wife; and some of the officers are fond of teazing her, when they chat with her or ask her to dance, by calling her "Matushka" (mother), a priest himself being commonly addressed as "Batushka" (father).

The second priest here, Vassili, whom Mr. Blackmore would be glad to see more frequently, is shy (he thinks) of visiting him on account of the difference in social position. On the other hand, as regards himself, a colonel, asking him and Mrs. Blackmore to dinner, addressed him by a purely civil title proper to his own rank of colonel, that is, as a gentleman, not as a priest. The Russian clergy are invited to the houses of citizens and merchants, but never to those of the nobility. Admiral Rikard once won the goodwill of some of them (bishops they were) by taking them in from some anteroom, where they had been left waiting, and presenting them at Court.

CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Blackmore's translations, chiefly as bearing

on the Uniats.

UCH men as the Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow

SUCH

are somewhat cramped by the horror there is of anything like innovation. He, for instance, as having translated the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew, naturally quoted, in something he published, from his own version, not from the Septuagint. But for this he was blamed, and he was forced to alter his quotations in a second edition. The Metropolitan Philaret returns to Petersburg in October, and stays till June, in order to attend the meetings of the Synod. While here he resides in a lodge belonging to the Trinity Lavra, of which he is the Archimandrite.

The Metropolitan of Novgorod and Petersburg, Seraphim, is now the presiding member or "First member" of the Synod, not by any right of his see, by ukase (oukaz) of the Emperor.

but

According to present custom the three Metropo

litans of Novgorod and Petersburg, of Moscow, and of Kieff, and two archbishops, viz. the Emperor's Confessor and the High Almoner of the Army and Fleet, are permanent members of the Synod. Three more members are called to sit for two or three years perhaps at a time, from among the other bishops. Besides these eight there are certain assessors without votes, but all this depends absolutely on the will of the Emperor.

Mr. Blackmore within the last year or two has translated into English from the Russ (1.) Some sermons by Michael, late metropolitan of Petersburg; and other sermons by Philaret, the present metropolitan of Moscow; (2.) A history of the Russian Church from the earliest times down to the institution of the Synod by Peter the Great, by A. N. Mouravieff, a cavalry officer who has travelled in the Levant attached to the Foreign Office, but is now Unter-Prokuror of the Most Holy Synod; (3.) The Full Catechism of the Orthodox Catholic Church (of Russia); and (4.) The official account of the return in A.D. 1839 of a million and a half of Lithuanian Uniats to the communion of the Russian Church, after union with Rome for between two and three centuries.

The return of these Uniats is regarded as one of the

1 [There are two sides to the conduct of the Russian Government in this transaction. For the systematic violence by which

most important ecclesiastical events of our time, and, having taken place quite recently, it is still very frequently spoken of with satisfaction, especially by persons connected with the Government. By it the United Rite, which dated from 1596 in Little Russia, Volhynia, White Russia, and Lithuania, as well as Red Russia or Gallicia, all at that time under the crown of Poland, have, so far as the Russian empire is concerned, ceased to exist. There remains now in it only one United Diocese, that of Kholm, which though originally Russian, had long been annexed to Poland proper; and by that accident it has been preserved, at least for the present. The re-absorption of the Uniats by the Russian Church was a result which might have been anticipated from the time of the first partition of Poland, and in fact great numbers of them had already been reunited under Catharine II. and her successors, and a number of causes concurred to facilitate their reunion. They had not been honoured and favoured, while they were under the crown of Poland; nor had those promises which had been made to them been kept. By their union with Rome they had socially lost ground; the nobles had almost all passed over to the Latin rite, so that it had become usual to speak of the Latin rite as

this return of the Uniats was at length effected, vide Fr. Theiner's L'Eglise Schismatique Russe and Vicende dalle Ch. Catt. nella Polonia e nella Russia.]

that of the nobles, and of the united or Greco-Latin rite as that of the peasants; and as that rite had been preserved free from Latin innovations, it was no wonder if, on their passing from a Roman Catholic Polish to a Russo-Greek sovereign, they showed signs of gravitating towards their original communion, signs, of which the Russian Government would naturally avail itself.

But however attached they might still be to their original Eastern customs and rites, they could not after two centuries and a half of actual union with Rome be suspected of any sympathy with Protestantism, or with Muscovite representatives of the school of Theophanes Procopovich; nor of any great zeal to transfer themselves from a purely spiritual to a purely secular head. Probably, then, some motive of policy, connected first with the prospect of the reunion of the Uniats, and then with its actual accomplishment, has had a share in promoting that reaction against the school of Theophanes Procopovich, and that desire to dissemble and palliate the excesses committed by the temporal power in Russia, which has of late been perceptible.

Under the present Ober Procuror, Count Pratasoff, himself educated by the Jesuits, the ideas of Church authority and of tradition, as opposed to the principles

2 [That is, Platon and Philaret.]

F