Catholic Churches assembled in the hope of union. They were prepared to renounce the word Filioque as being false;[1] moreover, they acknowledged Tradition, as also Confession, Penance, the Eucharist as a sacrifice, and even prayer for the dead[2] … (an account of the second Conference in 1875). But most of the theologians of England and America rejected these concessions of the genuine friends (he does not say of what) as being a return to Catholicism, and they held fast to the principles of Protestantism. Only a few Englishmen, such as the theologian Overbeck and his followers, eventually joined the Orthodox Church."[3] So far the view of the chief Greek Church historian. Undoubtedly they would all welcome the conversion of any number of Anglicans to the Orthodox Church; short of that it is difficult to realize any further possibility. And if it is a question of being converted to anything, it would perhaps, on the whole, be more dignified as well as more natural for Anglicans to be (as a Russian theologian said to Mr. Palmer) "first reconciled to their own Patriarch" the Pope,[4] than to become yet another (the seventeenth) of the very unequal and very quarrelsome bodies that make up the Orthodox Communion.[5]
- ↑ This is quite untrue. They all argued about the Filioque without end. The Old Catholics did not mind giving it up, but it was the Anglicans who would not do so; see the Berichte, passim.
- ↑ This, too, is quite a distorted account. The Anglicans would only agree to a sort of compromise on each of these points. Indeed, the only occasions on which the whole Conference agreed were when Döllinger read out some denunciation of Popery.
- ↑ Kyriakos, iii. pp. 104–105. The philologist will be interested to notice in Kyriakos's History that the Greek for Ritualist is τελετόφιλος. They can form words for anything.
- ↑ Palmer, p. 230.
- ↑ There is another point that deserves mention. Have the pious and irreproachable English gentlemen who go to the East, and there flatter the Orthodox bishops they meet, any idea what sort of people they are honouring? If one may believe eye-witnesses like Mr. Brailsford (Macedonia, pp. 192–194, 217, &c.), the official Green Book just published by the Roumanian Government (Echos d'Orient, pp, 109–115), or even the most moderate of the endless Bulgarian accusations (C, Bojan, Les Bulgares et le patriarche œcuménique, passim), the Greek metropolitans in Macedonia are directly and formally guilty of murder, massacre, and unspeakable atrocities in their campaign against the Bulgars, Vlachs, and non-Hellenic people generally
