Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/79

67 SYRIAC CHARACTERS NESTORIAN DOCTRINE. G7 as a sacred language, and that it was in use among them for the celebration of the divine services, for psalmody, and for drawing up ecclesiastical documents.* This is the more probable, as the same custom existed in India, among the Christian converts, supposed to be those of St. Thomas. The abridgment of Christian doctrine given in the Syro-Chinese inscription of Si-ngan-Fou shows us, also, that the propagators of the faith in Upper Asia in the seventh century professed the Nestorian errors, f Through the vague and obscure verbiage which characterises the Chinese style, we recognise the mode in which that heresiarch admitted the union of the Word with Man, by indwelling plenitude of grace superior to that of all the saints. One of the three persons of the Trinity communicated himself to the very illustrious and very venerable Messiah, " veiling Abel Rernusat, Klaproth, Reinaud, and Ernest Renan, have supposed that the Ouigour alphabet, from which the Mongol Kalmuck and Mantchoo alphabets are derived, came from the Syriac estranghelo, through the intervention of the Ntstox-ians. See Quatremere, "Mem. sur les Nabat.," p. 144. ; Abel Rernusat, " Recherches sur les Langues Tartares," vol. i. p. 29. ; Klaproth, " Recherches sur la Langue et 1'Ecriture des Ouigours ; " Reinaud, " Geog. d'Aboulfeda," Introd. p. 362. ; E. Renan, " Hist. Gen. des Langues Semitiques," p. 268. our era, consisted principally in the dogma, that there were two persons in Jesus Christ ; one, Jesus the Man, brought forth by the Virgin, the other, proceeding from the word of God ; and that the Incarnation was not the hypostatic union of the Divine Word with the human nature, but the simple indwelling of the Word in the Man, as in a temple. The Jacobites admitted only one person, but without mixture of the divine and human nature. The orthodox Christians were called Greeks or Mekites. f 2
 * Many learned Orientalists, among others M. M. Quatremere,
 * The heresy of Nestorius, which spread in the fifth century of