The first refused to recognize Christ as true God, the other, as true man; they both placed between God and man an impassable abyss, and taught that it was impossible for God to become moral being possessed of the choice between good and evil, and thus deprived man of the great happiness of being able to penetrate with his love into the unfathomable depths of God's love. But the Church asserted in her conciliar testimony that man is the image of his creator, and that God therefore might and really did become man. The abyss was bridged over. Thus man is exalted by the possession of the right to investigate the perfection of the eternal Being, and, at the same time, acquires the sacred duty in his own person to strive after the moral perfection, as he is made into God's likeness. Still later, by erroneous teaching of Monothelites, was called forth yet another testimony of the Church as to the identity between moral nature and will, and the natural perfection which was manifested by the Incarnate Word within the limits of His human nature. One more question began greatly to agitate the Church. Namely: pious use of icons (holy pictures) was admitted by the Church from time immemorial, but popular ignorance turned the venera into idolatry. Unreasonable and passionate zeal of some pressed the Church to condemn the custom itself, which would have amounted to the total deprivation of liberty. But the Church as a living body, animated by the Holy Spirit, had the right to glorify God's majesty both in word, sound and image, and she declared full liberty of worshipping God under any symbols which love might suggest to the unanimity of Christians. Thus while the other councils had saved Christian doctrine, the las (second Nicean) saved the liberty of Christian feeling. And quite recently, while protesting through the Eastern Patriarchs against the perversion of God's irrevocable law, that death is the penalty of sin, which law was made known to our progenitors and was manifested also in the demise of the Holy Virgin, whose birth the then pope was, however, about to proclaim VOL. I.-pt. 2.

to have been free from the original sin, the Church declared, in anticipation even of the dogma of papal infallibility (then still in embryo and a mooted point), that the knowledge of God's truth is granted to the mutual love of Christians only, and has no other controller or guardian besides that love.

"This is the apostolic faith, this is the faith of the Fathers, this is the Orthodox Faith, and this Faith has established the world!" is the declaration which is this very day (quite accidental coincidence it may be) made in the Churches of the East, it being the day devoted to the solemnization of the triumph of Christian liberty achieved by the Church in the second Nicean Council, and I cannot do otherwise than re-echo it, and say Amen to it.

Readily do we acknowledge, and sometimes too hastily adopt, the results of the great achievements of the Western mind and spirit in the affairs of this world, but in matters of faith the Eastern is, as it has ever been, the source and cradle of everything that is purest, highest and heavenly. Humiliating though it might appear to the haughty spirit of the West, it will at last, and of necessity, turn its eye towards the East and realize the saying:

Ex Oriente lux !

II. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.

Nearly three years have now elapsed since Kiev, that most ancient capital of Russia, presented, for the month of July, an unusually animated appearance. Representatives of the orthodox faith from every quarter of the globe came there, and Christian greetings and well wishes arrived from the most distant parts of the world; amongst numberless others, a sympathetic epistle from His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury had also reached the festive city and was duly honoured. It was the ninehundredth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into Russia that was solemnized there with great rejoicings, and it cannot be gainsaid that the state and the people had as much an occasion as the Church to take part in those festivities.

By Russia's faith," so said the hymn composed expressly for the occasion and sung at the festival, " is our state free and stable. Glory to Vladimir, the Prince of Kiev-the anciently throned! Nine centuries are past; on the foam of the ninth wave, the shield of our faith is secure, the bequest of bygone times is strong, the banner of orthodoxy is waving, shining forth afar. Rejoice, O Prince Vladimir-isapostolic Prince; Endeared to the heart of the people, the elect of the holy faith, to-day, O Prince, we sing thy day, together with the whole Russian land. If the land is not to be measured, if the inhabited places on it cannot be counted, -to God of strength be prayer, to Prince Vladimir the praise! Glory ! Thus the participation in the festival on the part of the state and people at large was only the due recognition of the inestimable service which the Orthodox Church and faith had done to the Russian people and state

In the present lecture I propose to offer you a historic retrospect of the Orthodox Church in Russia, from her inception there down to the present day, thus enabling you to see the actual application and working of that guiding spirit and those first principles which were the subject of my previous lecture.

Russia claims also at least an apostolic visit to her precincts, and a blessing, if not actual introduction of Christianity, by an apostle. Her great annalist, Nestor, in his chronicles, relates that St. Andrew, the first called of the twelve, ascending up and penetrating by the Dnieper into the deserts of Scythia, planted the first cross on the hills of Kiev, and, "See you," said he, to his disciples, "these hills? On these hills shall shine the light of Divine grace. There shall be here a great city, and God shall have in it many churches in His Name." But this is merely a venerable tradition, although not an unlikely one, as it is certain that the same apostle had preached the Gospel and appointed Stachys to be the first Bishop of Byzantium, from which city the rays of Divine light, after an interval of nine centuries, are historically known to have beamed upon Russia.

The nine centuries succeeding that apostle's visit had witnessed so many peregrinations and changes of masters of the land that it is a matter of wonder how the aboriginal Slavs were enabled to outlive them. (Is it not a signal proof of a singular vitality of the race?) All the successive hordes of Asiatics, that migrated into and overrun Europe, one after another, had come in contact with, and subjugated first, the Slavs; thus, for centuries, even before Christianity was introduced, the great virtues of patience and endurance in subjection were roughly taught to them. Left at last to themselves, after centuries of perpetual subjugation, they were unable to manage their own affairs and sent across the seas to invite those who would rule and govern them. Essentially agricultural, peaceful and commercial people, the Slavs wanted those who would defend them from continual incursions of nomadic barbarians, and guarantee to them quiet pursuit of their peaceful and gentle avocations. A whole clan of warrior Normans, with their chief, Ruric, in 862 (the very year of invention of Slavonic alphabet) answered the call and supplied even, as it is supposed, the very name "Russ" to the adopted country, bringing with them their turbulent, predatory, and quarrelsome habits, and yet assimilating them. selves, although by slow degrees, to the aborigines and their characteristic customs. "The domicile" of the Slavs "was so remote from the centre of ancient culture that Greeks and Romans could scarcely come into direct contact with them; and having always been, as they are still, by nature a peaceable people, they themselves never greatly interfered in the affairs of their border lands," observes Dr. Vilhelm Thomsen in his lectures on "The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia," and the Scandinavians—we may add-assisted in accelerating that contact and in bringing the light of Christianity to their hearts and homes. Heathenism of the southern Slavs was not of a fanatical character, as that,

4.g., of Scandinavians and their own north-western brethren; it was of a purer kind and mild in its form; there were with them neither priests nor idols, the latter having been introduced by the Northmen. As Procopius says, the Slavs acknowledged one God, Lord of the universe, but worshipped also rivers, nymphs, and some other deities to whom they offered sacrifices, practising also divination by this same means. Thus whilst worship of one God and of powers of nature can still be traced in popular songs and customs, nothing remains of idols, their temples or priests. This explains also their ready conversion to Christianity, the difficulty devolving rather on those Northmen who were instrumental in bringing its light to their notice.

The seeds of that faith had been sown there by occasional and slow, but sure degrees. It appears that Ascold and Dir, two princes of Kiev and of the companions of Ruric, were the first to embrace Christianity. Already in 866, viz., four years after their settlement in Russia, they made their appearance in armed vessels before the walls of Constantinople, when the Emperor was absent, and threw the Greek capital into no small alarm and confusion. Tradition reports that the Patriarch Photius took the original robe of the Mother of God from the Blachern Church and plunged it beneath the waves of the Strait, when the sea immediately boiled up from underneath, and wrecked the vessels of the heathen. Struck with awe, these princes believed in that God who had smitten them, and became the first fruits of their people to the Lord. The hymn of victory of the Greek Church, "To the protecting Conductress," in honour of the most holy Virgin, has remained a memorial of this triumph, and even now among the Russians concludes the office for the First Hour in the daily matins, for that was indeed the first hour of salvation to the land of Russia. Eighty years afterwards we find already mention of a Cathedral Church of the Prophet Elias, at Kiev, where the ChristianVariagians swore to the observance of the treaty concluded with the Greeks; and in Codinus' Catalogue of sees subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople, the metropolitical see of Russia appears as early as the year 891. Certain it is, however, that the wisest of the daughters of the Slavonians, the widowed Princess Olga, who governed Russia during the minority of her son Sviatoslav, afterwards, in 965, undertook a voyage to Constantinople for no other end than to obtain a knowledge of the true God, and there received baptism at the hands of the Patriarch Polyeuctes, the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, an admirer of her wisdom, being himself her godfather. Nestor draws an affecting picture of the Patriarch foretelling the newly illumined princess the blessings which were to descend by her means on future generations of the Russians, while Olga had now by baptism become Helena, that she might resemble both in name and deed the mother of Constantine the Great. Her example and entreaties, however, did not affect her fierce and warlike son. He simply had no taste for Christianity, and pursuing his constant expe