OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 147 nations beyond the Tigris. The first indehble lesson of Ihas, 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 [Neatorian crowd of missionaries, inflamed by the double zeal of religion Edea^doaed. 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 pi'ohibited their dangerous corre- spondence 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 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 a liberal prin- ciple of reason, or at least of policy ; the austerity of the cloister vas relaxed and gradually forgotten ; houses of charity goiema^te^ were endowed for the education of orphans and foundlings ; a.d.^sw!' &c. 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 him- self. To this standard of natural and religious freedom myriads of fugitives resorted from all the provinces of the ^1** A dissertation on the state of the Nestorians has swelled in the hands of Assenianni to a folio volume of 950 pages, and his learned researches are digested in the most lucid order. Besides this ivth volume of the Bihliotheca Orieritalis, 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.
