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It now appears to be admitted, that there really was such a potentate in a remote part of Asia. He was of the Nestorian Christians, a sect spread throughout Asia, and taking its name and origin from Nestorius, a Christian patriarch of Constantinople.
The divine worked miracles; the human suffered. The Nestorian could pride himself on having preserved the reality of the divine and the reality of the human; he could worship the one and imitate the other. But his system was non-Christian, because it excludes the element of mediation. A dual personality could never make atonement or redeem humanity.
The people were affected, not as in former years with the overwhelming convictions of the law, but with a deep and intelligent persuasion of the claims of truth. Perhaps the most distinguished among the Nestorian laborers, at this time, next to priest Abraham, was deacon John.
The Christian missionaries were still more active and successful: the Catholics asserted their universal reign; the sects whom they oppressed, successively retired beyond the limits of the Roman empire; the Marcionites and Manichæans dispersed their fantastic opinions and apocryphal gospels; the churches of Yemen, and the princes of Hira and Gassan, were instructed in a purer creed by the Jacobite and Nestorian bishops.
The Nestorian and Jacobite Christians of Mossul have the most beautiful churches I have seen in Turkey, but they are living in discord and hatred.
"They have rolls or cylinders inscribed with their prayers, which they twirl round on an axis, continually pronouncing these mystic words, and they believe that all the prayers on these rolls are virtually pronounced at each turn of the roll; The religion of the Dalai-Lama, is a branch of the Shamanian and Braminical superstitions, and has for its foundation the Manichaean doctrine of the two principles, which Manes attempted to incorporate into the Christian religion, so that it is no wonder the practices of the followers of the Dalai-Lama should resemble those of the Manichaean and Nestorian Christians."
Away went one to find the pure Nestorian Church that was said to exist in India, got as far as Antioch, Jerusalem and Egypt, and, being misled somehow by a Jew, returned home with the wonderful notion that the River Nile flowed from the Garden of Eden, but with no more knowledge of the Church in India than when he first set out.
While the state was exhausted by the Persian war, and the church was distracted by the Nestorian and Monophysite sects, Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.
How mayst thou hope to say such direful words against the Son of Heaven and live?" "The Son of Heaven" is one of the chief titles of the Chinese emperor. "The Son of Heaven killed the emperor, my father," said the child. "The emperor thy father!" Thomas the Nestorian almost gasped in this latest surprise. "Is the girl crazed or doth she sport with one who seeketh her good?"
While I Marco was in Quinsai, an account was taken for the great khan, of the revenues, and the number of inhabitants, and I saw that there were enrolled 160 toman of fires, reckoning for each fire a family dwelling in one house. Each toman is 10,000, which makes 1,600,000 families ; and for all this population there is only one Nestorian church, all the rest being idolaters.
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