it was proposed that we should make all the necessary arrangements for our further journey eastward.
Here we were welcomed by the Rev. Horatio Southgate, a missionary of the American Episcopal Church, who had been sent out originally to labour among the Mohammedans of Persia; but who was now directing his efforts to the amelioration of the spiritual condition of the Jacobites. Mutran Behnâm, the Jacobite Bishop of Mosul, was residing at his house, and from him, as well as from our kind host, I learned much of the state of the Christians in Mesopotamia. He had been sent to the capital by his Patriarch, to use all his influence with the Porte, for the restoration to their community of several churches and church lands in the districts of Diarbekir and Mosul, which had been seized upon by the dissenters from their body, who had submitted to the see of Home. This work of proselytism commenced in Aleppo, towards the end of the 17th century, and gradually extended to other parts of Syria and Mesopotamia, fostered as it was by the consular agents of France, and abetted and protected by their ambassadors at Constantinople. The result of this powerful co-operation on the part of a foreign power, which laid claim to a protectorate over all the adherents of the Pope in the Turkish empire, was the alienation or division of many of their churches and church property, and the consequent depression and impoverishment of the parent body. The venality of the Turkish ministers had over and over again been bribed by the two contending parties to annul their preceding decrees; but up to this time the seceders had triumphed, and the Jacobite Patriarch was now, through his representative, seeking to obtain a reversal of the imperial order, which gave his adversaries the partial possession of the churches originally under the jurisdiction of his predecessors.
The question herein involved must be viewed apart from the doctrinal orthodoxy or heterodoxy of the two communities, with which it has no direct concern; and when so regarded, there can be little doubt, that the decree which confirmed to the seceders the possession of their spoil was a palpable injustice, perpetrated by the strong towards the weak, in defiance of all right and precedent. In other instances of late occurrence, the Porte
