But the
approximation of ideas could not abate the vehemence of passion; each
party was the more astonished that their blind antagonist could dispute
on so trifling a difference; the tyrant of Syria enforced the belief of
his creed, and his reign was polluted with the blood of three hundred
and fifty monks, who were slain, not perhaps without provocation or
resistance, under the walls of Apamea. [126] The successor of Anastasius
replanted the orthodox standard in the East; Severus fled into Egypt;
and his friend, the eloquent Xenaias, [127] who had escaped from the
Nestorians of Persia, was suffocated in his exile by the Melchites of
Paphlagonia. Fifty-four bishops were swept from their thrones, eight
hundred ecclesiastics were cast into prison, [128] and notwithstanding
the ambiguous favor of Theodora, the Oriental flocks, deprived of their
shepherds, must insensibly have been either famished or poisoned. In
this spiritual distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united,
and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James
Baradaeus [129] has been preserved in the appellation of Jacobites, a
familiar sound, which may startle the ear of an English reader. From
the holy confessors in their prison of Constantinople, he received the
powers of bishop of Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination
of fourscore thousand bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from
the same inexhaustible source. The speed of the zealous missionary was
promoted by the fleetest dromedaries of a devout chief of the Arabs; the
doctrine and discipline of the Jacobites were secretly established in
the dominions of Justinian; and each Jacobite was compelled to violate
the laws and to hate the Roman legislator. The successors of Severus,
while they lurked in convents or villages, while they sheltered
their proscribed heads in the caverns of hermits, or the tents of the
Saracens, still asserted, as they now assert, their indefeasible right
to the title, the rank, and the prerogatives of patriarch of Antioch:
under the milder yoke of the infidels, they reside about a league
from Merdin, in the pleasant monastery of Zapharan, which they have
embellished with cells, aqueducts, and plantations. The secondary,
though honorable, place is filled by the maphrian, who, in his station
at Mosul itself, defies the Nestorian catholic with whom he contests the
primacy of the East. Under the patriarch and the maphrian, one hundred
and fifty