ts that "The
patriarch Photius took the virginal robe of the Mother of God from the
Blachern Church, and plunged it beneath the waves of the strait, when
the sea immediately boiled up from underneath and wrecked the vessels of
the heathen. Struck with awe, they believed in that God who had smitten
them, and became the first-fruits of their people to the Lord." The hymn
of victory of the Greek Church, "To the protecting Conductress," in
honor of the most holy Virgin, has remained a memorial of this triumph,
and even now concludes the _Office for the First Hour_ in the daily
_Matins_; for that was, indeed, the first hour of salvation to the land
of Russia.

It is probable that on their return to their own country the princes of
Kieff sowed there the seeds of Christianity; for, eighty years
afterward, on occasion of a conference for peace between the prince Igor
and certain Byzantine ambassadors, we find mention already of a "Church
of the Prophet Elias" in Kieff where the Christian Varangians swore to
the observance of the treaty. Constantine Porphyrogenitus and other
Greek annalists even relate that in the lifetime of Oskold there was a
bishop sent to the Russians by the emperor Basil the Macedonian, and the
patriarch St. Ignatius, and that he made many converts, chiefly "in
consequence of the miraculous preservation of a volume of the Gospels,
which was thrown publicly into the flames and taken out after some time
unconsumed." Also in Condinus, _Catalogue of Sees Subject to the
Patriarch of Constantinople_, the metropolitical see of Russia appears
as early as the year 891.

Lastly, it is certain that many of the Varangians who served in the
imperial bodyguard were Christians, and that the Greek sovereigns never
lost sight of any opportunity of converting them to their own faith, by
which they hoped to soften their savage manners. When the emperor Leo
was concluding a peace with Oleg, he showed not only his own treasures
to the ambassadors of the Russian prince, but also the splendor of the
churches, the holy relics, the precious _icons_, and the "Instruments of
the Passion of our Lord," if by any means they might catch from them the
spirit of the faith.

Some such influences as these, while Christianity as yet was only
struggling for an uncertain existence at Kieff, produced in good time
their effect on the wisest of the daughters of the Slavonians, the
widowed princess Olga, who governed Russia during the minority o