“While we are on this topic we cannot help remarking how surprising are the tentative advances toward union between the Greek Church and Protestantism which we have recently witnessed. Such an alliance the clear mind of Natalie, even before her conversion, rejected with repugnance as impossible and absurd. Does not, in fact, the most simple reflection suffice to demonstrate that by uniting herself to the Catholic Church the Greek Church would preserve the traditions of her venerable antiquity together with the august dogmas which she holds, and would, at the same time, in ceasing to be local and becoming universal, recover the power of expansion and evangelization which she has lost by her schismatical isolation? In this case she might be compared to a princess of high lineage regaining, by a return to the bosom of the family to which she belonged, the royal rank from which she had fallen. But, in truth, to make a union with Protestantism would be for her the worst of misalliances, for she would then resemble a princess marrying a _parvenu_ and with the utmost levity renouncing all the rights of her high birth and illustrious descent.” Some of our readers may find it difficult to understand the anomalous position in which the Russian Church stands, so completely different from that of any of our Western sects, and requiring only the one act necessary for its corporate reunion to the Catholic body for its rectification, and yet so completely severed from the true church in its actual state that it is not a branch, a limb, or any kind of part or member of the same, but only a sect, completely outside of the universal church. Some Catholics may suppose the Russian Church in a worse condition than it is in reality. They may not understand that its priesthood and sacraments are any better than those of the English or Scandinavian churches, which have an outward form of episcopal constitution. Or, if better informed on this head, they may ascribe to it heresy, and regard some of its differences of rite and discipline as vitiating essentially the Catholic order. On the other hand, these misapprehensions being set aside, and the likeness of the Russian Church to the Catholic Church clearly understood, they might find it difficult to perceive that essential difference which, as Madame Craven remarks with truth, is to most of the Russian laity invisible. Still more will a Protestant having a tincture of Catholic opinions and sentiments fail to see why a member of the Russian Church should be convinced of the imperative obligation of abjuring the Greek schism and passing over to the communion of the Roman Church.