Well, then, there is one idea, which we would willingly call the “providential idea” of the times, of so decisive a tendency does it appear to us for hastening the end of the schism and the return of the Græco-Russian Church to Catholic unity. It is the idea to which we now return, and which forms the subject of the entire third chapter of the essay just mentioned. We live in a century of revolutions; now, whilst the Catholic Church, in presence of the general overturning of thrones, dynasties and political constitutions, only strengthens, with her marvellous unity, the powers of her government, the Orthodox Eastern Church is given up defenceless to all the chances of political revolutions, and condemned, in her various branches, to submit to the form of government which these revolutions impose upon her. This fact alone is of a nature to lead back a goodly number of our separated brethren. We have not here to discuss lofty and abstract matters; we have to reflect whether Jesus Christ could thus have given up his church to the mercy of political revolutions. The man of the people, the illiterate, the workman, whose every moment is precious because he must live by the labor of his hands, can decide this question as easily as the theologian, the philosopher, and the statesman. It is a reflection which requires neither study nor any form of reasoning, nor even time; it is an argument self-evident to all—the “popular argument,” which must decide between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Eastern Communion.
After this our repetitions will be treated with indulgence, as will also our inability to make any promise not to recur, even more than once, to this same subject—in short, our desire will be found legitimate that the religious press of every country should make the idea which we have just expressed its own; that it should develop and popularize it, and make it really “the providential idea of the times.”
From what we have been able to ascertain, the conduct of the Russian Church upon this point is not so invariably uniform as to make it impossible to quote some exceptions to what we have just mentioned. It is very certain, however, that these exceptions do not regard great personages, who are always dispensed from submitting to baptism by immersion. To mention a recent example: the Princess Dagmar was admitted into the Russian Church without being required to receive a second baptism. The same thing was done in the last century. Voltaire having shown himself persuaded that the Russian Church baptized Protestants, baptized by infusion, was reproved by Catherine II. in the following terms: “As head of the Greek Church, I cannot honestly leave you unrebuked in your error. The Greek Church does not rebaptize at all. The Grand Duchess, etc.” (Vide Kegl. Eccles., p. 86, note.) What Catherine here calls the Greek Church is the Russian. Besides, Catherine herself had been received into the Russian Church without being rebaptized, and it was of this example that William Frederick Lütiens, the Lutheran author of the Dissertatio de Religione Ruthenorum Hodierna, did not fail to avail himself, in maintaining that upon this point also the Russians were in agreement with the Lutherans. “If the Russians of former days” (Rutheni veteres), writes Lütiens, “did not recognize as valid the baptism (by infusion) of our church, it cannot be attributed solely to their belief in the necessity of their ceremonies, but also to the hatred which, from the calumnies of the Romanists, they nourished against our Lutheran Church ...” (Dissert., etc., pp. 86, 7).
Besides, we find the following in the Russian Clergy of Father Gagarin: “The Ecclesiastical Talk (Doukhovnaia Beseda) of Sept. 17, 1866, was seeking for a means of reconciling on this point the Greek and Russian Churches. Nothing is stranger than the idea it has entertained. If we are to believe the Ecclesiastical Talk, the Greek Church fully admits the validity of baptism otherwise than by immersion, but has been obliged to exact a new baptism from those Latins seeking admission into her bosom, in order to draw a deeper line of demarcation between Greeks and Latins, from fear of a reconciliation, and to this end has attempted nothing less than to make the Greeks believe that the Latins were not Christians. We should never dare to attribute to the Greek Church such a proceeding. Lying, calumny, profanation of a sacrament that cannot be repeated—all this, according to the Ecclesiastical Talk, the Greek Church would knowingly and willingly do! Reading this, we cannot believe our eyes. And this journal is published by the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg, under the eye and with the approbation of the Synod!” (The Russian Clergy, translated from the French of Father Gagarin, S.J., by Ch. Du Gard Makepeace, M.A. London: Burns and Oates, 1872; p. 272.)