121: The pompous language of Rome on the submission of a
Nestorian patriarch, is elegantly represented in the viith book of Fra
Paola, Babylon, Nineveh, Arbela, and the trophies of Alexander, Tauris,
and Ecbatana, the Tigris and Indus.]

According to the legend of antiquity, the gospel was preached in India
by St. Thomas. [122] At the end of the ninth century, his shrine,
perhaps in the neighborhood of Madras, was devoutly visited by the
ambassadors of Alfred; and their return with a cargo of pearls and
spices rewarded the zeal of the English monarch, who entertained the
largest projects of trade and discovery. [123] When the Portuguese first
opened the navigation of India, the Christians of St. Thomas had been
seated for ages on the coast of Malabar, and the difference of their
character and color attested the mixture of a foreign race. In arms, in
arts, and possibly in virtue, they excelled the natives of Hindostan;
the husbandmen cultivated the palm-tree, the merchants were enriched by
the pepper trade, the soldiers preceded the nairs or nobles of Malabar,
and their hereditary privileges were respected by the gratitude or the
fear of the king of Cochin and the Zamorin himself. They acknowledged a
Gentoo of sovereign, but they were governed, even in temporal concerns,
by the bishop of Angamala. He still asserted his ancient title of
metropolitan of India, but his real jurisdiction was exercised in
fourteen hundred churches, and he was intrusted with the care of two
hundred thousand souls. Their religion would have rendered them the
firmest and most cordial allies of the Portuguese; but the inquisitors
soon discerned in the Christians of St. Thomas the unpardonable guilt
of heresy and schism. Instead of owning themselves the subjects of the
Roman pontiff, the spiritual and temporal monarch of the globe, they
adhered, like their ancestors, to the communion of the Nestorian
patriarch; and the bishops whom he ordained at Mosul, traversed the
dangers of the sea and land to reach their diocese on the coast of
Malabar. In their Syriac liturgy the names of Theodore and Nestorius
were piously commemorated: they united their adoration of the two
persons of Christ; the title of Mother of God was offensive to their
ear, and they measured with scrupulous avarice the honors of the Virgin
Mary, whom the superstition of the Latins had almost exalted to the rank
of a goddess. When her image was first presented to the disciples of St.