fault of these pious mountaineers is a tendency to assure promiscuous Protestant visitors that at bottom they agree with them on all sorts of points. As so often happens, the danger of Roman propaganda, their fear and dislike of the Uniates, leads them to welcome alliance with anyone who is against the Pope, who assures them that he seeks not to turn them into enslaved Chaldees.
4. Nestorian Rites
Their rites and liturgy are perhaps the most interesting thing about the Nestorians. Certainly most of the interest which the West takes in this obscure little sect is because of its liturgy. For these people in their remote mountains still keep and use one of the great historic rites of Christendom.
The East Syrian rite evolved in Edessa before the 4th century. Saint Ephrem used and quotes it.[1] The Syriac (Jacobite) poet James of Srug († 521)[2] and Philoxenos of Hierapolis († 523)[3] gave further information about the East Syrian rite of their time. Two fragments written in the 6th century in a Coptic monastery in Egypt (now in the British Museum) show an unexpected use of what is fundamentally the East Syrian rite in that country,[4] apparently by Nestorian colonies (p. 104).
The origin of this rite is much discussed. Liturgies are not composed as original works at some definite date; a new rite does not suddenly spring out of nothing. Their development is always gradual modification from an earlier form, till we come back to the original rite, fluid in details but uniform in type, of the first three centuries.[5] If we suppose the generally admitted principle that the origin of all Eastern rites is either Antioch or Alexandria,
- ↑ See Probst: Liturgie des 4ten Jahrhunderts (Munster, 1893), pp. 308–318.
- ↑ Bishop of Batnan (Duval: Littérature syriaque, 352–356).
- ↑ Also an ardent Jacobite. His name in Syriac is Aḳsnâyâ (Xenaias, see Duval: ib. 356–358). Hierapolis is Syriac Mabug, Arabic Manbiǵ, on the Euphrates.
- ↑ A list of later writers from whom information about this rite may be gathered will be found in Brightman: Eastern Liturgies, pp. lxxx–lxxxi.
- ↑ Liturgies develop by modification as do languages. They too have dialects and groups of related forms. See Fortescue: The Mass (Longmans, 1912), chaps. i.–ii.
