CHAPTER XIX.

His claim and title to canonization.

HE official statement then observes :-" This

THE

confirmation of the faith and consolation of the Orthodox Church was needed in an age in which scandals, both in faith and in life, are produced in such quantity among peoples calling themselves enlightened, and in which the wind, that blows from abroad, wafts the seeds of the tares over the surface of our blessed country also. And blessed be God, who in renewed signs of His grace, has given such a confirmation to His faith, such consolation to His Church."

Thus we are carried on to the movement for the

bishop's canonization. His memory had ever been kept up at Veronege till the present generation: pannychids (nightly services) were often sung for him. This, when it lasted, could only be explained by concluding that he was praying for those in heaven who prayed for him on earth; and in the course of a century the devotion to his tomb had become notable.

By 1820, those who thus honoured him, had become a great concourse, and miracles were reported. The discovery of the freedom of his body from corruption, in the years following on his death, could not have been forgotten, and in the year 1832 fresh repairs of the cathedral where he lay were the means of confirming it. This led to the Emperor's taking the matter up, to the Holy Synod's moving, to the original of the Testamentary Address being procured from Moscow, and to a commission, sworn to declare the truth, being appointed to make examination on the spot, both of the state of his body and the report of healings at his tomb.

The issue of the process may be anticipated. At the distance of 128 years from his death, in a vault of black moist earth, without a lid to the coffin, and only one board of it sound wood, the body was found entire; nor was the report concerning the healings less satisfactory. Then follow in the formal document the details of thirty-one cases of healings, exorcisms, &c., effected by Metrophanes, twenty-four of them being wrought on women, or girls. This justified the Synod in referring their judgment to the Emperor Nicholas, who wrote upon the report and memorial they presented to him, "I am of the same opinion with the Most Holy Synod." In consequence, with great pomp and ceremony, in the course of August and Sep

H

tember, 1832, amid a crowd of 50,000 people, Metrophanes was added to the number of those prelates who have received the honour of canonization.

The official publication concludes thus:-"To the Lord God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, &c., &c., be all glory and thanksgiving for ever and ever, Amen." And prefixed to the whole there is an engraving of the icon of Metrophanes, which had been painted partly from a much damaged portrait, partly from a dream.

In this official document we find the names of four bishops, Metrophanes of Voronege, Demetrius of Rostoff, Innocent of Irkutsk, and Tichon of Voronege and Zadovsk, who, having all lived and died under that spiritual supremacy of the civil ruler which had been established (in A.D. 1658, 1660, and 1666) by the Tsar Alexis Michaelovich, had three of them already (viz. by the year 1840) been at different times declared (by the Emperor or Empress for the time being, and by the Synod, or Church Commission, instituted by Peter,) to be saints. And a like canonization of the fourth was expected; for in A.D. 1840 I heard it said in conversation, by those who spoke of the recent canonization of Metrophanes, that Tichon Zadovski also, who died in the reign of Catharine II., was reported to be a saint, and there were stories current of his apparition

and miracles; and that some proposal had been made to the Emperor Nicholas for his canonization, but the Emperor had replied that one was enough, at least, for the present.1

Of all the four it may be admitted that they seem to have been good and pious men; and that the belief of their sanctity was of spontaneous popular growth, not by any means caused or suggested by the Synod, or by the civil Government. And at the same time, the Synod and the civil Government, in giving legal sanction to the popular belief, declare such continued production of saints down to the present day to be a Divine attestation of the continuance of spiritual life and orthodoxy in the present State Church of Russia.

Not only is the existing state of things (viz. the system of a Synod, or Church Commission, governing the Church under the Emperor, while the Emperor himself is head) alluded to, as if legitimate, in the depositions relating to the miraculous healings, but the four Saints themselves during their lives appear to have been unresisting subjects and servants of the secular supremacy.

1 [Mr. Palmer adds that he was eventually canonized, under the Emperor Alexander II., in A.D. 1861.]

CHAPTER XX.

The Russian Saints viewed in their recognition of the Most Holy Synod.

HE Apostle says: "Though we or an angel from

heaven preach to you any other gospel than that ye have received, let him be anathema." The Seventh Ecumenical Council expressly, and all the Councils and all the Fathers virtually repeat this denunciation; and the Russian Patriarch Nicon, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy in A.D. 1662, applied it to the then recent establishment of a civil supremacy over the Russian Church, anathematizing by name Pitirim, the first vicar of that supremacy, and in him all his successors, and the College or Synod or Church Commission to be instituted later, and all those who should communicate with them; and repeating with the same application words already embodied in the Greek and in the Slavonic Synodicon for the Sunday of Orthodoxy: "To all that has been done in the way of innovation contrary to the ecclesiastical tradition and doctrine, and to the constitutions of the holy and