TO THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

IN THE YEARS 1840, 1841.

BY THE LATE

WILLIAM PALMER, M.A.

Formerly Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

SELECTED AND ARRANGED

BY

CARDINAL NEWMAN.

LONDON:

KEGAN PAUL TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE.

WILLIAM PALMER, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, eldest son of the Rev. William Jocelyn Palmer, Rector of Mixbury, and brother of Lord Chancellor Selborne, the Rev. George Horsley Palmer, and Archdeacon Palmer of Oxford, was one of those earnest-minded and devout men, forty years since, who, deeply convinced of the great truth that our Lord had instituted, and still acknowledges and protects, a visible Church-one, individual, and integral-Catholic, as spread over the earth, Apostolic as co-eval with the Apostles of Christ, and Holy, as being the dispenser of His Word and Sacraments-considered it at present to exist in three main branches, or rather in a triple presence, the Latin, the Greek, and the Anglican,

these three being one and the same Church, distinguishable from each other only by secondary, fortuitous, and local, though important, characteristics. And, whereas the whole Church in its fulness was, as they believed, at once and severally Anglican, Greek, and Latin, so in turn each one of those three was the whole Church; whence it followed that, whenever any one of the three was present, the other two, by the nature of the case, were absent, and therefore the three could not have direct relations with each other, as if they were three substantive bodies, there being no real difference between them except the external accident of place. Moreover since, as has been said, on a given territory, there could not be more than one of the three, it followed that Christians generally, wherever they were, were bound to recognize, and had a claim to be recognized by, that one, ceasing to belong to the Anglican Church, as Anglican, when they were at Rome, and ignoring Rome as Rome, when they found themselves at

Moscow. Lastly, not to acknowledge this inevitable outcome of the initial idea of the Church, viz., that it was both everywhere and one, was bad logic, and to act in opposition to it was nothing short of setting up altar against altar, that is, the hideous sin of schism, and a sacrilege.

This I conceive to be the formal teaching of Anglicanism; this is what we held and professed in Oxford forty years ago; this is what Mr. Palmer intensely believed and energetically acted on when he went to Russia. It was his motivecause for going there; for he hoped to obtain from the Imperial Synod such a recognition of his right to the Greco-Russian Sacraments, as would be an irrefragable proof that the doctrine of the Anglican divines was no mere theory, and that an Anglican Christian was ipso facto an Oriental Orthodox also.

How Mr. Palmer's appeal for such a recognition of our "Anglo-Catholicism" was met by the ecclesiastical authorities of Petersburg is the main