Here follows a Bull of Pope Alexander,
IN WHICH THE ORDINANCE OF BAPTISM AMONG THE RUSSIANS IS FULLY DESCRIBED.
The Bishop Alexander, servant of the servants of God, for a perpetual remembrance. The loftiness of the divine wisdom, which no human reason can grasp, always originating out of the essence of its boundless goodness something for the welfare of the human race, produces and brings it to light at that convenient season which God himself, by a secret mystery, knows to be the suitable one; in order that men may know that they can do nothing by their own merits as of themselves, but that their salvation and every gift of grace proceeds from the supreme God himself, and from the Father of light. Truly it is not without great and lively joy in our mind that we have heard that some Russians in the Duchy of Lithuania, and others living according to the Greek ritual, but in other respects professing the Christian faith, dwelling in the cities and dioceses of Wilna and Kiev, Lukov[1] and Medniki,[2] and other places in the same duchy, have, by the illumination of the Holy Spirit working in them, expressed a desire utterly to reject from their minds and hearts some errors which while living in the ritual and custom of the Greeks they have hitherto observed, and to embrace the unity of the Catholic faith and of the Latin Roman Church, and to live according to the ritual of the said Latin and Roman Church. But as they have been
- ↑ A small town in Poland, six leagues south of Siedlec, and five north-east of Radzyn. Though it has only about twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom a large proportion are Jews, it contains a castle, several churches, and a college.
- ↑ A little town in the government of Wilna on the banks of the Varvitza. It is the residence of a Catholic bishop, who calls himself Bishop of Samogithia.
