In the grottoes within the Caucasian icy mountains, which the bold glance of mortal has never spied, where the frost creates an eternal translucent vault and dulls the fall of the sun’s rays, where lightning is dead, where thunder is fettered, there stands, cut into ice, a mighty mansion. There are the storms, there are the cold, blizzards, tempests; there Winter reigns, devouring years. This austere sister of other days, though hoary, is swift and agile. Rival of Spring, Autumn and Summer, she is clad in the purple woven of snow; stark-frozen steam serves her as veil. Her throne has the form of a diamond mountain. Great pillars, of ice constructed, cast a silvery sheen, illumined by the sun; over the heavenly vault glides the solar splendour, and then it seems a mass of ice is on fire.
The elements have no motion: the air dares not move, nor the fire glow. There are no coloured fields; among the fields of ice gleam only frozen flowery vapours; the waters in the heavens, melted by the rays, hang, petrified, in wavy layers; there in the air you may discern the words of prophecy, but all is stark, and nature dead. Only tremor, chill and frost have life; hoar frosts move about, while zephyrs grow dumb; snowstorms whirl about in flight, frosts reign in the place of summer luxury. There the ice represents the ruins of cities, one look at which congeals your blood. Pressed by the frosts, the snows there form silvery mounds and fields of diamonds. From there Winter spreads her dominion over us, devouring the grass in the fields, the flowers in the vales, and sucking up the living sap of trees, and on cold pinions bears frosts to us, driving day away, prolonging gloomy nights, and compelling the sun to turn aside his beaming eyes: with trembling, forests and rivers await her, and chills weave her shrouds from the white billows.
Platón (in civil life Peter Geórgevich) Levshín. (1737-1812.)
What Feofán Prokopóvich had been to the reign of Peter the Great, Platón was to Catherine II. After having studied in the Moscow Theological Academy, where he became a teacher even before ending his course, he took the tonsure at twenty-two; at twenty-five he was made rector of the Seminary. In the same year he attracted Catherine’s attention by an eloquent speech On the Usefulness of Piety, and he was at once called to St. Petersburg to be her son’s spiritual teacher (see p. 326). Platón rose rapidly, and in 1787 he was made metropolitan of Moscow. His liberal and enlightened views on theology were valued not only at home, but his Brief Theology, originally published in 1755, has been translated into most European languages, and three times into English. A Russian source informs us that his book on theology was made a text-book at Oxford and Cambridge. Several Englishmen who had visited him, and Dr. Stanley, spoke in the highest terms of this Russian divine.
The translation of his Brief Theology in English bears the following titles: The Present State of the Greek Church in Russia; or, A Summary of Christian Divinity, by Platón, Late Metropolitan of Moscow, translated from the Slavonian ... by Robert Pinkerton, Edinburgh, 1814, and New York, 1815; The Orthodox Doctrine of the Apostolic Eastern Church; or, A Compendium of Christian Theology, translated from the Greek ... to which is appended a Treatise on Melchisedec, London, Manchester [printed], 1857; Κατηχησις—The Great Catechism of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Orthodox Church, translated from the Greek by J. T. S., London, 1867. A Sermon preached by order of Her Imperial Majesty, on the Tomb of Peter the Great, in the Cathedral Church of St. Petersburg, London, 1770.
WHAT ARE IDOLATERS?
The second commandment forbiddeth idolatry, and every unlawful mode of worshipping God.
At one time, almost all nations were in such a state of error (and even now there are many in the same situation), that they worshipped the creatures as gods, such as the sun, the moon, fire, also the lower animals, as bulls, cats, crocodiles; and some even worshipped herbs, such as onion and garlic; and to all these they offered sacrifices, and paid other divine honours, or they made statues in the likeness of men and other animals, and bowed down before them as if they were divinities. But from these shocking and awful errors, the grace of Jesus Christ has delivered us (I Peter iv. 3).
Such persons also resemble those idolaters as labour for Mammon and their belly; that is, whose thoughts are all taken up about amassing riches, which they either do not make use of, or only sacrifice to their fleshly lusts. With such people, Mammon and the belly are the idols, to whom they devote all their services; and on this account the Holy Scriptures call the love of riches, idolatry (Col. iii. 5); and those also idolaters who make their belly their God (Phil. iii. 19).
This commandment also forbids the use of all unlawful means in the worship of God; that is, when anyone thinks of pleasing God by that which is not acceptable to Him, and which is not commanded in His Word. Such, for instance, were those Israelites who presented to God costly sacrifices while they led ungodly lives. And therefore God, through His prophet Isaiah, declared sacrifices presented from such hands to be hateful in His eyes; that is, their oblations were vain, their incense was an abomination and their fatted calves like dogs in His sight (chap. i. II). Those persons consequently transgress against this commandment: