kill an animal for food in the name of God the Most Merciful, and it would have been well if in that name they had only cut the throats of animals and not of men also. In the eighth century canons were made for the Armenian Church forbidding animals to be actually slaughtered in the church, but allowing the priests to accept their tit-bits and portions as before.

It is perhaps more than a coincidence, that in the last decades of the third century, when Christianity was beginning to spread over Asia, there was a revival also of the old Persian or Magic religion. With the advent of a Sassanide dynasty in Persia this revival took place; and there forthwith ensued a death struggle between the fire-worship and the Christian religion, from the Persian Gulf up to the very sources of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. In Armenia, after a stubborn struggle, Christianity prevailed; but in Persia Magism got the upper hand. The custom of exposing the dead to be devoured by birds now came to be enforced upon every one, whereas it had hitherto been confined to the magi or priest caste. At the same time the cumbrous ceremonial of priestly purification was enforced upon the whole people. But it was too great a burden to bear. And it was not many centuries before the Persians themselves sought refuge from the righteousness of the Magi in Muhammadanism, a religion at once simpler and more elevated in its conceptions of things divine. The mild theism of the Parsees of Bombay is the only form in which the Magism of the Sassanide epoch to-day survives.

Elisæus the teacher, an Armenian writer whose style is not unworthy of the great events which he relates, has preserved for us many moving pictures of the fierce persecutions of Armenian Christians which were instigated by the Magi in the fifth century.

These Persian persecutions were, like those inflicted by Rome, as much political as religious, and were designed to detach the Armenians from the Greek alliance. In the person of Constantine, Christianity for the first time in history sat on the throne of the Cæsars and became the official religion of the Empire. Hence the Persian National party, who had triumphed in the accession to the throne of the Sassanides, regarded Christianity as Greek in its sympathies, and determined to put it down. Thus we read of edicts issued by the Persian kings forbidding to the Armenians the use of Greek books. But Christianity was really far from Hellenizing the Armenians; on the contrary, it was the occasion of their founding a vernacular literature written in an alphabet of their own. Armenian literature begins with their conversion to Christianity. Under Gregory and his immediate successors they seem to have translated chiefly from Syriac books; but during the fifth century they translated Greek books. Scholars were sent abroad, to Athens and Antioch and Alexandria, to collect the leading works of Greek divines and translate them into Armenian, and these works survive as models of style and purity of diction to the present day. It is only to be regretted that they translated exclusively those writers, like Chrysostom

and the Basils, who were in vogue in the fifth century, to the neglect of the great writers and thinkers of previous generations. We could well spare a translation even of Chrysostom, if we had instead versions of Clement and Origen. Naturally, however, they chose the fashionable preachers of the day. It is more lamentable that they should have translated great writers like Nestorius and Theodore of Mopsuestia, but have afterwards destroyed them, because they were heretical. I fear that the Armenians had not the virtue of tolerance in the fourth and fifth any more than in succeeding centuries. Thus we read that Mesrop undertook to beat down the bold and insolent sect of the "muddy ones," that is, of the Nestorians, who were preaching their tenets in Armenia. These poor heretics were given over to the most terrible tortures. "When" adds Mesrop's biographer, "in spite of torment and imprisonment, these men, hated of God, refused to walk in the way of salvation, they were burnt alive or chased with ignominy from the country." This was in the fifth century, when the Persian persecution was raging. It is evident that the uses of adversity were lost upon the Armenians of that day.

The invention of the Armenian alphabet marks a new epoch in the life of the Armenian people. It came of the want of a special character which would render all the sounds of their language, as the Greek and Syriac alphabets failed to do. The Bible and the liturgical books of the Greeks and Assyrians were the first to be translated, and written out in the Armenian character, and these versions really created the literary language of Armenia, in which were written forthwith a great number of historical and theological works. This literary outburst may be compared to that which took place in the sixteenth century in Germany, when Luther, by translating the Bible into German, created literary German language such as it is until to-day. In the same way Armenian literature, once created, kept alive the National spirit and became its guardian and vehicle, preserving its life against the alien conquerors who overran their land, but found themselves unable to impose their language or their religious books. In converting Armenia to Christianity, Gregory the Illuminator had but added one to the many pretexts of war which the neighbours of Armenia had against her; but the discovery, or rather invention by Mesrop of a peculiar alphabet prevented the national spirit from being lost, and entrenched it for ever n an impregnable fortress.1

But the Christian religion, even if it purified manners and religious conLeptions for the Armenians, and gave them a literature which has ever since been the safe-guard and vehicle of the expression of their national spirit, brought also political ruin upon them. More than before, the Armenian kings became the creatures alternately of Greek and Persian despots. Horde after horde of Huns and other barbarians overran their land, burned their cities, and pillaged their churches; and the Armenians paid tribute first to one and then to another conqueror, often to two at

1 Cp. Geyterias "Arménie et les Arméniens."

once.

But amid these convulsions, while the old kingship disappears, a new power for the people to look to and gather round emerges, namely the Patriarchy. The discredit into which royal power sank more and more, owing to the incapacity and debauchery of the princes, intensified the national respect for the office of Patriarch. This office had always remained in the family of St. Gregory as long as there were any members surviving of that family; and the men who held that office were careful, while spreading Christianity, to gather into their own hands the moral authority which the Kingship was day by day losing. Consequently, when Armenia as a political State fell to pieces, it was around the Patriarch that the population rallied, for the national religion remained the only bond which could unite districts of their country separated from one another by long distances, by clashing interests, and often governed by different masters.1

This explains why the Armenians have been so prone to identify their race with their religion, to deny the virtue of patriotism to all who have left on conscientious grounds the old Church of Gregory the Illuminator, and attached themselves either to the Roman Catholics or to Protestant sects. The complaint is always the same, that missions, whether of the Pope or of the American Protestants, denationalize the Armenians. I do not believe myself that the complaint is well-grounded, or that the Armenians who have joined other confessions are in any way behindhand in their aspirations for the future welfare of the race.

In the Eastern Church much activity was wasted in the fourth and fifth centuries in defining dogmatically the metaphysical relationship of the Second to the First Person of the Trinity; and although the Greek tongue failed to spread in Armenia, yet these baneful speculations excited interest there, and occasioned much heart-burning and persecution. The Armenians sent a son of Gregory named Aristaces to take part in the great council of Nice, in the year 325, when the opinions of Arius were in dispute. They attended the Council of Constantinople in 381 and of Ephesus in 431, and these three Councils they recognised. The issue at Ephesus in 431 was, whether Nestorius kept properly distinct the two natures in Christ, which, according to the Orthodox view, it was important not to confuse. Nestorius held that in Christ the Divine swallows up and absorbs the human character. The Orthodox admitted that Christ was without sin; but Nestorius went further, and in holding that Christ's body was freed from the limitations of time and space, was incomprehensible and not to be delineated or in any way imaged, fell into the damnable error of Monophysitism. It was Nestorius who led one side in the stormy Council at Ephesus; and St. Cyril of Alexandria, the coarse and brutal murderer of Hypatia, led the other side. Needless to say, it was his view which triumphed. But this Council was the occasion of the separation from the Greek of that Nestorian Church whose missionaries carried Christi

1 I borrow these remarks from Geyterias.

anity into Siberia and into China by land, and into the south of India by sea. In Armenia, as I have already mentioned, Nestorius had his following, which was however crushed out by the persecuting spirit of the Armenians themselves. But the turn of the Armenians came before long. They too were to become heretics in the year 451 A.D., when the Fourth general Council of the Church was held at Chalcedon, and Eutyches was condemned for what seems to us now-a-days a microscopic error. It appears that the Armenians, although they afterwards agreed with the controversial results arrived at in this Council, were not well represented at it, and were deceived by news brought to them, that in the Council of Chalcedon the Greeks had relapsed into the Nestorian errors condemned in 431 at Ephesus. The Armenian Patriarch accordingly convened a Council in the year 491 at Valarshapat, and anathematized the Council of Chalcedon. Subsequently they discovered their mistake, and to-day they anathematize Eutyches no less than do the Greeks. But amour propre has prevented them from ever joining again with the Greek Orthodox Church. Even under Basil, in the fourth century, we hear that there were quarrels at Cæsarea between the Greek and Armenian students of theology. The feeling of dislike steadily grew; and the establishment of a separate Armenian era in the year 551 marks the final rupture of the Armenian with the Greek Church.

At this point, therefore, we may fitly summarize the peculiarities which mark off the Armenian from other Churches; and I must assume that my

hearers are familiar with the main outlines of the Christian system, as presented by the Greek, or Latin, or English Church. Firstly, as to the plan of the fabric. An Armenian church is usually an oblong building1 which assumes internally a cruciform shape by reason of there being in each corner an oblong or square cell, of which the walls are carried up to the roof, so that it only communicates with the general interior through a low arched door. The general interior is thus divided into four arms roofed by four gables; but over the middle of the building, where the gables converge, is a round or polygonal tower, admitting light to the church through its windows, and surmounted by a flattened form of steeple. Dr. Neale's description of the general type of a Byzantine church, "as a gabled Greek cross, with central dome, inscribed in a square or quasi-square," suits an Armenian or Georgian church equally well. Entering the western gate of the church, one stands in what was called the narthex, or part of the building reserved for penitents and catechumens, and one is flanked on either hand by the walled-up cells already mentioned. The narthex is usually separated from the space under the dome by a railing, which is often carried also along the inner edges of the transepts, so as to mark off the space under the tower, which answers to our nave and chancel both at once. Advancing a few steps, one finds oneself under the tower or dome, with a north and south transept on the left and right hands. These transepts are very stunted in length, and would hardly be recognised for transepts, as they do not project externally beyond the fabric, and in this respect differ from the transepts of an European church. Standing and looking eastward, one is faced by an apsidal recess opening between the two corner cells already mentioned. The floor of this recess is railed off, raised by steps from the rest of the church, and in the middle of it stands the altar. There is an arrangement for drawing a curtain across the front of the recess, so as to screen the altar from the congregation. This apsidal recess is in Armenia called the bem, from the Greek word bema, which in old days meant the pulpit from which the orator addressed the Greek ecclesia, or parliament. The Armenian word for church, "egheghetzi," is itself a corruption of the word ecclesia. The corner cell to the left of the bēm is in a Greek church called the prothesis, or place of exposing the bread and wine to be consecrated for the Communion. The cell on the right is in Greek called the diaconicon, or chamber for the deacons. In a Greek church they both open directly into the bēma, but in an Armenian church into the transepts only, so that the priest and deacon, when they are going to celebrate the Communion, must bring the bread down out of the prothesis into the transept, round the massive column which rises to left of the bēma and helps to support the tower, and then up the steps of the bēma, before it can be laid on the altar. On this altar lies a copy of the gospels, usually a manuscript, and often very ancient. The altar, or sacred table, stands in the middle of the bēma, so that the priests and deacons can walk round it, which they often do, the

See Woodcuts.