missionaries had made little progress among the Armenians, but they have since succeeded, chiefly, I regret to say, through the influence of England, in getting their proselytes to be recognised by the Porte as a separate sect called "Protestants," and the number of their adherents from the same community is said to be increasing, especially in Aintâb near Aleppo, and in other places. Here, then, we see the ultimate result of their plans, though they have loudly affirmed that it was not their design to create schism. However sincerely such assertions were made, they must at once be regarded as puerile in the extreme; since professing, as they do, to reject such doctrines as the mysterious efficacy of the sacraments, episcopacy, the use of a ritual, appointed festivals and fasts, and to hold in the place of these the unlimited right of every individual to choose his own creed from the Holy Scriptures, they are bound in all honesty to teach that the former are errors or irrelevant to salvation, and that the latter is the safer and more excellent way. And can it be supposed that proselytes to these views would themselves remain, or be permitted by their clergy to remain, in communion with their native Churches?
But if the principles of dissent are unscriptural, so are they also opposed to the genius and sympathies of the oriental mind. Up to the present time, no one form of republicanism in religion has ever arisen in the East; and I am fully persuaded that the present partial success of the Independents will be ephemeral, or lead eventually to the spread of a pernicious rationalism wherever their tenets meet with acceptance. They may succeed in spreading abroad a vast amount of secular knowledge through the medium of their schools, and may bring up many eastern youths to argue and to dispute, but the good, if any, will rest here. Trained like their masters, to respect no authority in matters of faith but their own individual judgment upon the text of Scripture, and united to each other by no other bond than that of a common rejection of some of the errors of their parent Churches, the proselytes can never exist in a compact community, exhibit the outward order and life of a branch of the heavenly vine, or "grow up into Him in all things which is the Head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted, by that which every joint supplieth,
