Page:Correspondence between the Warden of St Columba's College and the Primate of Armagh.djvu/12

 Bishops, not only from his Commendatory Letter, but from conversations at two private interviews with which he honoured me before I went out. When I found, on the spot, that the Prelates, both of the Greek and Armenian Rite, mistrusted the friendly professions of the Archbishop's letter, dreading—what has since come to pass—a repetition of the practices of the emissaries of the Church of Rome, and of the American Congregationalists, it was my duty to repudiate the notion of dishonesty with all the earnestness of one who had full faith in the integrity and uprightness of that revered and lamented Primate. Among the dignified ecclesiastics to whom I personally guaranteed, with my Bishop's sanction, the good faith of the English Church, were the late Greek Patriarch of Antioch, the then Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the present Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem: and these protestations I afterwards repeated to the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, and to many ecclesiastics of the Church in Russia.

Well then might I be expected to be foremost to protest against a course of proceeding which is even avowed to be opposed to the original instructions of Bishop Alexander, and to the professions made through him to the Oriental Churches; and as I never understood that one condition of my tenure of this office was to ignore my own identity and antecedents, or to abstain from any further connexion with matters in which I had become so