THE NESTORIANS.
1836-1840.
The two missionaries and priest Abraham narrowly escaped
assassination by ruffians of a class called Lootee, while on a visit
to the village of Mar Joseph. Walking quietly through the village
they encountered three of these fellows, in a narrow path lined by a
hedge, with a horse placed across to obstruct their progress. Priest
Abraham stepped forward, and was mildly requesting them to allow his
party to pass, when one raised his dagger to strike him. Seeing the
defenseless priest in peril, Mr. Perkins instinctively sprang
forward, and the assassin turned upon him. Nothing but his fall at
the moment the weapon struck him, saved him from instant death. As
it was, the dagger cut through his clothes, and punctured his side.
Seeing his associates thus hard beset, Dr. Grant, who was behind,
ran up and brought his riding whip with such force across the
villain's eyes, as to confuse him for the moment, and in the
confusion the party ran into a house and barred the doors. The
priest received a cut in the head, but Mr. Perkins was not seriously
wounded. Through the efforts of the British ambassador, the Lootee
received so severe a chastisement from the Persian authorities, as
made them careful, ever after, how they injured any member of the
mission.
A printing establishment was much needed; and a press was sent with
the Rev. Albert L. Holliday and Mr. William R. Stocking, who sailed
from Boston in January, 1837. At Trebizond, the press was found too
unwieldy to be carried overland, and was accordingly sent back to
Constantinople and sold to the Armenians, for their high-school at
Scutari. The new missionaries were met at Erzroom by Mr. Perkins and
Mar Yohannan, and reached their destination in June. Mr. Holliday
found the encouragement to labor quite as great as had been
represented by the brethren first in the field.
The extreme poverty of the Nestorians had the same effect on the
first missionaries, that like causes have had in some other portions
of the unevangelized world. It caused the whole expense of schools
and of the agency employed to be thrown upon the Christian public at
home. The board of the fifty scholars in the seminary was paid by
the mission, and people in the villages thought they could not
afford to send their children to the village schools, unless each of
them was paid two or three cents a day to buy their bread. They said
their children could earn as much by weeding the cotton, or driving
the oxen; and the brethren naturally rejoiced in being able to
afford this aid. Among the students of the seminary at this time,
were two bishops, three priests, and four deacons, who of course
were adults. Pupils in the first rudiments of their own language
received twelve and a half cents a week for their support, and the
more advanced received twenty-five cents. Experience was as needful
to discover the best methods of missionary labor, as of any other
untried undertaking.
The mission now had eight native helpers, among whom were three
bishops and two priests, all, except one, residing with the mission.
That one was the venerable Mar Elias, the oldest bishop in the
province, who superintended one of the schools. He had adopted the
practice of translating portions of the Epistles, which he read
statedly in his church. Some of the people were much delighted with
the innovation; but others, and a profligate priest among them,
complained that he annoyed them with the precepts of "Paul, Paul,
Paul," of whom they had scarcely ever heard before. But the good
bishop did not regard the opposition.
Mrs. Grant was the first member of the mission, called away by
death. She had been thoroughly educated, and the two bishops in her
family wondered to see a woman learning Syriac through the Latin
language. Nor was their wonder less when she turned to the Greek for
the meaning of some difficult passage in the New Testament. Finding
the prejudices of the people too strong to permit her to begin a
girls' school at once, she taught her own female domestics to read,
and then sought to interest mothers in the education of their
daughters. At length she succeeded in collecting a small school of
girls, of which she was the first teacher. When too sick to leave
her chamber, she had the pupils assemble there. This was the
beginning of the Female Seminary, which afterwards became so noted
under Miss Fiske. It was commenced March 12, 1838, with four pupils,
but the number soon increased, and Mrs. Perkins rendered valuable
aid. Mrs. Grant readily learned to speak the Turkish, and to read
the ancient Syriac. The modern Syriac she was able both to read and
write, and the French she could speak before leaving home. But,
cultured and refined as she was, she declared the time spent in the
mission field among that rude people, to have been the happiest part
of her life. The aid she rendered her husband in his medical
practice, added not a little to her usefulness. She had great
aptness and skill in the sick chamber, and like her divine Master
went about doing good; yet without neglecting her household affairs.
Her death occurred on the 14th of January, 1839, at the age of
twenty-five. She was greatly lamented by the Nestorians. The bishops
said to the afflicted husband, "We will bury her in the church,
where none but holy men are buried;" and her death produced a
subdued and tender spirit throughout the large circle of her
acquaintance. This better state of feeling continued through the
year, especially in the seminary.
Priest Dunka, from one of the independent tribes, gave indications
of piety. He had learned the alphabet in his childhood, while
tending his father's flocks on the mountains, and became a reader
without farther instruction. At Oroomiah he was now both a learner
and helper. Three months of the summer he spent among his native
mountains, preaching the Gospel in the villages around his home.
Little of the truth had been heard there for ages, except in the
unknown language of the liturgy, but the people were eager to
listen.
In September, Robert Glen, son of the Rev. William Glen of Tabriz, was
hopefully converted while at Oroomiah on a visit. He was born at
Astrakhan, where his father labored seventeen years as a missionary,
and was now employed as a teacher in a small school of Moslem young
men. The mission at this time had twelve schools in as many villages,
containing two hundred and seventy-two males, with twenty-two females;
and seventeen pupils in the female boarding-school, and fifty-five in
the seminary, which was taught by a priest and deacon, under the
supervision of Mr. Stocking.
The scarcity of copies of the Holy Scriptures among the Nestorian
people would be remarkable, in view of their receiving them as their
rule of faith and practice, if we did not remember how sorely they
had been persecuted in the past, and how much they still suffered
from Moslem oppression. Excepting the Psalms, which entered largely
into the prescribed form of worship, they had but one copy of the
Old Testament, and that was in a number of volumes, the property of
several individuals. The British and Foreign Bible Society had
printed the Gospels in the Nestorian character; but they had
scarcely more than a single copy of the Acts of the Apostles and the
Epistles, and none of the Book of Revelation, in their own
character. Of course all was in the ancient language.
Dr. Grant had been suffering for some time before the death of his
wife, from the climate of the plain; and he was now instructed by
his Committee to commence a station, if possible, among the
Nestorians on the western side of the Koordish mountains. Incapable
of fear, he had vainly sought the consent of his brethren to
penetrate the mountains directly from the plain. It was the belief
of the Committee that, with his medical skill and his courage and
address, he could do this with safety; but the brethren of the
mission had been so impressed by the murder of Mr. Schultz, on that
route, that they could not consent; and the opinions of brethren on
the ground were not to be disregarded. He was, however, authorized
to enter the mountains from the west, in the belief that, once
established there, he would soon find his way opened on every side.
On the first of April, 1839, Dr. Grant left Oroomiah, expecting to
meet Mr. Homes at Erzroom, who had been appointed to accompany him.
An unusually late fall of snow made the journey perilous. For more
than two hundred miles, it was from two to four feet deep; and for
twenty miles, in the mountains beyond Ararat, there was not a single
human habitation. In descending, the only way he could know when he
was out of the path, was by the depth to which he sank in the snow.
In the pass of Dahar, near the sources of the Euphrates, where
Messrs. Smith and Dwight had well-nigh perished, the guide lost the
path in a snow-storm, and declared it impossible to go on. The snow
was too deep for the horses. Turning back was out of the question,
as their tracks were obliterated by the wind, which would then be in
their faces. Though benumbed and feeble, the courage of Dr. Grant
did not fail. He could not tell how deliverance would come, but had
a sweet assurance that God would send it, and encouraged his
companions to new effort. Just then four mountaineers came tramping
over the snow before them, and one of them consenting to turn back,
they passed safely on foot, the man breaking down the drifts for the
horses, and exploring the path by thrusting his long staff deep into
the snow. He reached Erzroom on the seventeenth, and rested with his
kind friend Dr. Riach, who had retired from Teheran, because of
impending war between England and Persia. Dr. Grant's health had
improved amid all his hardships.
Learning that Mr. Homes was detained at Constantinople, he started
for Trebizond on the eighteenth, with no attendant except the
surijee from the post-house, and there took a steamer for
Constantinople. Mr. Homes not being yet able to accompany him, he
returned alone to Erzroom, and proceeded thence to Diarbekir, where
he arrived May 30. He found the city waiting in suspense for news
from the battle of Nizib, between the forces of Mohammed Ali and the
Sultan. The defeat of the latter was soon manifest in the arrival of
hundreds of fugitives, completely stripped by the Koords. Anarchy
reigned from that moment, and the city was filled with robbery and
murder. The people ascribed their defeat to Frank innovations in
military tactics; and when Mr. Homes arrived, the brethren not only
heard curses against themselves in the streets, but an openly
expressed purpose to kill every European in the place. The
thermometer was then 98 in the shade, and their danger from both
climate and people induced them to leave for Mardin, which they did
with an escort of thirty horsemen. Such was their personal danger
even at Mardin, only a few days after their arrival, that the
governor offered them a guard. This they declined, not thinking it
best to manifest any alarm, and the excitement soon apparently died
away. But, two months later, a mob killed the governor in his palace
in open day, and also several leading men, and then sought the
lodgings of the missionaries, intending to kill them. Providentially
they had ridden out farther than usual that morning, in a vain
search for a caravan, and before their return, the Koords had shut
the gates, to prevent the entrance of government troops. That saved
the lives of our brethren, who retired to the convent of the Syrian
Patriarch, a few miles distant, which their enemies did not dare to
attack.
In the midst of so much peril, and with so little hope of
usefulness, Mr. Homes, by the advice of brethren at Constantinople
and Smyrna, resolved to return, and Dr. Grant did not withhold his
consent. "Within the ruined walls of an ancient church," he writes,
"in a lonely ravine, overlooked by the town, I exchanged the parting
embrace with my brother and companion in tribulation. On account of
the anarchy around us, we had travelled together barely two days,
but on a bed of sickness, and surrounded by men of blood, I had
learned to prize the company of a Christian friend. Yet, while
Providence called him back to Constantinople, to me it seemed to
cry, 'Onward to the mountains!'"
Dr. Grant resolved to go to Mosul. Disguised in an Oriental dress,
he returned to Mardin to prepare for his journey, and while there,
his safety was insured by the surrender of the town to the Pasha of
Mosul. On his way, he was favored with the company of Captain
Conolly, the bearer of despatches for India, whose sad fate on the
banks of the Oxus afterwards occasioned the journey of Dr. Wolff to
Bokhara. The distance was nearly two hundred miles, and they arrived
at Mosul on the 20th of September.
Fully resolved to penetrate the fastnesses of Koordistan, and
trusting in the protecting power of his gracious Lord, Dr. Grant
left Mosul on the 7th of October, with two Nestorians from Persia, a
Koordish muleteer, and a kavass from the Pasha. Crossing the bridge
of twenty-one boats, which spans the Tigris, he was amid the ruins
of Nineveh, and soon reached a Yezidee village, where he was
hospitably received. On the 15th, as he approached Duree, near the
borders of Tiary, deep Syriac gutturals from stentorian voices in
the rocks above him demanded who he was, where he was going, and
what he wanted. Had he been a Papist, he would have been robbed; as
it was, the frightened kavass lost all courage, and begged
permission to return.
When the people heard him speak their own language, they gathered
around, and welcomed him to their mountain home. His fame as a
physician had preceded him, and they came for medicine from all
directions. The venerable bishop, with a long white beard, took him
into their ancient church, which was a cave high up on the mountain
side, with heavy masonry in front, and dark within. Here the bishop
slept, to be in readiness for early morning prayers, and he was
pleased with the gift of a box of matches to light his lamp.
A loftier range still separated Dr. Grant from Tiary, the "munition
of rocks," which he describes as "an amphitheatre of mountains
broken with dark, deep defiles and narrow glens, that for ages had
been the secure abodes of this branch of the Christian Church." He
had been warned at Mosul, not to enter this region without an escort
from the Patriarch. But he could not afford the delay, and as the
bishop encouraged him, he resolved to go alone. Exchanging his
Turkish boots for the bishop's sandals, made of hair, to avoid a
fatal slip on the smooth, narrow ledges of the mountain, he set off
early on the 18th. An hour and a half brought him to the summit.
Retiring to a sequestered corner, where he could feast his eyes with
the prospect, his thoughts went back to the period when the
Nestorians traversed Asia, and, for more than a thousand years,
preached the Gospel in Tartary, Mongolia, and China. Though the
flame of vital piety was almost quenched on their altars, his faith
anticipated the day when those glens would reëcho the glad praises
of God; and down he sped, over cliffs and slippery ledges, to the
large village of Lezan, on the banks of the noisy Zab. Scarcely had
he entered it, when a young man, the only one he had ever seen from
this remote region, from whose eyes he had removed a cataract a year
before, came with a present of honey, and introduced him at once to
the confidence of the people. He became so thronged with the sick
from all the region, that he had to forbid more than three or four
coming forward at once.
Leaving Lezan, he went up to Ashita, where he became the guest of a
priest, reported to be the most learned of living Nestorians, who
had spent twenty years in copying, in beautiful style, the few works
of Nestorian literature; but even he had not an entire Bible. He was
electrified by Dr. Grant's account of the press, that could do his
twenty years' work in a less number of hours. At Kerme, where he
arrived on the twenty-fifth, almost exhausted by a walk of ten long
hours, he was soon recognized and welcomed by a Nestorian, who had
received medical aid from him two years before at Oroomiah. Starting
the next morning for the Patriarch's residence, he forded a river on
horseback, that was fifty or sixty yards across. He was now on the
caravan road from Salmas to Julamerk. In the more precipitous
places, the rock had been cut away and regular steps chiseled out.
He was received by the Patriarch with great cordiality, without the
extravagant compliments so common with the Persians. "And now," said
the Patriarch, "you will make my house your own, and regard me as
your older brother." Mar Shimon was thirty-eight years old, above
the middle stature, well-proportioned, with a pleasant, expressive,
and rather intelligent countenance; and his large flowing robes, his
Koordish turban, and his long gray beard, gave him a patriarchal and
venerable appearance, that was heightened by a uniformly dignified
demeanor. But for the fire in his eye and his activity, he would
have been thought nearer fifty than thirty-eight. Being the temporal
as well as spiritual head of his people, the difficulties of his
situation were assigned as the cause of his hoary hair and beard.
During the five weeks spent in the patriarchal mansion, Dr. Grant
had an opportunity to see Nestorians of intelligence and influence
from all parts of the mountains, and elicited from them information
such as he could not have gained in any other way. At parting, the
Patriarch presented him one of the ancient manuscripts of his
library. It was the New Testament, written on parchment, in the old
Estrangelo character, seven hundred and forty years before. It was
presented by Dr. Grant to the library of the American Board, and is
now there.
His next sojourn was in the castle of Nûrûllah Bey, chief of the
independent Hakary Koords, two days from the residence of the
Patriarch. The Bey was very sick; and becoming impatient under the
slow operation of the medicine given him by the doctor, he sent a
messenger for him at midnight. "The sentinels upon the ramparts,"
says Dr. Grant, "were sounding the watch-cry in the rough tones of
their native Koordish. We entered the outer court through wide,
iron-cased folding-doors. A second iron door opened into a long dark
alley, which conducted to the room where the chief was lying. It was
evident that he was becoming impatient; and as I looked upon the
swords, pistols, guns, spears, and daggers--the ordinary furniture
of a Koordish castle--which hung around the walls of the room, I
could not but think of the fate of the unfortunate Schultz, who had
fallen, as it is said, by the orders of this sanguinary chief. He
had the power of life and death in his hands. I knew I was entirely
at his mercy; but I felt that I was under the guardian care of One,
who had the hearts of kings in His keeping."
The chieftain recovered, and, in token of his gratitude, made his
benefactor the present of a horse. Dr. Grant describes him as a man
of noble bearing, fine open countenance, and about thirty years of
age. This important journey was completed on the 7th of December,
1839.
The Rev. Willard Jones and wife arrived in the month previous; and
the Rev. Austin H. Wright, M. D., and wife, in the following July,
to take Dr. Grant's place as missionary physician; and Mr. Edward
Breath, a printer, in November. A press, made for the mission, to be
taken to pieces and so rendered portable, came with the printer,
much to the satisfaction of the people. A font of Syro-Chaldaic type
had previously been received from London, through the kindness of
the Rev. Joseph Jowett, editorial superintendent of the British and
Foreign Bible Society's publications. The press was the more
seasonable, because the Jesuits had commenced their characteristic
and determined efforts to get possession of the field. The vain
young bishop, Mar Gabriel, imagining himself to have been slighted
by his clerical brethren, and being strongly assailed with
flatteries and offers of money, had, in an evil hour, encouraged
them to come among his people. On reflection he repented of his
rashness, called in the aid of his Protestant friends, and wrote to
Boré, the French Jesuit, warning him to keep aloof from his people.
Boré was enraged, and replied that, having a firman from the King of
Persia permitting him to open schools, he should open one at
Ardishai. But Gabriel and the mission had already opened a school
under one of the best teachers from the Seminary, and soon opened
another,--the two containing sixty scholars; while the Jesuit's
school, commencing with nine scholars, dwindled to four or five. One
of the first works of the press was to print a tract in the Syriac
language, entitled "Twenty-two Plain Reasons for not being a Roman
Catholic." The Nestorians were exceedingly interested by the array
of Scripture texts against the corrupt doctrines and practices of
that sect. This was followed by a thousand copies of the Psalms.
The gradual revival of preaching in this ancient Church, became now
apparent. At the earnest request of the people, a circuit was formed
of seven preaching stations, at all of which the missionaries were
aided by ecclesiastics, three of them bishops.
Thus, with the hearty approval of both bishops and priests, the
missionaries began to preach in the churches, and so great was the
demand for preaching that Mr. Stocking was ordained. The ordination
took place in one of the Nestorian churches. Mr. Perkins felt that
spiritual death, rather than theological error, was the calamity of
the Nestorians. Their liturgy was composed, in general, of
unexceptionable and excellent matter, and the charge of heresy on
the subject of Christ's character, he pronounces unjust. The Nicene
Creed, which they always repeat at the close of their worship,
accords very nearly with that venerable document, as it has been
handed down to us.1
1 Annual Report of the Board for 1841, p. 114.