and an apostate who had stirred up the existing persecution! Bahram may have cared but little for the other accusations, but a Roman sympathizer was, of course, suspect, and the Catholicos was arrested, beaten and imprisoned.[1] This proceeding not improbably saved his life in fact; for being already in prison on a secular charge, he remained there forgotten till the peril of martyrdom had passed. His imprisonment continued until the war with Rome had come to an end and Christians had liberty to exist once more.
When the persecution and the war ended together, the Christian "melet" ipso facto resumed their own position towards the Government, as naturally as did Armenians, for instance, in a later age. Dad-Ishu was released; but his sufferings and the slanders combined had broken his spirit. He refused to take his place at the head of the Church, and crept off alone to the "Monastery of the Ark," in Cordyene,[2] intending there to spend his days in a hermit's cell, "weeping over the fall of the Church."
This, however, by no means suited the intentions of his brother bishops. They were now proposing to organize the Church again after the persecution, and, moreover, to emphasize its independent and autocephalous character; and for this, the presence of the Catholicos was a vital necessity. The pro-western wave of feeling, which had been in the ascendant four years previously, had now spent its force—the more so, that the panacea adopted under its influence had conspicuously failed to do what
- ↑ Amr, Assem., ii. 214.
- ↑ i.e. to Judi Dagh, near the modern Jezireh, a mountain which local tradition identifies with the Ararat on which the Ark rested. Here St. James of Nisibis had a hermitage, and here there exist still the remains of a monastery, which we may probably identify with that of the "Ark" to which Dad-Ishu retired.
