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Rh will they even allow icons to be exhibited in their churches. Men and women take the communion in both kinds. All five orders of clergy below the bishops are permitted to marry. Dr. Layard could not find any convents either for men or for women.

Thus in many respects the modern Nestorians are nearer to European Protestantism than to Roman Catholicism. While those who have succumbed to the Jesuit missions are bound to accept the full Western doctrine—if they really know what that is—the sturdy resistance of the old Nestorians to the papal pretensions throws them into an attitude which is essentially protestant. But they are neither Lutheran nor Calvinistic. They have any essential Western Protestantism in their constitution. Such ideas of Luther as the priesthood of all Christians and justification by faith are quite unknown to these scattered communities of the primitive Syrian Church. In their daily life the Syrian and Persian Nestorians have the reputation of being superior to their Mohammedan neighbours. They are honest, thrifty, perhaps even parsimonious. Such people are well worthy of the sympathy and assistance of their more fortunate and more enlightened fellow-Christians. The first necessity is to protect them from oppression and outrage. What they need is education, not ecclesiastical proselytising. They are said not to know the elements of the gospel. Then the best action of friendly English or American churches would be to evangelise them by teaching them the contents of their own Scriptures. Some good work of this kind is already going on under the American missionaries.

One cause of the weakening of this ancient Syrian Church may be found in its divisions. In particular there are the Chaldæans and the Jacobites.

The sect known as the "Chaldæans" is of recent origin, having originated in the year 1681, when the Nestorian