feeling should prevail between the members of both Churches. He is glad to hear that the Anglicans do not mean to proselytize, although he cannot spare the Archbishop a sharp passage about the Bible societies and their "scandalous pamphlets (σκανδαλώδη βιβλάρια)." However, he agrees to communicate any important news from his communion to the Archbishop, and also accepts the other proposal that on special feast-days the Orthodox clergy in London and the Anglican clergy in Constantinople should pay their respects to the authorities of the other Church.[1] This brotherly feeling is not, as was carefully explained, inter-communion. Is a real communion between these Churches possible? It is with no prejudice against either that one realizes that, unless the Orthodox fundamentally change their whole system, it is not. The first and greatest objection is that they answer the question: What is the true Church? from their standpoint just as we do from ours. The Orthodox Communion is the whole and only legitimate Church of Christ. To be outside that communion is schism, to disagree with her faith is heresy (p. 365). Of course, any one may join their Church, and they have elaborate forms of reception for converts (p. 366); that would involve accepting all their faith and, at any rate hitherto invariably, their liturgy and rites too. But even Greek inconsistency cannot allow a religious body that holds that position to make an alliance on equal terms of inter-communion with another body. Secondly, they are very undecided about the validity of Anglican orders. On the whole their theologians are more inclined to reject them. They have, indeed, a special reason for doing so in their belief that the grace of Holy Orders dies a natural death in schismatical or heretical bodies (p. 423). At the Old Catholic Conference at Bonn in 1874 the Orthodox members refused to pass the § 9, b: "We acknowledge that the Church of England and the Churches derived through her have maintained unbroken the Episcopal succession." None of them absolutely denied the thesis, but they said that Anglican orders are doubtful, and appealed to the opinion of Philaret of Moscow (the chief dogmatic theo-
- ↑ See Gelzer: Geistl. u. Weltl., p. 67, seq., who also notices the curious haughtiness of the Patriarch in his address to the Archbishop.
