What are the present needs of Slav Orthodoxy?  Oh, her needs are great, her thirst is immense.  She does not need so much what Tolstoi proposed for her, or what Harnack could give her, neither does she thirst after the stricter and clearer juristic definitions, nor after a “sweet reasonableness,” as Matthew Arnold expressed Christ’s being, a new theology or a new worship.

She needs more Christian dramas blended in one.  She needs more of Christ on earth, more votes for Christ, all the votes for Christ instead of dividing them between Olympus and Golgotha.  She needs to be united with all other Churches in one Christ-like body and spirit, in order that all the pieces of a broken mirror may be recomposed and that Christ could see in it His whole face.  She is thirsty for more stigmata, more suffering, more sins.  Yes, she is thirsty for more sins, I say, and more virtues; she likes to have all the sins and all the virtues of the world confessed and recognised as the common burden and common good.  She is thirsty for a communion of sins and virtues among men, she is thirsty to call you brothers.  She is thirsty to cry in exaltation to every man under the sun:  “Poor child, give me just your sins (you don’t need them) and I will give you my virtues, in order that I may be ashamed of your sins and you may be proud of my virtues.”

For centuries Slav Orthodoxy seemed to the Western world like an immobile tortoise with a multi-coloured shell and with no great probability of its being inhabited by a living being.  The outside world looked at this multi-coloured, hard and unchangeable shell, sometimes with love, sometimes with horror—­always with an intense curiosity and almost always with a doubt that there could be any living thing in it.  I will try to show you that there was and still is a living being contained therein, with many more movements, dissatisfactions, convulsions, longings and sufferings than it seems possible could exist.

II

SLAV REVOLUTIONARY CATHOLICISM

A FAR AIM AND A NARROW WAY.

If Providence bestows on the English Church only once in every half century a man like Bishop Westcott, this Church, I think, can be sure of a solid and sound longevity.  Well, this Bishop Westcott spoke once enthusiastically of “the noble catholicity which is the glory of the English Church.”  My intention in this lecture is to describe to you an island in the Roman Catholic Church among the Slavs, which island is distinguished by a noble catholicity.  “I believe in the holy catholic apostolic church.”  This sentence that you repeat in London, as do the Roman Catholics in Rome, and we Orthodox in Moscow, has always two meanings, a sectarian and a universal, or a narrow one and a sublime one.  The first meaning belongs to the people who imagine Christ standing at the boundary of their Church, turned with his face to them and with his back to all other