Читать книгу American Foreign Missions to the Oriental Churches (Vol. 1&2) - Rufus Anderson - Страница 18

Table of Contents

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.