s, they recommended humanity and repose. Yet a khan,
whose power they vainly magnified, is said to have received at their
hands the rites of baptism, and even of ordination; and the fame of
Prester or Presbyter John [117] has long amused the credulity of Europe.
The royal convert was indulged in the use of a portable altar; but he
despatched an embassy to the patriarch, to inquire how, in the season of
Lent, he should abstain from animal food, and how he might celebrate
the Eucharist in a desert that produced neither corn nor wine. In their
progress by sea and land, the Nestorians entered China by the port of
Canton and the northern residence of Sigan. Unlike the senators of
Rome, who assumed with a smile the characters of priests and augurs, the
mandarins, who affect in public the reason of philosophers, are devoted
in private to every mode of popular superstition. They cherished and
they confounded the gods of Palestine and of India; but the propagation
of Christianity awakened the jealousy of the state, and, after a short
vicissitude of favor and persecution, the foreign sect expired in
ignorance and oblivion. [118] Under the reign of the caliphs, the
Nestorian church was diffused from China to Jerusalem and Cyrus; and
their numbers, with those of the Jacobites, were computed to surpass
the Greek and Latin communions. [119] Twenty-five metropolitans
or archbishops composed their hierarchy; but several of these were
dispensed, by the distance and danger of the way, from the duty of
personal attendance, on the easy condition that every six years they
should testify their faith and obedience to the catholic or patriarch of
Babylon, a vague appellation which has been successively applied to the
royal seats of Seleucia, Ctesiphon, and Bagdad. These remote branches
are long since withered; and the old patriarchal trunk [120] is now
divided by the Elijahs of Mosul, the representatives almost on lineal
descent of the genuine and primitive succession; the Josephs of Amida,
who are reconciled to the church of Rome: [121] and the Simeons of Van
or Ormia, whose revolt, at the head of forty thousand families, was
promoted in the sixteenth century by the Sophis of Persia. The number of
three hundred thousand is allowed for the whole body of the Nestorians,
who, under the name of Chaldeans or Assyrians, are confounded with the
most learned or the most powerful nation of Eastern antiquity.

[Footnote 116: See the Topographia Christia