ed and
painted with the colors of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century,
according to the report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was
successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the
Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the Barbaric
churches, from the Gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea, were almost
infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the number and
sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper coast of Malabar,
and the isles of the ocean, Socotora and Ceylon, were peopled with an
increasing multitude of Christians; and the bishops and clergy of
those sequestered regions derived their ordination from the Catholic of
Babylon. In a subsequent age the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the
limits which had confined the ambition and curiosity both of the Greeks
and Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samarcand pursued without
fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated themselves into
the camps of the valleys of Imaus and the banks of the Selinga. They
exposed a metaphysical creed to those illiterate shepherds: to those
sanguinary warriors, 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 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. 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.