Page:Introduction to the Assyrian church.djvu/88

82 In Persia, as the long persecution gradually flickered out (and there is evidence that it was not fully over till thirty years after the death of Sapor), it is not wonderful that the Church should be left in a most shattered and disorganized condition. The marvel is, indeed, that life remained in the body at all; and it is doubtful whether a Western Church would have survived such an ordeal. An Eastern melet, however, if it has not the vigorous and energetic (perhaps interfering) vitality of its Western counterpart; and if, like certain animals, it maintains itself by an external armour of custom and inherited habit, rather than by a strong principle of internal life; has this in common also with the crustacean—that it can endure an amount of cutting and slashing that would be fatal to a more highly organized body.

Thus, though crushed and maimed—with probably hardly any bishops remaining, and certainly a very scanty supply of priests—the Church began its reparative process almost as soon as the persecution was stayed. Naturally it is difficult to trace the stages, for the confusion of the time is repeated in the confused and fragmentary statements of the historians.

It appears, however, from the statements of both the later writers who give us an account of this period that a Catholicos, or, at all events, a bishop of Seleucia, was chosen soon after the death of Sapor; and probably in the time of his son, though not immediate successor, Sapor III. Bar-Hebræus, indeed, declares that permission was given for the election by Sapor II, after the death of Julian had convinced him of the iniquity and folly of persecuting Christians. As, however, we know from other sources that the event had no such effect, the state-