gether not only the Russian nation but the orthodox Slav peoples. It is, therefore, not too much to say that the translation of St. Cyril and St. Methodius and the apostolate of the two Slav brothers, has been one of the half-dozen decisive events of the history of the modern world, as decisive as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Cæsar or as the Empire of Charlemagne. For it is mainly through the creation of ecclesiastical Slavonic that the southern Slavs have been drawn into and maintained in the orbit of Great Russia, and it is as the result of the achievement of St. Cyril and St. Methodius that the Mosque of St. Sophia will be in future ages the metropolitan cathedral of all the orthodox Slavs of Eastern Christendom.
IV
It is deeply to be regretted that the academicians and philologists who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had to fix the standard of the Russian language, and who had to perform the difficult task of cutting straight roads through the dense forest of the old Russian language, should not have cut down some of the rank undergrowth of the Russian grammar, and that they should not have taken their cue
