ture, reason, or tradition, had
been established, and was still maintained, by the arbitrary power of
a temporal monarch. Their adversaries might allege the words of the
fathers of Constantinople, who profess themselves the slaves of the
king; and they might relate, with malicious joy, how the decrees of
Chalcedon had been inspired and reformed by the emperor Marcian and his
virgin bride. The prevailing faction will naturally inculcate the duty
of submission, nor is it less natural that dissenters should feel and
assert the principles of freedom. Under the rod of persecution, the
Nestorians and Monophysites degenerated into rebels and fugitives; and
the most ancient and useful allies of Rome were taught to consider the
emperor not as the chief, but as the enemy of the Christians. Language,
the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind,
soon discriminated the sectaries of the East, by a peculiar and
perpetual badge, which abolished the means of intercourse and the hope
of reconciliation. The long dominion of the Greeks, their colonies, and,
above all, their eloquence, had propagated a language doubtless the most
perfect that has been contrived by the art of man. Yet the body of the
people, both in Syria and Egypt, still persevered in the use of their
national idioms; with this difference, however, that the Coptic was
confined to the rude and illiterate peasants of the Nile, while the
Syriac, from the mountains of Assyria to the Red Sea, was adapted to
the higher topics of poetry and argument. Armenia and Abyssinia were
infected by the speech or learning of the Greeks; and their Barbaric
tongues, which have been revived in the studies of modern Europe, were
unintelligible to the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The Syriac
and the Coptic, the Armenian and the AEthiopic, are consecrated in the
service of their respective churches: and their theology is enriched
by domestic versions both of the Scriptures and of the most popular
fathers. After a period of thirteen hundred and sixty years, the spark
of controversy, first kindled by a sermon of Nestorius, still burns in
the bosom of the East, and the hostile communions still maintain the
faith and discipline of their founders. In the most abject state of
ignorance, poverty, and servitude, the Nestorians and Monophysites
reject the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and cherish the toleration of
their Turkish masters, which allows them to anathematize, on the on