THE RAMBLER.

VOL. IX. New Series. JANUARY 1858.

PART XLIX.

THE RUSSIAN AND ANGLICAN HIERARCHIES. "IN the eyes of Rome," says Father Gagarin, "the Russian Bishops are true Bishops, and the Russian priests true priests." This conclusion was not admitted with regard to a considerable portion of the hierarchy without some very sharp disputes, disputes similar to those which are now with the same breath being both invited and deprecated in England. There are, if we are to believe Mr. Henry Collins, a recent convert, many Anglicans who have been prevented becoming Catholics only by the "bitterness of the tone" of some of us. "The number of conversions that has been impeded, or altogether hindered, can never be fully known." Among "bitternesses of tone," our opinion of the invalidity of English orders holds a foremost place; we ought for the sake of peace either to change it or to conceal it.

"What right has any Catholic to press upon Anglicans, and to insist upon it, that their Bishops are mere laymen? The Church has never decided it, or spoken positively: no man may therefore speak positively of it (!). It is an open question; and in winning over others whose faith is any way different, all open questions are better avoided, especially if they wound the feelings of those we would gain. To speak disagreeable things is never the way to win men; they should never, then, be spoken except when absolutely necessary. Why take a pleasure in hunting out methods of annoying one whom we would convert? The fact that Anglicans value orders is a point on our side; for if they value them, they value their absolute certainty. But the point being open, Catholics may, and some do, hold the opinion that Anglican orders are valid, and that, if they are not certain, yet a very great deal more can be said for their validity than for the contrary part; but it is enough that, upon an open question, it is highly impolitic to exasperate one whom we would win. The belief in orders is one more point upon which

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the Anglican Church holds the true faith in union with Catholics. It is a very great blessing that one hindrance to unity is taken away, and a greater still it were, if, upon examination, their orders should be pronounced valid by authority. It is an essential point for the Church to have orders, but the having orders does not make any church the Catholic Church, nor part of it either. The Nestorian heretics, the Copts, &c., have orders, but are no part of the Church, though this is a point of union between them and the Church which has providentially been preserved. The Donatists had orders, and held the Catholic faith; their position was not because of this justifiable; on the contrary, holding so much, it was the more unjustifiable that they should have continued separate from the Catholic Church, and strangers to the promises."*

We do not wish to hurt any one's feelings; but we do not see why compassion should take the place of argument, or why we should refrain from urging on people who think themselves safe with their sacraments, that their orders have ever been considered doubtful in the Church, and that converts from their body are ordained afresh under the eyes of Popes, without the smallest consideration for the ordinations of the Anglican Bishops. It is surely a topic that may be discussed without exasperation. Now that the Nag's-Head story is shown to have been a mistake, we should be the last to re-affirm it: but, at the same time, the representatives of those who banished, imprisoned, robbed, and hanged the Catholics; who shut up, as far as might be, all sources of information from them; who burnt their books, dispersed their schools, and used every means that an unprincipled ingenuity could suggest to prevent their ever knowing the exact state of affairs, ought to be careful not to call that fable a "foul lie.” It was not a foul lie,-it was a natural mistake; and it was natural to mistrust the refutations of it when they were produced by men convicted before of manifold misrepresentations, and were founded on documents which it was supposed might easily have been forged. It was not their fault if the English Catholics, as Bramhall reproaches them, "were great strangers to the true passages of those times, knowing nothing but what they heard at Rome, Rheims, or Douai."

With respect to the ordinations of the Oriental Churches in general, there is no more doubt than there is of the Latin ordinations; that is, there is none at all. The doubts that have arisen concerning the validity of some of the Russian consecrations have their origin in a fact which happened as lately as 1630, and of which we proceed to give an account.

At the Council of Florence, Isodore, metropolitan both of

* Difficulties of a Convert, by H. Collins, M.A. (Dolman, 1857), p. 9.

Kief and Moscow, had been one of the most zealous promoters of the union. On his return to his sees, he caused this great act to be accepted at Kief, and its suffragan dioceses, Bransk, Smolensk, Peremyszl, Turow, Wladimir in Volhynia, Polock, Chelm, and Halitz; but he failed entirely in the province of Moscow. Even at Kief the union only lasted till the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Nevertheless the greater part of the Bishops and clergy of Kief again renounced their schism in 1594 and 1595 at the famous councils of Brest. The Bishops of Peremyszl and Lemberg alone, under the influence of Constantine, prince of Ostrog, refused to be re-united. They soon died; and the non-uniates of Poland,-for a portion of the people refused to follow its Bishops,—were left without a head, and even without any hope of obtaining one; for the laws of Poland forbade the consecration of a Bishop without the king's consent. Sigismund III. was firm; neither prayers, nor remonstrances, nor reasons of policy moved him; and in 1620, when the Cossacks, who were called out to fight against the Turk in Wallachia, threatened to desert his flag if he any longer refused them a schismatic metropolitan, he answered them, "I will rather lose my crown and go into exile than consent to the renewal of the schism."

But for the last three years there had been residing in Muscovy an envoy of the Sultan, who assumed the title of Patriarch of Jerusalem. Nobody seems to have had a doubt of his being really Theophilus, patriarch of the Holy City. He was even requested to preside at the installation of Philarete as patriarch of Moscow, and to confirm the re-establishment of the patriarchate of that city, which had been first instituted in 1588 by Jeremias II., the deposed patriarch of Constantinople. But these acts can have no influence on the decision of the question in hand. Philarete, the father of the Tsar Michael Feodorowitch, and the stock of the imperial house of Romanoff, had been metropolitan of Rostoff before he was taken prisoner by the Poles; and after he regained his liberty he became head of the Russian orthodox Church. It is an error, then, to say that Philarete was consecrated by the pretended patriarch of Jerusalem; he received from him no sacramental imposition of hands, but only installation in the patriarchal chair. No objection, then, can be brought against the orders of the Bishops consecrated by the patriarch Philarete.

But Theophilus did not stop with installing the patriarch of Moscow. The Cossacks, taking advantage of the wars and difficulties into which Sigismund III. was plunged, caused

this mysterious personage to come to Kief, where, without the assistance of any other Bishop, he proceeded, August 15, 1630, to consecrate three Bishops: Job Borecki anti-metropolitan of Kief, Meleci Smotricki anti-archbishop of Polock, and Joseph Kuscewicz anti-bishop of Wladimir. Some time after, he consecrated four more Bishops: Isaias Boriskowicz Czerczicki anti-bishop of Luck, Isaias Kopinski anti-bishop of Peremyszl, Païsius Hippolytowicz anti-bishop of Chelm, and Abraham Stragouski anti-bishop of Pinsk. All these sees were then occupied by united Ruthenian Bishops.

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One can fancy the troubles that followed the enterprise of Theophilus. The schismatic Bishops soon succeeded in filching from the Catholic prelates a good portion of their flocks they took forcible possession of the churches, drove away the Catholics, and in a short time destroyed the fruit of twenty years' labours. As all this was done in contempt of the laws of the state, Sigismund, far from recognising these Bishops, issued an edict for their apprehension; but by means of disguises and other precautions they managed to escape pursuit, and even to visit the churches, and to ordain every where priests opposed to the union.

They were soon strong enough to begin persecuting the Catholics. Wladislas IV., who succeeded his father Sigismund in 1632, felt himself obliged to command the Catholics to give up the churches to the anti-unionists; he called the schismatics to the senate, and allowed them to have an episcopate on nearly the same footing as the Catholic Ruthenian hierarchy. This schismatical episcopate has been continued to our day.

It is in relation to these Bishops that the question of the validity of their consecration has place. Of course there is no question about their legitimacy; no one can be a legitimate Bishop unless he is in communion with the universal Church built on the authority of St. Peter and his successors: the simple question is, whether the ordinations of Kief are valid; whether, that is, the anti-unionist Bishops of that province really have the episcopal character; for as baptism administered by heretics is valid when there is no essential change in form, matter, or intention,-so orders administered by heretics or schismatics are valid as long as all that is necessary is observed; that is to say, as long as they are conferred with the prescribed forms by a Christian who has the episcopal character.

From the very first there have been Polish Catholics who have maintained the consecrations made by the pretended patriarch of Jerusalem to have been null. They depended