Page:Notes upon Russia (volume 1, 1851).djvu/243

Rh carried off by poison, and that the adulterous Ovezina was cut to picces. The eldest son Ivan, who was born in 1528, came to the throne after the death of his mother.

As Russia began, so to the present day it continues to observe the Christian faith according to the Greek ritual. The metropolitan formerly resided in Kiev, afterwards in Vladimir, but now in Moscow. It was a custom of the metropolitans to pay a visit every seven years to that part of Russia which was subject to the Lithuanians, and to return after exacting sums of money from them; but Withold fearing that his territories would become exhausted of coin, would no longer permit this. He therefore called a convocation of bishops, and appointed a special metropolitan, who at this day holds his seat at Wilna, the metropolis of Lithuania, a city which though observing the Roman ritual, has more Russian than Roman churches in it. The Russian metropolitans hold their authority from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The Russians openly boast in their annals, that before the times of Vladimir and Olha, the land of Russia was baptized and blessed by Andrew, the apostle of Christ, who came, as they assert, from Greece to the mouth of the Dnieper, and that he sailed up the river against the stream as far as the mountains where Kiev now stands, and there blessed and baptized all the country; that he planted his cross there, and preached the great grace of God, foretelling that the churches of the Christians would be numerous; that thence he went afterwards to the sources of the Dnieper, to the Great Lake Volok, and descended by the River Lovat to Lake Ilmen, and thence by the River Volchov’, which flows