A Word on Professor N. I. Ivanovsky’s Conferences With the Petersburg Schismatics

Nikolai Ivanovich Ivanovsky, professor at the Kazan Academy, a learned investigator of the schism and a lover of the truth of the Orthodox Church, would come to our northern capital from time to time at the invitation of the Society for Religious and Moral Enlightenment, and would hold with the so-called Old Believers his conscientious, extended conferences—conferences that plainly exposed the wrongness of the schism—before large audiences. To these the schismatics could give no answer that was substantial or well-grounded; they either dodged the subject or tried to slip sideways to evade the question and avoid having to answer it, and talked nonsense to the point, because the plain truth stung their eyes and struck them with its light.

At the end of the last conference, one schismatic, backed into a corner by the plain truth of his interlocutor’s words, had the audacity to cry out: «Well, brothers (meaning his fellow believers), Nikolai Ivanovich never did answer our question, and he proved nothing.»

This is bare-faced shamelessness, a lie and a slander against the truth, for which God alone can justly punish him. What more do we need to answer them? What the Lord Jesus Christ answered the scribes and Pharisees in a like case: «If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. Leave them: they are blind guides of the blind, and if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.» Or as the apostles Paul and Barnabas said to the Jews after the Lord’s ascension: «The word of God had to be preached to you first; but since you spurn it and make yourselves unworthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.»

Our so-called Old Believers are the same as the ancient Jews, or the Jewish rabbis of today. Whatever happens, however plainly they are shown to be in the wrong, they stand stubbornly in their error, perishing themselves and leading others like them to perish with them. To them, as once to the Jews who came to the apostle Paul to hear the word of God and resisted him, his words apply: «Well did the Holy Spirit speak through the prophet Isaiah to our fathers, saying: Go to this people and say: you will keep on hearing but never understand, you will keep on seeing but never perceive. For the heart of this people has grown coarse, their ears are slow to hear, and they have closed their eyes, so that they will not see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and turn back for Me to heal them.»

For her part, the Holy Church has done and continues to do everything to turn her erring former children back to truth and salvation. For two and a half centuries she has not ceased to reprove and instruct them gently and with a mother’s love, as she does not cease to instruct them now; but they persist in their error and their enmity toward the holy Church, and so, if they do not yet turn back, they will inevitably perish—like the ancient and modern Jews in their stubbornness, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (perishing in their stubbornness, as the sons of Korah did).

The schismatics’ blasphemy against the Church, and their disobedience and resistance to her, is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, for it is resistance to manifest truth, which is the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit; and if they do not turn and submit to her, they will receive forgiveness neither in this age nor in the age to come.

To them also apply the words of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, quoted by the holy apostle Jude: «Behold, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of His holy angels, to hold judgment over all, and to expose every ungodly one among them for all the deeds their ungodliness produced, and for all the harsh words that ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.»

Let them choose one of two things: either submit freely and knowingly to the truth of the Orthodox Church, or await for themselves the dread Judgment of God. Dreadful is the expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire ready to devour the adversaries. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God.

The Orthodox Church, as the spotless bride of Christ, is glorified to this day by manifest testimonies of the Lord to her truth and her power to save: by the incorruption of the holy relics of her saints, which appear now as before, and by saving signs and wonders, worked then and worked now at the prayer of her faithful sons—proving to the point of plain evidence the truth, the rightness, and the saving power of the Orthodox Church. Let the schismatics show even one miracle that has occurred among them, in their schism. They cannot point to a single one, for there is none. Only in the Church is there truth and salvation; outside the Church, error and ruin. Only for those who remain in the Church is there a sacrifice for sins; outside the Church, there is no sacrifice. If we, having received acknowledgment of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins… One who has renounced the law of Moses is put to death without mercy on the word of two or three witnesses; how much more severe a punishment, do you suppose, does the man deserve who tramples the Son of God underfoot, treats as unholy the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and insults the Spirit of grace?

This is enough for those who have understanding.