adapted to the higher topics of poetry and argument. Armenia and Abyssinia were infected by the speech or learning of the Greeks; and their Barbaric tongues, which have been revived in the studies of modern Europe, were unintelligible to the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The Syriac and the Coptic, the Armenian and the Ethiopic, are consecrated in the service of their respective churches; and their theology is enriched by domestic versions, both of the Scriptures and of the most popular fathers. After a period of thirteen hundred and sixty years, the spark of controversy, first kindled by a sermon of Nestorius, still burns in the bosom of the East, and the hostile communions still maintain the faith and discipline of their founders. In the most abject state of ignorance, poverty, and servitude, the Nestorians and Monophysites reject the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and cherish the toleration of their Turkish masters, which allows them to anathematize, on one hand, St. Cyril and the synod of Ephesus; on the other, pope Leo and the council of Chalcedon. The weight which they cast into the downfal of the Eastern empire demands our notice; and the reader may be amused with the various prospects of, I. The Nestorians. II. The Jacobites.† III. The Maronites. IV. The Armenians. V. The Copts; and, VI. The Abyssinians. To the three former, the Syriac is common; but of the latter, each is discriminated by the use of a national idiom. Yet the modern natives of Armenia and Abyssinia would be incapable of conversing with their ancestors; and

Irak. (Gregor. Abulpharag. Hist. Dynast. p. 11.) On the Syriac, see Ebed-Jesu, (Asseman. tom. iii, p. 326, &c.,) whose prejudice alone ould prefer it to the Arabic. * I shall not enrich my

gnorance with the spoils of Simon, Walton, Mill, Wetstein, Assemannus, Ludolphus, La Croze, whom I have consulted with some care. It appears, 1. That, of all the versions which are celebrated by the fathers, it is doubtful whether any are now extant in their pristine integrity. 2. That the Syriac has the best claim; and that the consent of the Oriental sects is a proof that is more ancient than their schism.

On the account of the Monophysites and Nestorians, I am deeply indebted to the Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana of Joseph Simon Assemannus. That learned Maronite was dispatched in the year 1715, by Pope Clement XI. to visit the monasteries of Egypt and Syria in search of MSS. His four folio volumes, published at Rome, 1719-1728, contain a part only, though perhaps the most valuable, of his extensive project. As a native and as a scholar, he possessed the Syriac literature; and, though a dependant of Rome, he wishes to be

the Christians of Egypt and Syria, who reject the religion, have adopted the language, of the Arabians. The lapse of time has seconded the sacerdotal arts; and in the East, as well as in the West, the Deity is addressed in an obsolete tongue unknown to the majority of the congregation.

1. Both in his native and his episcopal province, the heresy of the unfortunate Nestorius was speedily obliterated. The Oriental bishops, who at Ephesus had resisted to his face the arrogance of Cyril, were mollified by his tardy concessions. The same prelates, or their successors, subscribed, not without a murmur, the decrees of Chalcedon; the power of the Monophysites reconciled them with the Catholics in the conformity of passion, of interest, and insensibly of belief; and their last reluctant sigh was breathed in the defence of the three chapters. Their dissenting brethren, less moderate or more sincere, were crushed by the penal laws; and, as early as the reign of Justinian, it became difficult to find a church of Nestorians within the limits of the Roman empire. Beyond those limits they had discovered a new world, in which they might hope for liberty, and aspire to conquest. In Persia, notwithstanding the resistance of the Magi, Christianity had struck a deep root, and the nations of the east reposed under its salutary shade. The Catholic, or primate, resided in the capital: in his synods, and in their dioceses, his metropolitans, bishops, and clergy, represented the pomp and order of a regular hierarchy: they rejoiced in the increase of proselytes, who were converted from the Zendavesta to the gospel, from the secular to the monastic life; and their zeal was stimulated by the presence of an artful and formidable enemy. The Persian church had been founded by the missionaries of Syria; and their language, discipline, and doctriue, were closely interwoven with its original frame. The Catholics were elected and ordained by their own suffragans; but their filial dependance on the patriarchs of Antioch is attested by the canons of the Oriental church.* In the Persian school of

moderate and candid.

* See the Arabic canons of Nice

in the translation of Abraham Ecchelensis, No. 37-40. Concil. tom. ii, p. 335, 336, edit. Venet. These vulgar titles, Nicene and Arabic, are both apocryphal. The council of Nice enacted no more than twenty canons (Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. lib. 1, c. 8); and the remainder,

Edessa, the rising generations of the faithful imbibed their theological idiom; they studied in the Syriac version the ten thousand volumes of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and they revered the apostolic faith and holy martyrdom of his disciple Nestorius, whose person and language were equally unknown to the nations beyond the Tigris. The first indelible lesson of Ibas, bishop of Edessa, taught them to execrate the Egyptians, who, in the synod of Ephesus, had impiously confounded the two natures of Christ. The flight of the masters and scholars, who were twice expelled from the Athens of Syria, dispersed a crowd of missionaries, inflamed by the double zeal of religion and revenge. And the rigid unity of the Monophysites, who, under the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius, had invaded the thrones of the East, provoked their antagonists, in a land of freedom, to avow a moral, rather than a physical, union of the two persons of Christ. Since the first preaching of the gospel, the Sassanian kings beheld, with an eye of suspicion, a race of aliens and apostates, who had embraced the religion, and who might favour the cause, of the hereditary foes of their country. The royal edicts had often prohibited their dan gerous correspondence with the Syrian clergy; the progress of the schism was grateful to the jealous pride of Perozes; and he listened to the eloquence of an artful prelate, who painted Nestorius as the friend of Persia, and urged him to secure the fidelity of his Christian subjects, by granting a just preference to the victims and enemies of the Roman tyrant. The Nestorians composed a large majority of the clergy and people: they were encouraged by the smile, and armed with the sword, of despotism; yet many of their weaker brethren were startled at the thought of breaking loose from the communion of the Christian seventy or eighty, were collected from the synods of the Greek church. The Syriac edition of Maruthas is no longer extant (Asseman. Bibliot. Oriental. tom. i. p. 195; tom. iii. p. 74), and the Arabic version is marked with many recent interpolations. Yet this code contains many curious relics of ecclesiastical discipline; and since it is equally revered by all the eastern communions, it was probably finished before the schism of the Nestorians and Jacobites. (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. xi. p. 363-367.) *Theodore the reader (1. 2,

c. 5. 49, ad calcem Hist. Eccles.) has noticed this Persian school of Edessa. Its ancient splendour, and the two eras of its downfal (A.D. 431 and 489,) are clearly discussed by Assemannus (Biblioth. Orient. tom. ii. p. 402; iii. p. 376. 378; iv. p. 70. 924).

VOL. V.

R

world, and the blood of seven thousand seven hundred Monophysites, or Catholics, confirmed the uniformity of faith and discipline in the churches of Persia.* Their ecclesiastical institutions are distinguished by liberal

principle of reason, or at least of policy: the austerity of the cloister was relaxed and gradually forgotten; houses of charity were endowed for the education of orphans and foundlings; the law of celibacy, so forcibly recommended to the Greeks and Latins, was disregarded by the Persian clergy; and the number of the elect was multiplied by the public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and even the patriarch himself. To this standard of natural and religious freedom, myriads of fugitives resorted from all the provinces of the Eastern empire; the narrow bigotry of Justinian was punished by the emigration of his most industrious subjects; they transported into Persia the arts both of peace and war; and those who deserved the favour, were promoted in the service, of a discerning monarch. The arms of Nushirvan, and his fiercer grandson, were assisted with advice, and money, and troops, by the desperate sectaries who still lurked in their native cities of the East; their zeal was rewarded with the gift of the Catholic churches; but when those cities and churches were recovered by Heraclius, their open profession of treason and heresy compelled them to seek a refuge in the realm of their foreign ally. But the seeming tranquillity of the Nestorians was often endangered, and sometimes overthrown. They were involved in the common evils of Oriental despotism: their enmity to Rome could not always atone for their attachment to the gospel: and a colony of three hundred thousand Jacobites, the captives of Apamea and Antioch, was permitted to erect a hostile altar in the face of the Catholic, and in the sunshine of the court. In his last treaty, Justinian introduced some conditions which tended to enlarge and fortify the toleration of Christianity in Persia. The emperor, ignorant of the rights of con

*A dissertation on the state of the Nestorians has swelled in the hands of Assemannus to a folio volume of nine hundred and fifty pages, and his learned researches are digested in the most lucid order. Besides this fourth volume of the Bibliotheca Orientalis, the extracts in the three preceding tomes (tom. i. p. 203; ii. p. 321-463; iii. 64-70. 378-395, &c. 403-408. 580-589) may be usefully consulted.

science, was incapable of pity or esteem for the heretics who denied the authority of the holy synods: but he flattered himself that they would gradually perceive the temporal benefits of union with the empire and the church of Rome; and if he failed in exciting their gratitude, he might hope to provoke the jealousy of their sovereign. In a later age, the Lutherans have been burnt at Paris, and protected in Germany, by the superstition and policy of the most Christian king.

The desire of gaining souls for God, and subjects for the church, has excited in every age the diligence of the Christian priests. From the conquest of Persia they carried their spiritual arms to the north, the east, and the south; and the simplicity of the gospel was fashioned and painted with the colours of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century, according to the report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the Barbaric churches, from the Gulf of Persia to the Caspian sea, were almost infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the number and sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper coast of Malabar, and the isles of the ocean, Socotora and Ceylon, were peopled with an increasing multitude of Christians, and the bishops and clergy of those sequestered regions derived their ordination from the Catholic of Babylon. In a subsequent age, the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the limits which had confined the ambition

* See the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas, surnamed Indicopleustes, or the Indian navigator, 1. 3, p. 178, 179; 1. 11, p. 337. The entire work, of which some curious extracts may be found in Photius (cod. 36, p. 9, 10, edit. Hoeschel), Thevenot (in the first part of his Relations des Voyages, &c.), and Fabricius (Bibliot. Græc. 1. 3, c. 25, tom. ii. p. 603-617), has been published by father Montfaucon at Paris, 1707, in the Nova Collectio Patrum (tom. ii. p. 113-346). It was the design of the author to confute the impious heresy of those who maintain that the earth is a globe, and not a flat oblong table, as it is represented in the Scriptures (1. 2, p. 138). But the nonsense of the monk is mingled with the practical knowledge of the traveller, who performed his voyage A.D. 522, and published his book at Alexandria, A.D. 547 (1. 2, p. 140, 141. Montfaucon, Præfat. c. 2). The Nestorianism of Cosmas, unknown to his learned editor, was detected by La Croze (Christianisme des Indes, tom. i. p. 40-55), and is confirmed by Assemannus (Bibliot. Orient. tom. iv. p. 605, 606).