tian
Scriptures, and commanding those who had received copies to deliver
them to the public authorities to be burnt. The copies remaining in
the hands of the distributors were to be sealed up till they could
be sent back to Europe. But few copies were obtained from the
people, and the Turks seemed to take very little interest in the
matter.

Messrs. Fisk and King made their third and last visit to Jerusalem
in the spring of 1825, arriving there on the 29th of March. On their
way, they had stopped a few weeks in Jaffa, where their labors gave
rise to some very absurd reports, which yet appeared credible to the
superstitious people. Some said, that the missionaries bought people
with money; that the price for common people was ten piastres, and
that those ten piastres always remained with the man who received
them, however much he might spend from them. Others said, that the
picture of professed converts was taken in a book, and that the
missionaries would shoot the picture, should the man go back to his
former religion, and he would of course die. A Moslem, having heard
that men were hired to worship the devil, asked if it were true,
saying that he would come, and bring a hundred others with him.
"What," said his friend, "would you worship the devil?" "Yes," said
he, "if I was paid for it."

The brethren were cordially received by their acquaintances at
Jerusalem. Two days afterwards, the pasha of Damascus sat down
before the city, with three thousand soldiers, to collect his annual
tribute. The amount to be paid by each community was determined
solely by his own caprice, and what he could not be induced to remit
was extorted by arrest, imprisonment, and the bastinado. Many of the
inhabitants fled, and the rest lived in constant terror and
distress. So great was the confusion and insecurity within and
around the city, that the brethren decided to return to Beirut,
where they arrived on the 18th of May. From 1822 to 1825 they and
their associates had distributed nearly four thousand copies of the
Scriptures, and parts thereof, in different languages, and about
twenty thousand tracts. After staying a month at Beirut, Mr. King
passed six weeks at Deir el-Kamr in the study of Syriac, with Asaad
el-Shidiak for his teacher, a remarkable young Maronite, who will
have a prominent place in this history. On returning to Beirut, Mr.
King wrote a farewell letter to his friends in Palestine and Syria,
which Asaad translated into