Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/80

68 68 CHMSTIANITT IN CHINA, ETC. his majesty." That is certainly the doctrine of Nes- torius ; upon that point the authority of the critics is unanimous. History, as we have elsewhere remarked, records the rapid progress of the Nestorian sects in the interior of Asia, and their being able to hold their ground, even under the sway of the Mussulmans, by means of tributes, compromises, and concessions of every kind. Setting out from the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates, these ardent and courageous propagators of the gospel probably proceeded to Khorassan, and then, crossing the Oxus, directed their course towards the Lake of Lop, and entered the Chinese Empire by the province of Chen-si. Olopen and his successors in the Chinese mission, whether Syrians or Persians by birth, certainly belonged to the Nestorian church. O-lo-pen is doubtless a Syriac name, mutilated by Chinese ortho- graphy. De Guignes traced in the two first syllables, the Syrian name for God, Aloho, and the learned Maro- nite Assemani tried to bring it back by metathesis to the form of Yaballah, or Yabh- Aloho, that is to say, " God given." Six centuries later, we shall find a Nestorian metropolitan of China bearing the same name. " One cannot imagine," says Abel Remusat *, " of what Voltaire was thinking, when he said that this name resembled an ancient Spanish one. He cannot tell either," he says, "what is to be understood by Olopen coming to China,, conducted by the blue clouds, and by observing the rule of the winds ; but these ex- pressions, oddly as they sound in a translation, are quite ordinary ones in China."
 * Nouv. met. Asiat., vol. ii. p. 192.