Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/85

73 ST. MARTIN S ARGUMENTS, 73 in a note worthy of his erudition, another special proof, which is by no means to be neglected.* " Amongst the various arguments," he says, " that might be urged in favour of the legitimacy of the monument, but of which, as yet, no use has been made, must not be forgotten, the name of the priest by whom it is said to have been erected. This name Yezdbouzid is Persian, and at the epoch when the monument was discovered, it would have been impossible to invent it, as there existed no work where it could have been found. Indeed, I do not think that even since then, there has ever been any one published in which it could have been met with. "It is a very celebrated name among the Arme- nians, and comes to them from a martyr, a Persian by birth, and of the royal race, who perished towards the middle of the seventh century, and rendered his name illustrious amongst the Christian nations of the East." Saint Martin adds in the same place, that the famous monument of Si-ngan-Fou, whose authenticity has for a long time been called in question, from the hatred entertained against the Jesuit missionaries who discovered it, rather than from a candid examination of its contents, — is now regarded as above all suspicion. Why, in fact, should there have been any such sus- picions, and with what possible object could the mis- sionaries have taken on themselves the guilt of the odious stratagem, which Voltaire attributes to them ? Their intention, it will probably be said, was to ob- tain an argument in favour of the Catholic doctrine, or at least to give the Chinese a proof of the antiquity of
 * "Hist, du bas Empire," vol. vi. p. 69. (ed. de S. M. 1827).