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XLVII.

CHAP. several of these were dispensed, by the distance and danger

of the way, from the duty of personal attendance, on the easy condition that every six years they should testify their faith and obedience to the catholic or patriarch of Babylon, a vague appellation, which has been successively applied to the royal seats of Seleucia, Ctesiphon, and Bagdad. These remote branches are long since withered, and the old patriarchal trunk-20 is now divided by the Elijahs of Mosul, the representatives, almost in lineal descent, of the genuine and primitive succession, the Fosephs of Amida, who are reconciled to the church of Rome,121 and the Simeons of Van or Ormia, whose revolt, at the head of forty thousand families, was promoted in the sixteenth century by the Sophists of Persia. The number of three hundred thousand is allowed for the whole body of the Nestorians, who, under the name of Chaldæans or Assyrians, are confounded with the most learned or the most powerful nation of Eastern

antiquity The Chris. According to the legend of antiquity, the gospel was tians of St. Thomas in preached in India by St. Thomas. 122 At the end of the India,

ninth century, his shrine, perhaps in the neighbourhood of A. D. 883.

Madras, was devoutly visited by the ambassadors of Alfred, and their return with a cargo of pearls and spices rewarded the zeal of the English monarch, who entertained the largest projects of trade and discovery. 123

When the Portuguese

120 The division of the patriarchate may be traced in the Bibliotheca Orient. of Assemanni, tom. i. p. 523...549. tom. ii. p. 457, &c. tom. iii. p. 603. p. 621...623. tom. iv. p. 164...169. p. 423. p. 622...629, &c.

121 The pompous language of Rome on the submission of a Nestorian patriarch, is elegantly represented in the viith book of Fra-Paola, Babylon, Niniven, Arbela, and the trophies of Alexander, Tauris, and Ecbatana, the Tigris and Indus.

122 The Indian missionary St. Thomas, an apostle, a Manichæan, or an Armenian merchant (La Croze, Christianisme des Indes, tom. i. p. 57....70), was famous, however, as early as the time of Jerom (ad Marcellam epist. 148). Marco Polo was inforined on the spot that he suffered martyrdom in the city of Maabar, or Meliapour, a league only from Madras (d'Anville, Ecclaircissemens sur l'Inde, p. 125), where the Portuguese founded an episcopal church under the waine of St. Thomé, and where the saint performed an annual miracle, till he was silenced by the prophane neighbourhood of the English (La Croze, tom. ii. p. 7....16).

123 Neither the author of the Saxon Chronicle (A. D. 883) nor Williain of Malmsbury (de Gestis Regum Angliæ, l. ii. c. 4. p. 44) were capable in the twelfth century, of inventing this extraordinary fact; they are incapable of explaining the motives and measures of Alfred; and their hasty notice serves only to provoke our curiosity. William of Malmsbury feels the difficulty of the enterprise, quod quivis in hoc sæculo miretur; and I almost suspect that the English anıbassadors collected their cargo and legend in Egypt. The

XLVII.

A. D.

first opened the navigation of India, the Christians of St. CHAP. Thomas had been seated for ages on the coast of Malabar, and the difference of their character and colour attested the mixture of a foreign race. In arms, in arts, and possibly in virtue, they excelled the natives of Hindostan: the husbandmen cultivated the palm-tree, the merchants were enriched by the pepper trade, the soldiers preceded the nairs or nobles of Malabar, and their hereditary privileges were respected by the gratitude or the fear of the king of Cochin and the Zamorin himself. They acknowledged a Gentoo sovereign, but they were governed, even in temporal concerns, by the bishop of Angamala. He still asserted his ancient title of metropolitan of India, but his real jurisdiction was exercised in fourteen hundred churches, and he was entrusted with the care of two hundred thousand souls. Their religion would have rendered them the firmest and most cordial 1500, &c. allies of the Portuguese, but the inquisitors soon discerned in the Christians of St. Thomas the unpardonable guilt of heresy and schism. Instead of owning themselves the subjects of the Roman pontiff, the spiritual and temporal monarch of the globe, they adhered, like their ancestors, to the communion of the Nestorian patriarch; and the bishops whom he ordained at Mosul, traversed the dangers of the sea and land to reach their diocese on the coast of Malabar. In their Syriac liturgy, the names of Theodore and Nestorius were piously commemorated; they united their adoration of the two persons of Christ; the title of Mother of God was offensive to their ear, and they measured with scrupulous avarice the honours of the Virgin Mary, whom the superstition of the Latins had almost exalted to the rank of a Goddess.

a When her image was first presented to the disciples of St. Thomas, they indignantly exclaimed, “We are Christians, not idolaters !” and their simple devotion was content with the veneration of the cross. Their separation from the western world had left them in ignorance of the improvements or corruptions of a thousand years; and their conformity with the faith and practice of the fifth century, would equally disappoint the prejudices of a papist or a protestant. It was the first care of the ministers of Ro.ne to intercept all

a

reyal author has not enriched his Orosius (see Barrington's Miscellanies) with an Indian, as well as a Scandinavian voyage.

XLVII.

CHAP. correspondence with the Nestorian patriarch, and several of

his bishops expired in the prisons of the holy office. The flock, without a shepherd, was assaulted by the power of the Portuguese, the arts of the Jesuits, and the zeal of Alexes de Menezes, archbishop of Goa, in his personal visitation of the coast of Malabar. The synod of Diamper, at which he presided, consummated the pious work of the reunion, and rigorously imposed the doctrine and discipline of the Roman church, without forgetting auricular confession, the strongest engine of ecclesiastical torture. The memory of Theodore and Nestorius was condemned, and Malabar was reduced under the dominion of the pope, of the primate,

and of the Jesuits who invaded the see of Angamala or CranA.D. 1599 ganor. Sixty years of servitude and hypocrisy were pa...1663.

tiently endured; but as soon as the Portuguese empire was shaken by the courage and industry of the Dutch, the Nes. torians asserted, with vigour and effect, the religion of their fathers. The Jesuits were incapable of defending the power which they had abused: the arms of forty thousand christians were pointed against their falling tyrants; and the In. dian archdeacon assumed the character of bishop, till a fresh supply of episcopal gifts and Syriac missionaries could be obtained from the patriarch of Babylon. Since the expulsion of the Portuguese, the Nestorian creed is freely professed on the coast of Malabar. The trading companies of Holland and England are the friends of toleration ; but if oppression be less mortifying than contempt, the Christians of St. Thomas have reason to complain of the cold and si

lent indifference of their brethren of Europe. 124 II. The II. The history of the Monophysites is less copious and JACO- interesting than that of the Nestorians. Under the reigns of

Zeno and Anastasius, their artful leaders surprised the ear of the prince, usurped the thrones of the East, and crushed on its native soil the school of the Syrians. The rule of the Monophysite faith was defined with exquisite discretion by "Severus patriarch of Antioch; he condemned, in the style

BITES.

124 Concerning the Christians of St. Thomas, see Assemanus Bibliot. Orient, tom. iv. p. 391...407.435...451. Geddes's Church History of Malabar; and, above all, La Croze, Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, in two vols. 12. o, La Haye, 1758, a karned and agrecable work. They have drawn fron the same source, the Portuguese and Italian narratives; and the prejudices of the Jesuits are sufficiently corected by those of the protesta its.

of the Henoticon, the adverse heresies of Nestorius and Eu- CHAP.

XLVII. tyches, maintained against the latter the reality of the body of Christ, and constrained the Greeks to allow that he was a liar who spoke truth.125 But the approximation of ideas could not abate the vehemence of passion; each party was the more astonished that their blind antagonist could dispute on so trifling a difference; the tyrant of Syria enforced the belief of his creed, and his reign was polluted with the blood of three hundred and fifty monks, who were slain, not perhaps without provocation or resistance, under the walls of Apamea. 126 The successor of Anastasius replanted the or- A. D. 518. thodox standard in the East: Severus fled into Egypt; and his friend, the eloquent Xenaias,' 27 who had escaped from the Nestorians of Persia, was suffocated in his exile by the Melchites of Paphlagonia. Fifty-four bishops were swept from their thrones, eight hundred ecclesiastics were cast into prison,'28 and notwithstanding the ambiguous favour of Thcodora, the Oriental flocks, deprived of their shepherds, must insensibly have been either famished or poisoned. In this spiritual distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united, and perpetuated, by the labours of a monk ; and the name of James Baradæus 129 has been preserved in the

ap125 Oιον ειπείν ψευδαληθης is the expression of Theodore, in his treatise of the incarnatiou, p. 245. 247. as he is quoted by La Croze (Hist. du Chris. tianisme d'Ethiope et d'Armenie, p. 35), who exclaims, perhaps too hastily, "Quel pit able raisonnement !" Renaidot has touched (Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 127...138.) the Oriental accounts of Severus ; and his adithen ic creed may be fi und in the epistle of John the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, in the xth century, to his brother Mennas of Alexandria (Asseman. Bibliot. Orient. tom. . p. 132...141).

126 Epist. Archimandritarum et Monachorum Syriæ Secundæ ad Papam Hermsdam, Concil. tonn. v.p. 598...602. The courage of St. Sabas, ut leo animosus, will justify the suspicion that the arms of these monks were not al. ways spiri'ual or defensive (Baronius, A. D.513, No. 7, &c.).

127 Assemanni (Bibliot. Orient. tom. ii. p. 10...46), and La Croze (Chris, tiarisme d'E hiopie, p. 36...40.) will supply the history of Xenaias, or Philose. bus, bishop of Mabug, or Hierapolis, in Syria. He was a perfect master of the Syriac language, and the author or editor of a version of the New Testament.

108 The names and titles of fifty-four bishops who were exiled by Justin, are preserved in the Chronicle of Dionysius (apud Asseman. tom. ii. p. 54). Severus was personally summoned to Constantinople...for his trial, says Li. beratus (Brev.c. 19)...that his tongue might be cut out, says Evagrius (1. iv.c. iv). The prudent patriarch did not stay to examine the difference. This ecdesiastical revolution is fixed by Pagi to the month of September of the year 518 (Critica, tom. ii. p. 506).

129 The obscure history of James, or Jacobus Baradæus, or Zanzalus, may be gathered from Eutychius (Annal. tom. ii. p. 144. 147), Renaudet (Hist. Patriarch Alex.p. 133), and Assemannus (Bibliot. Orient. tom. i. p. 424. toni ā. p. 62... 69. 324...332. p. 414. tom. iii. p. 385...388). He seems to be un

the ear

a

CHAP pellation of Jacobites, a familiar sound which may startle XLVII.

of an English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison of Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination of four-score thousand bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from the same inexhaustible source. The speed of the zealous missionary was promoted by the fleetest dromedaries of a devout chief of the Arabs; the doctrine and discipline of the Jacobites were secretly established in the dominions of Justinian ; and each Jacobite was compelled to violate the laws and to hate the Roman legislator. The successors of Severus, while they lurked in convents or villages, while they sheltered their proscribed heads in the caverns of hermits, or the tents of the Saracens, still asserted, as they now assert, their indefeasible right to the title, the rank, and the prerogatives of patriarch of Antioch: under the milder yoke of the infidels, they reside about a league from Merdin, in the pleasant monastery of Zapharan, which they have embellished with cells, aqueducts, and plantations. The secondary, though honourable place, is filled by the maphrian, who, in his station at Mosul itself, defies the Nestorian catholic with whom he contests the supremacy of the East. Under the patriarch and the maphrian, one hundred and fifty archbishops and bishops have been counted in the different ages of the Jacobite church ; but the order of the hierarchy is relaxed or dissolved, and the greater part of their dioceses is confined to the neighbourhood of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The cities of Aleppo and Amida, which are often visited by the patriarch, contain some wealthy merchants and industrious mechanics, but the multitude derive their scanty sustenance from their daily labour: and poverty, as well as superstition, may impose their excessive fasts; five annual lents, during which, both the clergy and laity abstain not only from flesh or eggs, but even from the taste of wine, of oil, and of fish. Their present numbers are esteemed from fifty to four, score thousand souls, the remnant of a populous church, which has gradually decreased under the oppression of twelve centuries. Yet in that long period, some strangers of merit have been converted to the Monophysite faith, and

known to the Greeks. The Jacobites themselves had rather deduce their name and pedigree from St. James the apostle.

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