Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/176

 154 THE DECLINE AND FALL 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 labours of a monk ; and the name of James Baradaeus ^'^- has been preserved in the appella- tion of Jacobites, a familiar sound which may startle the ear of an English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison [c. AD. 5ii] (jf Constantinople he received the powers of bishop of Edessa, and apostle of the P2ast, and the ordination of fourscore thousand bishops, priests, and deacons is derived from the same inexhaustible source. The speed of the zealous mission- ary was promoted by the fleetest dromedaries of a devout chief of the Arabs ; the doctrine and discipline of the Jacobites were secretly established in the dominions of Justinian ; and each Jacobite was compelled to violate the laws and to hate the Roman legislator. The successors of Severus, while they lurked in convents or villages, while they sheltered their proscribed heads in the caverns of hermits or the tents of the Saracens, still asserted, as they now assert, their indefeasible right to the title, the rank, and the prerogatives of patriarch of Antioch ; under the milder yoke of the infidels they reside about a league from Merdin, in the pleasant monastery of Zapharan, which they have embellished with cells, aqueducts, and plantations. The secondary, though honourable, place is filled by the maphrian, who, in his station at Mosul itself, defies the Nestorian catholic, with whom he contests the supremacy of the East. Under the patriarch and the maphrian, one hundred and fifty archbishops and bishops have been counted in the different ages of the Jacobite church ; but the order of the hierarchy is relaxed or dissolved, and the greater part of their dioceses is confined to the neighbourhood of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The cities of Aleppo and Aniida, which are often visited by the patriarch, contain some wealthy merchants and industrious mechanics, but the multitude derive their scanty sustenance from their daily labour ; and poverty, as well as superstition, may impose their excessive fasts : five annual lents, during which both the clergy and laity abstain not only from flesh or eggs, but even from the taste of wine, of oil, and of 13^ The obscure history of James, or Jacobus, Baradnsus, or Zanzalus [ob. A.D. 578] maj' be gathered from Eutychius (Annal. torn. ii. p. 144, 147), Renaudot (Hist. Patriarch. Ale.x. p. 133), and Asseniannus (Bibliot. Orient, torn. i. p. 424, tom. ii. p. 62-69, 324-332, p. 414, tom. ii. p. 385-388) [and Bar-Hebraeus, Chron. Eccl. , ed. Abbeloos and Lamy, p. 215 sqq. He seems to be unknown to the Greeks. The Jacobites tliemselves had rather deduce their name and pedigree from St. James the apostle.