Malabar survived (pp. 353–358); and here and there a broken stone bearing a cross and Syriac letters is found, to bear witness that once Christ was worshipped in Tatary and China.
There is another curious relic of Nestorianism in Asia, which we may just notice. Everyone has heard how strangely Christian or Catholic in external details is the Lamaism of Tibet. We know that Lamaist monks have a hierarchy and many rites like ours. People have tried to make anti-Christian capital out of this. Since Lamaism is Buddhism of a sort, and Buddha lived before Christ, it is sometimes said that we have borrowed these things from them. All kinds of dependence have been suggested, even the ridiculous idea that our Lord travelled to Central Asia and studied there under Buddhist monks. Now, in the first place, Lamaism is a quite late degradation of Buddhism, introduced into Tibet about 640 a.d.;[1] and, secondly, the mysterious likeness is explained by the fact that at that time there were flourishing Nestorian churches, with an elaborate ritual, all over these parts. Lamaist monasticism, holy water, incense, vestments are nothing but debased copies of what the natives had seen among the Nestorians. There is nothing mysterious about these things. At the source of the Lamaist ritual which so surprises the modern explorer stand a Nestorian monastery and a Nestorian bishop celebrating his liturgy.[2]
These missions are the most remarkable and the most glorious episode in Nestorian history. It would be cruelly unjust to forget them. We think of the Nestorians as a wretched heretical sect, cut off from the Catholic Church and so gradually withering. They are that. But there is another side too. For a time, as long as they could, they did their share in the common Christian cause heroically. While they were cut off from the West, denounced by Catholics, Orthodox and Jacobites, while we thought of them as a dying sect in Persia, they were sending missions all over Asia. Those forgotten Nestorian missionaries, they were not Catholics but they were Christians. Braving long journeys, braving heathen tyrants and horrible danger, they brought the name of Christ north to Lake Baikal, south to Ceylon, and east right into the
