Pope Nicholas I.,
demonstrating that the Word of God ought to be preached in three tongues
only--Hebrew, Greek, and Latin--"because the inscription on the Cross
had been written by Pilate in those tongues only." Pope Nicholas
summoned the brothers to Rome; but Pope Adrian II., who was reigning in
his stead when they arrived there, received them cordially, granted them
permission to continue their preaching and divine services in the
Slavonic language, and even consecrated Methody bishop of Pannonia;
after which Methody returned to Moravia, but Kyrill, exhausted by his
labors, withdrew to a monastery near Rome, and died there in 869.

The language into which Kyrill and Methody translated was probably the
vernacular of the Slavonian tribes dwelling between the Balkans and the
Danube. But as the system invented by Kyrill took deepest root in
Bulgaria (whither, in 886, a year after Methody's death, his disciples
were banished from Moravia), the language preserved in the ancient
transcripts of the holy Scriptures came in time to be called "Ancient
Bulgarian." In this connection, it must be noted that this does not
indicate the language of the Bulgarians, but merely the language of the
Slavonians who lived in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians themselves did not
belong to the Slavonic, nor even to the Indo-European race, but were of
Ural-Altaic extraction; that is to say, they belonged to the family now
represented in Europe by the Finns, Turks, Hungarians, Tatars, and
Samoyeds. In the seventh century, this people, which had inhabited the
country lying between the Volga and the Don, in southeastern Russia,
became divided: one section moved northward, and settled on the Kama
River, a tributary of the Volga; the other section moved westward, and
made their appearance on the Danube, at the close of the seventh
century. There they subdued a considerable portion of the Slavonic
inhabitants, being a warlike race; but the Slavonians, who were more
advanced in agriculture and more industrious than the Bulgarians,
effected a peaceful conquest over the latter in the course of the two
succeeding centuries, so that the Bulgarians abandoned their own
language and customs, and became completely merged with the Slavonians,
to whom they had given their name.

When the Slavonic translations of the Scriptures and the Church Service
books were brought to Russia from Bulgaria and Byzantium, the language
in which they were written received the name of "Ch