that it is far easier to pull down than to build; the apostate Cranmer and his Anglican brethren struck the first blow at the root of the tall tree of faith which had flourished in England, as elsewhere, above a thousand years; the foreign Protestants nobly seconded their unholy efforts; for a century the theology of Calvin was triumphant in England-what Calvin did not destroy, perished by the hand of Hoadley; and in spite of every effort to revive the fallen tree, as a whole and a system, it still lies prostrate and dead. The efficacy of the one of its two sacraments was denied and destroyed at the Reformation; within our own day Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, as the mouthpiece of Anglican ecclesiastical law, declared that the English Church knew nothing of altars, and therefore nothing of either priest or sacrifice; and but four short years ago its only remaining sacrament was made and declared an open question, by the authority of her Majesty in council, and scarcely a voice was raised against the judgment. Can Archdeacon Wilberforce find any parallel to this state of things in the early and "undivided " Church? And if not, can the Anglican body, upon his own showing, have any claim upon his obedience? Is it in any sense a witness of God's truth and a teacher of the faith of the apostles? This is a solemn question; and it involves another; but we ask it not now; God's grace, in His own good time, will doubtless work out the true solution.

ART. IV.-1. Lectures on Turkey. By the Very Rev. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D. Dublin: Duffy.

2. Downfall of Turkey. By the Rev. G. S. FABER. London.

3. The Russ, the Greek, and the Turk. London: Freeman.

4. The Greek and the Turk. By E. CROWE. London: R. Bentley. 5. The Cross, v. The Crescent; the Religious Aspect of the Eastern Question. London: T. Harrison.

6. The Czar and the Sullan. London: Vizetelly.

7. St. Petersburg. By J. G. KонH. London: Simms and McIntyre. 8. The Drying up of the Euphrates, and the Downfall of Turkey. By the Rev. R. ARTOUN. London: Virtue and Co.

9. The Crisis in the East, or the Russo-Turkish War, with its consequences to England and the World. By CONINGSBY. London: Routledge aud Co.

10. The Danubian Principalities, the Frontier Lands of the Christian and the Turk. London: R. Bentley.

11. Progress of Russia. London: J. Murray.

12. The Religious Aspect of the Eastern Question. London: Ollivier. 13. The Doom of Turkey. By J. McFarlane. London: Bosworth. 14. Russia in the Right. London: Mosley.

15. Papers laid before Parliament on the Eastern Question.

THE

HE above list of works is significant of the interest felt in this country at the present time with respect to Russia. It is an interest which, however purely political and ephemeral in its character, and entirely owing to the events of recent occurrence, has by degrees associated itself with permanent and moral considerations. There are among these works several which take large, and even religious views of the question; and we need hardly say that if Protestant writers have been led to look at it in this lofty aspect, Catholics can scarcely fail to do so. We need not do more than mention the illustrious names of Lacordaire and Le Maistre, to which we may now add that of Newman. These great minds have been attracted by the momentous questions of the destiny of Russia, the fate of Turkey, and the result to Christianity. The view which they appear to take may be shortly summed up thus: that Turkey must be absorbed by Russia, and that Russia must be re-absorbed in Catholic unity. The vastness of the prospect thus opened to our view-the graudeur of the idea thus presented to our imagination, it surpasses all the powers of poetry to express. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Danube to the Indus, the Catholic religion spreading its benign sway-the Holy See exercising its Apostolic jurisdiction! With such a moral force acquired by the Church, and such a deadly blow given to Mahomedanism, it is impossible not to see that the powers of Antichrist all over Asia would be

shaken, and that India and China would not long be able to resist the progress of the faith, which would soon diffuse itself over the whole of that vast continent, so that Christianity would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The Abbé Lacordaire says, " Russia is a mighty nation. She stretches from the centre of Europe to that of Asia, from China to America, enclosing a territory whose immensity startles the imagination far less than its providential distribution delights the understanding. Russia belongs to the Greek religion by accident, and not by her political necessities or the character of her mind. It is impossible for her to fulfil her destiny without a return sooner or later to unity." Taking these lines for our text, we will endeavour to give the historical grounds for the conclusions thus expressed, and to exhibit the past history and the present character of Russia, as a key to her probable destiny, having ever before our mind the magnificent prediction of the Count Le Maistre, that Europe and Asia will one day sing High Mass together under the dome of Santa Sophia!

It is impossible to appreciate the views of these great Catholic writers without referring to the past history of Russia. For instance, to understand the profound remark of Lacordaire, that she is of the Greek religion by accident, we must go back to the eve of her original conversion to the faith. The Sclavonian tribes which inhabited the central provinces of the present Russia, (we are informed by Döllinger,) bordered on the North by the Finnish tribes, were formed into a kingdom in 862, by the Norman Ruric, whence they are said to have acquired their name. The capital of their kingdom was first Novogorod, and afterwards Kiow, which was situated more to the South. From Ruric and from his companions in arms, the Russians soon acquired the Norman spirit of enterprise and plunder, and appeared as early as the year 867, and again in the years 907 and 941, on the Black Sea before Constantinople. Their wars and treaties with the Byzantine empire first introduced them to a knowledge of Christianity. Photius speaks in the highest terms of the faith of the Russians. In the beginning of the tenth century Russia was enumerated as the sixtieth archbishopric under the eparchs who were dependant on the patriarch of Constantinople. In 945 Kiow was a

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Metropolitan See, and in 957, Olga, the widow of the chief prince of Igor, was baptized in the Imperial city of the Greeks, but the conversion of Russia was reserved for her grandson, Wladimir. This prince, who, in 980 became sole monarch of Russia, had resolved to embrace Christianity, when his conversion was proposed to him by the Greek emperor, the hand of whose sister he sought in marriage. He was baptized at Cherson, in 988; he immediately ordered all the idols at Kiow to be destroyed, and the image of Perun, the chief god of the Russians, to be thrown into the Dnieper. His decree that all the inhabitants should appear on the banks of the same river, to receive baptism on the following day, was obeyed without opposition. Greek priests were now sent into the different cities, churches and cloisters were erected, and schools established. Michael, a Servian by birth, was the first metropolitan of Russia. But easily as the people, thus in appearance, yielded to the change of religion, paganism was not entirely banished, particularly amongst the tribes that were not of Sclavonian descent, before the twelfth century. The founding of new cities, which were exclusively Christian, tended greatly to the establishment of the faith. The connexion of the Grecian with the Russian Church, opened the way for the introduction into Russia of the arts and literature of Greece. It was doubtless on account of the similarity of the two churches that Nicetas hesitated not to name the Russians the most Christian people. In the eleventh century Kiow possessed no less than four hundred churches, and had gained for itself the title of the second Constantinople. In one of its cloisters, the monk Nestor (1056-1111) wrote his annals in the language of the country. But the entire spiritual and hierarchical dependence of the Russian Church upon the Church of the Greeks, (the Russian metropolitans were always confirmed and consecrated by the patriarchs of Constantinople,) involved it in the melancholy schism of the latter. Hence the Russian clergy always arrayed themselves at a distance, and in hostility against the many ameliorations of social life, which were effected in the West, and placed the strongest barriers against the many improvements which might have flowed in upon their country from the Catholic States of Western Europe." It was during the period thus occupied by the

* Hist. Church. Period ii. sec. 3, vol. iii. p. 30.

conversion of the Russians that those disagreements with Rome occurred, which ultimately ended in a separation of the Greek Church from the Holy See. Hence Russia, so to speak, received the faith from a source tainted with schism, and can scarcely be said to have ever been in complete communion or direct communication with the Chair of St. Peter. This is an important fact to be borne in mind, in considering her history or her destiny. From the manner in which the people first received the faith, coming to them as it did, everything good might have been augured of them had it not been for the unfortunate schism, in the guilt of which it is impossible not to see that the bulk of the nation could, under the circumstances, scarcely have shared. The case of Russia, in this respect, is peculiar, and cannot be more appropriately described than in the happy phrase of the Abbé Lacordaire, that she "received the Greek religion by accident."

It is a curious circumstance that before their conversion, the Russians had attempted the conquest of Constantinople.

"It is now a thousand years," says Dr. Newman, "since their first expedition against Constantinople: their assaults continued two centuries, and in the course of that period they seemed to be nearer the capture of the city than at any time since. They descended the Dnieper in boats, coasted along the East to the Black Sea, and so came round by Trebezond to the Bosphorus, plundering the coast as they advanced. At one time their sovereign had got possession of Bulgaria. Barbarians of other races flocked to his standard: he found himself surrounded by the enemies of the East and West, and he marched down to Adrianople, aud threatened to go further.* Ultimately, he was defeated; then followed the conversion of his people to Christianity, which, for a period, restrained their barbarous rapacity; after this, for two centuries they were under the yoke and bondage of the Tartars."

In the little work from which we have just quoted, (and which, almost extemporized as it was, is a wonderful proof of the power of its illustrious author's mind, and his vast historical information,) Dr. Newman, in a most masterly manner, traces the whole history of the Turkish nation down to their origin amidst the hordes of Tartars who once overran Russia. It is interesting to observe

As the present emperor did in 1828. Singular that, during 1000 years, the Russians should never have got further.