Oriental church. [113] In the Persian school of Edessa, [114] the
rising generations of the faithful imbibed their theological idiom: they
studied in the Syriac version the ten thousand volumes of Theodore of
Mopsuestia; and they revered the apostolic faith and holy martyrdom of
his disciple Nestorius, whose person and language were equally unknown
to the nations beyond the Tigris. The first indelible lesson of Ibas,
bishop of Edessa, taught them to execrate the Egyptians, who, in the
synod of Ephesus, had impiously confounded the two natures of Christ.
The flight of the masters and scholars, who were twice expelled from
the Athens of Syria, dispersed a crowd of missionaries inflamed by
the double zeal of religion and revenge. And the rigid unity of the
Monophysites, who, under the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius, had invaded
the thrones of the East, provoked their antagonists, in a land of
freedom, to avow a moral, rather than a physical, union of the two
persons of Christ. Since the first preaching of the gospel, the
Sassanian kings beheld with an eye of suspicion a race of aliens and
apostates, who had embraced the religion, and who might favor the cause,
of the hereditary foes of their country. The royal edicts had often
prohibited their dangerous correspondence with the Syrian clergy: the
progress of the schism was grateful to the jealous pride of Perozes, and
he listened to the eloquence of an artful prelate, who painted Nestorius
as the friend of Persia, and urged him to secure the fidelity of his
Christian subjects, by granting a just preference to the victims and
enemies of the Roman tyrant. The Nestorians composed a large majority of
the clergy and people: they were encouraged by the smile, and armed with
the sword, of despotism; yet many of their weaker brethren were startled
at the thought of breaking loose from the communion of the Christian
world, and the blood of seven thousand seven hundred Monophysites,
or Catholics, confirmed the uniformity of faith and discipline in
the churches of Persia. [115] Their ecclesiastical institutions are
distinguished by a liberal principle of reason, or at least of policy:
the austerity of the cloister was relaxed and gradually forgotten;
houses of charity were endowed for the education of orphans and
foundlings; the law of celibacy, so forcibly recommended to the Greeks
and Latins, was disregarded by the Persian clergy; and the number of
the elect was multiplied by the publ