Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/501

Rh its heavenly home to earth and is performing tasks assigned to it as the way for its return. This idea is worked out in the form of the pilgrimage of a prince to Egypt in quest of the serpent-guarded pearl.

Thus far, then, we have seen the Syrian Church at Edessa going its own way and working out its own ideas of Christian truth and life, no doubt with the "mediocrity" of ability which, as Renan says, characterises everything Syriac, and certainly without producing any really great men, but still with a certain freedom, originality, and variety that interest us in contrast with the growing uniformity of Catholic standards in the main body of the Church. Early in the fourth century this isolation was disturbed, and for the second time the Eastern Syrian Church was brought more into line with the orthodox Greek Church at Antioch. This was the work of the great ecclesiastic Rabbulas, a native of Chalcis (Quinnesrîn, i.e., "Eagle's Nest") in Syria, who had a heathen priest for his father but a Christian mother. Having come to personal decision for his mother's religion, he went to Jerusalem and then down to the Jordan to be baptised. On his return he renounced his wife and his property, sent his children to convent schools, and went first to the monastery of St. Abraham at Chalcis, and, since that was not severe enough for him, afterwards to a cave in the desert, where he lived the life of a hermit. Thus he won fame in the Church, and in the year 411 he had his reward. He was then appointed bishop of Edessa by a synod at Antioch. Rabbulas proved to be an energetic disciplinarian, especially aiming at correcting the irregularities, that is to say, the national or local peculiarities, of his diocese, by bringing his flock into line with the Greek-speaking Church. With this end in view he made a dead set against the Diatessaron, ordering it to be removed from all the churches, and commanding the four separate Gospels to be substituted for it. But he did not circulate the old Syriac gospels of Palut; his gospels were in a text more nearly agreeing with the Syrian Greek text used at Antioch in his day.