ssumed the character of bishop till a fresh
supply of episcopal gifts and Syriac missionaries could be obtained from
the patriarch of Babylon. Since the expulsion of the Portuguese, the
Nestorian creed is freely professed on the coast of Malabar. The trading
companies of Holland and England are the friends of toleration; but
if oppression be less mortifying than contempt, the Christians of St.
Thomas have reason to complain of the cold and silent indifference of
their brethren of Europe.

II. The history of the Monophysites is less copious and interesting than
that of the Nestorians. Under the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius, their
artful leaders surprised the ear of the prince, usurped the thrones of
the East, and crushed on its native soil the school of the Syrians. The
rule of the Monophysite faith was defined with exquisite discretion
by Severus, patriarch of Antioch: he condemned, in the style of the
Henoticon, the adverse heresies of Nestorius; and Eutyches maintained
against the latter the reality of the body of Christ, and constrained
the Greeks to allow that he was a liar who spoke truth. 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. The successor of Anastasius
replanted the orthodox standard in the East; Severus fled into
Egypt; and his friend, the eloquent Xenaias, 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, 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
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, pr