language used by our Lord and his apostles? All kinds of conjectures were wildly made, including the inevitable one that the lost Ten Tribes had at last been found.[1] Another circumstance fanned the enthusiasm among Protestants. These unspoiled primitive Christians, were they Papists? By no means. They had no pictures in their churches! That alone would be enough to show the purity of their faith. But there was more and better. They said something about the Blessed Virgin which Roman Catholics did not say; they had heard of the Pope of Rome and could not abide him; they had Bibles, and were quite willing to accept more. They seem in those days to have been prepared to agree with enthusiasm to anything their Protestant visitors said. Monks? Were there monks in the Church of England? No. Then they had not any either. The Holy Eucharist? What did their honoured visitors believe about it themselves? Nothing very definite, but certainly not what the Pope says. Exactly the state of the Nestorian mind on the subject. They, too, are not very clear about it; but they are certain the Pope is wrong. So there came that wonderful myth of Mâr Shim‘un and his people as the "Protestants of the East." Poor little harried sect! These well-dressed European travellers had money, power, influence. Pashas and Kaimakams trembled before them. And they were so friendly to the poor rayahs. What wonder that the rayahs were anxious to agree?
A further reason for interest in the Nestorians was their need of protection by some civilized State. They have continually been persecuted by their neighbours, notably by the fanatical Kurds who share their mountains. During the early 19th century there were endless raids of Kurds on Nestorian villages, accompanied by the massacre, rape, burning of houses and churches, which form the inner history of the Turkish Empire at all times. There had been very bad cases of this about 1830; so that the conscience of Europe was aroused, as it was at the time of the Bulgarian, Maronite and Armenian atrocities. Hitherto the wilds of Kurdistan had been practically independent of the
- ↑ This is the idea of Dr. Asahel Grant, of the American Independent Board of Missions: The Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes, London, 1841.
