Page:Lesser Eastern Churches.djvu/319

Rh which looks to the Coptic Patriarch as its highest standard, conscious that it lags some way behind that exalted ideal. So we are not surprised to find the Church founded under such happy auspices, when Athanasius laid his hands on Frumentius, now considerably the most backward part of the whole Christian family.

2. Christian Ethiopia in the Past

The Church founded by Frumentius and Aedesius soon became the religion of the State of Aksum and of all the real (Semitic) Abyssinians. From their time till to-day there has been a powerful Christian State south of Nubia. Its frontiers have varied considerably, as the King of Abyssinia gained or lost territory by the fortune of war. Not all his subjects have been Christian. The King himself, his court and his own people are always; but they have often ruled and still do rule over subject tribes who remain Pagan or Moslem. The next thing we hear of the Ethiopic Church is a happy omen of its orthodoxy, unhappily not to be fulfilled in later years. It refused to accept Arianism. In 365 Constantius wrote to beg the Abyssinian King to send Frumentius to Alexandria, that he might learn the true faith from (and join in communion with) the Arian intruded Patriarch George (356-362). At the same time he warned him against Athanasius, who had been deposed "for many crimes." But Frumentius and the king remained faithful to the saint from whom they had received their hierarchy.

Christianity was then strengthened and extended in Abyssinia by the monks of Upper Egypt. These have hardly had justice done to them as propagators of the faith. They preached the gospel with great zeal among the heathen south of Egypt. They built up flourishing churches in Nubia (p. 305), and so met the Christian Ethiopians. In the 5th and 6th centuries Coptic monks came to Abyssinia and revived or reorganized Christianity there, so that the Ethiopians count this as a kind of second conversion of their country. About the year 480, in the time of King Ameda, came the "Nine Saints," still honoured as secondary apostles of the country. They were Coptic monks, named Aragawi, Pantaleon,