(Oxford) went to Russia in the naive hope that, as a member of the Church universal, he would be admitted to Orthodox Sacraments. Of course, he was told by every one that he must first join the Orthodox Church, and on May 20, 1841, he received a formal answer from the Metropolitan of Moscow to that effect.[1] He was annoyed to find that every one spoke of an Anglican clergyman as a Pastor,[2] and confused Anglicans with Lutherans and Calvinists; also the Metropolitan had nothing good to say of the XXXIX Articles.[3] At the two Union Conferences held at Bonn in 1874 and 1875 under the auspices of the Old Catholics, Anglicans met Orthodox. Anglican orders and the Filioque were discussed, but they did not arrive at any agreement.[4]
It is during the last twenty years or so that the relations between these two Churches have become very friendly. It is easy to understand their mutual good feeling. Of course the ordinary Greek layman still calls Anglicans Protestants, and the average British tourist in the East is quite content to accept that respectable name. But the extreme High Churchmen represent their Church to the Orthodox authorities as something very different. Their ideal is Catholicism without Popery, which sounds exactly like that of the Eastern Churches. Diomedes Kyriakos tells us that "the Eastern Church rejects both the Roman Church because of her errors and the Protestant Churches because of their opposite errors; she holds a middle place between Catholicism and Protestantism."[5] As this is just what High Churchmen want, no wonder that they think of union with her. And the Orthodox have reason to be friendly to Anglicans. We have seen how they hate proselytizing, and how they have long been harried by proselytizers, both Catholic and Protestant. The Anglicans arrive sounding a very different note. They protest that the last thing they would dream of doing would be to try to seduce any Orthodox Christian from the venerable and beautiful Church to which he belongs. On
