Page:Russian Church and Russian Dissent.djvu/29

14 forth. A great city shall arise on this spot, and in it the Lord shall have many temples to His name."

Byzantine annalists record the labors of St. Peter of Kiev, a Greek monk sent thither by the Emperor Basil, the Macedonian, and who was, according to them, the first metropolitan of Russia. The heathen inhabitants demanded proof of the divine nature of his teachings; to convince them he passed, uninjured, with the Gospel in his hands, through a great fire kindled by them, whereupon they all embraced the faith. He repeated the same miracle among the Muscovites, and they also were converted.

The patriarch Photius, in a circular letter addressed to the Eastern bishops in 866, speaks of the Russians as having renounced their pagan superstitions and professed the faith of Jesus Christ, and adds that he has sent them a bishop and priests.

In the same year Oskold and Dir, companions of Ruric and rulers of Kiev, pursuing their quest for booty and plunder, descended the Dnieper and appeared before Constantinople; the city was saved by the miraculous interposition of the Virgin; her robe, a relic of the Church of Blacherne, was bathed in the sea, whereon a furious tempest arose which dispersed the hostile fleet. According to Greek chroniclers the Russian princes, struck with awe, abjured their heathen gods and embraced Christianity. These chroniclers also enumerate Russia as the seventieth archbishopric depending on the see of Constantinople.

The recruitment of the imperial body-guard from the Varagians along and beyond the Dnieper, bringing many from those regions under Christian influences, and the