by many prelates, who preferred the maintenance of the patriarchate, the authority of the tsar bore down all opposition, and the measure was approved. Yavorsky was made president of the Synod, with Feodoceï Yanovsky and Feofan Procopovitch as vice-presidents.
The new institution was announced to the patriarch of Constantinople in an autograph letter from the tsar, setting forth the necessities of the Russian Church and the reasons which had dictated a change in its form of government. He expressed the hope that the Synod might receive the recognition of the Eastern patriarchs, and ever maintain, in close communion with them, the ancient unity of the Orthodox faith.
Favorable replies were returned by them all, and the constitution of the Russian Church, thus confirmed and sanctioned by the œcumenical fathers, still continues in full force, as established by Peter.
A union between the Anglican and Oriental Churches, which had been already suggested to Peter, had meanwhile been pressed in the East by certain members of the English clergy, but without any prospect of success. This visionary scheme received at the same time a definitive settlement. The Eastern fathers and the Russian divines joined in emphatically repudiating the heretical and Calvinistic doctrines with which they declared the English Church to be tainted, and, mutually exhorting each other to be steadfast in the faith, they reasserted the truth of the Orthodox confession, as set forth by Peter Mogila and proclaimed by Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, at the Council of Bethlehem, in 1672.
Other questions, which at different periods of the Church's history had been decided and redecided, now, in one way and again in another, were discussed, and to Peter's influence was due the more Catholic and Christian spirit in which they were finally settled.
