The Patriarch and the Tsar, Volume 4: Services of the Patriarch Nicon to the Church and State

Tis First Part is taken almost entirely from a volume eu-titled The most holy Nicon, Patriarch of AU Russia, published at St. Petersburg in A.D. 1863 by the lite Samuel Michaclofsky, hieromonach of the Nefsky Lavra. It reproduces from Michaelofsky’s work, besides the preface, his account of the election of Nicon to the patriarchate; of the great services rendered hy him to the Church of his cowry, and to the State; and of the circumstances which led to what Michaelofsky calls his ‘sad fate. These extracts are not everywhere exact translations; for liberty has been taken to abridge, and to correet some inaccuracies of detail; but no attempt has been made, without notice to the reader, to correct or to palliate the inconsistency of the writer as to main principles. Indeed, this has been our chief reason. for using his work, that, while culogising Nicon, and taking his part warmly against the raskolniks and against the boyars, Michaelofsky is not himself, like Nicon, a believer ina divinely-ruling universal Church, but he is the submissive minister of that merely national Church which the tsar Alexis, in A.D. 1660, set up wicanonically in Russia, And such a servant of the Church and State of his country’ is the fittest of all witnesses to acknowledge before his Russian fellow-countrymen the benefits or sevvices done to them by Nicon; though Nicon in rendering those services acted not as the official servant either of the Church or B of the State of his country, but as the free messenger of Christ. How Nicon was requited for his ‘services’ by ‘the State and by the Chureh of his country,’ and with what consequences to themselves, will be shown in the Second Part of this volume, from contemporary documents.