THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK IN RUSSIA.
THE Anglican Church appears to weary of her "splendid isolation." Not content with collecting, as she will this year, all her sister and daughter Churches at Lambeth, in a gathering which will include representatives from every continent, and at least prove to the world that she is as little insular in influence as in aims, she is making overtures of friendship to other Churches which she once regarded only as hostile rivals. It is but a few months since some of her leading spirits asked Rome once more to acknowledge her rank in the Christian Hierarchy by admitting the validity of her Orders, and now she is making overtures, or at least offering courtesies, to the Holy Orthodox Church, a corpora- tion as ancient as that of Rome, almost as proud and self- dependent, and destined, perhaps in the near future, to as large an area of sway or influence. The Archbishop of York is hardly visiting the great ecclesiastics of Russia out of mere curiosity, or with a desire to reveal to them that there are Protestant prelates as dignified and as secure in their dignity as themselves. He undoubtedly wishes to draw the Churches closer, if only in the bonds of friendship and mutual comprehension, and we do not know that the attempt deserves either ridicule or condemnation. Of anything like union in the technical sense there is of course no prospect, at least in the present state of opinion, the fissures which divide the Churches being too many and too grave. Even admitting that the ancient quarrel about the nature of the Godhead rests, as many learned theologians believe, upon a misunderstanding, the Greek acceptance of seven sacra- ments, the callus of the Virgin Mary, the sacredness of sacerdotalism, and some of the practices as distinguished from the dogmas of the Greek rite, raise up barriers which, to the Anglican laity at all events, will seem insuperable, and which, in our generation at least, will scarcely be overleaped. Bat the relation of the two Churches differs from the relation existing between Rome and Canterbury, in an absence of inherited prejudice which is very remarkable. The traditional dislike of Rome which exists in all Protestant communities, and which, though now locally decaying, still remains in this country above or below any influence from argument, scarcely extends at all to the Greek Church. The want in that Church of a monarchical con- stitution, and consequently of much pretension to an invidious form of authority, the absence of any claim to infallibility as lodged anywhere except in the entire Church, the abolition of image-worship in the English sense of that phrase, the admission of the right of priests—though not of Bishops—to marry like other men, and the much less developed jealousy of Scripture as the final and authoritative depositary of essential truth, all help to make the Greek Church seem much nearer to our own than perhaps it really is. There is, moreover, no record or tradition of conflict, no remembrance of martyrdoms inflicted on Englishmen by Greek persecutors, no suspicion of an intense wish to proselytise, none, in sort, of those historic circumstances which, though many of them accidents, have created so firm and lofty a barrier in the popular mind between Protestantism and the Roman C.itholic Church. No one in England is indignant if an English Prince marries a Greek Princess, and no one will accuse Dr. Maclagan of treachery to his Church because he receives with pleasure a kindly welcome from Russian Bishops or Archimandrites. On the other hand, there can be no doubt of the kindliness of that welcome or its honorific character. The Greek Church has never acknowledged as a Church the validity of Anglican Orders, the most lenient Opinion in Russia being that their validity is a matter for each Bishop to decide in his own diocese ; but nevertheless the Archbishop of York has been pointedly received not as an erring though honoured inquirer into the faith, but as a great prelate, the choirs in the churches singeing in his honour chants
reserved only for those of acknowledged Episcopal rank. That is a lofty act of politeness if it is nothing more, and it will create, as it was intended to create, among English clerics at all events, a feeling that the Greek Church regards them with no sentiment of hostility, and with something more real than that brotherhood which, as Douglas Jerrold said, bound together Cain and AbeL The Greek Church is friendly at least to our own.
We think that friendliness may be productive of good. The Greek Church, it must be remembered, besides its
immense present influence in Eastern Europe, has before it a future of which it would be difficult to assign the limits. It is already predominant in Russia and the Balkans, numbering in its three divisions a hundred millions of votaries, or probably four times the number of Anglican Episcopalians ; it may become predominant within a very
few years in the old Eastern Empire of Rome; and it will certainly reign in some form over the great population which Russia is already beginning to distribute and settle in Northern Asia. It is the form of Christianity which will have most attraction for China and Japan, and we feel no security that its influence will not be felt even in India, where Christian converts still hesitate as to the kind of Church which they will develop out of their, inevitably Oriental, view of Christianity. Though the Church is so unprogressive as to be often denounced by Western observers as dead, there can be no doubt that it has a strong grip upon its votaries, and although it has bred dissenters, and treats some of them with a harshness unseen in this country for nearly two centuries, there are no signs visible of anything like general revolt. Influence over such a Church must be worth having, and to any active-minded Church against which there is no antecedent prejudice, contact, intercourse, discussion, must bring influence. The Russian and the English Churches have, too, one most effective point of contact, the humanitarian feeling, the tendency to an exag- geration of pity for classes which at present underlies them both. What we might briefly, and rather overbroadly, describe as the Tolstoi tone, is just now perceptible in both—in the Slav tending to unreasonableness, in the Englishman to fierce social dislikes — about which and its results each may from the other learn some- thing, if not much. What the English Church has to learn, is that respectability is not everything, and that there are Christian Churches not Romanist, but never- theless with strong Episcopal organisation, which can get closer to the masses of the people, and at least produce in them that desire for the success of the Church as a whole which is in Russia so marked and in England frequently so feeble. Indeed our people hardly know how their Church spreads, and will witness the gathering at Lambeth Palace in July with the disposition to ran for maps and see where these unknown dioceses are, which is the first effect of any declara- tion of war. In truth, a friendship between the two Churches, though its results may be slow to declare themselves, must be beneficial, if only because it diminishes the tendency of Christians who are ecclesiastically divided to be acrimonious in their view of each other, and because it will modify that disposition, always reappearing here at intervals, to regard the Church of the Latins as the only alternative to the Anglican rite. A century hence the world may be divided between those who speak English and those who speak Slavic tongues, and it is something to think or even fancy that should they at last come into collision, the possibility of agreement will not be lessened by the existence of any unreasonable but irremovable hatred or suspicion between the Churches.
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