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496 states that they agree with the Melchites in the observance of Lent, Christmas, and Epiphany, but differ from them as to all other feasts and fasts. At the feast of Ma'alʿtha, he tells us, "They wander from the nave of their churches up to the roof in memory of the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem," an indication of Jewish associations on the part of the Nestorians. Albiruni declared that the majority of the inhabitants of Syria, Irak, and Khurasan were Nestorians.

The lot of the Nestorians in modern times is pitiable. In the year 1843 four thousand of them were massacred by the Kurds. Layard describes his visit to a ghastly scene of skeletons, skulls, scattered bones, rotting garments on rocks and bushes and ledges of a precipice over which men, women, and children had been hurled. Everywhere he found villages devastated and churches in ruins, or, if in some cases they were roughly rebuilt, the people afraid to use them, because the patriarch was in prison and unable to reconsecrate the desecrated houses of worship.

The wonder is that these oppressed people, excommunicated by the Greek Church and persecuted by their Mussulman neighbours, still retain their loyalty to what they believe to be the faith once delivered to the saints, even to the extent of martyrdom. They have very little to encourage them in what Protestants would call "the means of grace." Their liturgies are in old Syriac, which is unintelligible to the people of the present day—except where, as Layard says, it is translated into the vernacular. They hear no preaching. Their chief religious functions are fasts, of which there are 153 in the year. One consequence of their isolation is that, while they have sunk into ignorance, they have not degenerated in doctrine and ritual to the same extent as more active churches. They have no doctrine of transubstantiation, no purgatory; they do not sanction Mariolatry or image worship; nor