Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/575

Rh left their country because of its successive troubles and settled in Asia Minor, Constantinople, and other Western places, after the manner of the Jewish "dispersion," in the present day the land is largely stocked with a rude, alien, Mohammedan race, inferior to the original inhabitants both in civilisation and in morals. The two races have never coalesced. Religious more than racial differences have kept them apart. This fact should be borne in mind when we consider the Armenian problem. Armenia is no longer a geographical term in any national sense; it represents a persecuted people, almost living as outlaws both in their own original land and in many other places, chiefly Turkish, Russian, and Persian.

In the year 1603 the catholicos Melchizedic called in the aid of the Persian Shah Abbas to deliver his people from Turkish oppression; but after over-running the land the shah transported many of the Armenians by force into his own country, where he concentrated them in a colony near Ispahan. For two centuries after this Armenia was trampled on alternately by contending Turkish and Persian armies. The Church was also suffering degradation from the sale of the office of catholicos. There was a dispute between the Armenian patriarchs at Constantinople and Jerusalem and the catholicos as to the supremacy of the latter. In the year 1655, Philip, an able man, only second to St. Isaac of the patristic period as a great ecclesiastic, consolidated the Church by inducing the two patriarchs to submit to him as catholicos of all the Armenian Christians. But now the Armenians were disturbed by Jesuit missionaries, and the office of catholicos again fell into unworthy hands, so that during the first half of the eighteenth century the Church was in a deplorable condition. This was the time of the catholicos Lazar, who left behind him an ill name. But in the time of Simon, who came into office in the year 1763, things began to improve under Russian influences.

Russia acquired Georgia in the year 1801; and in 1828 she took possession of part of Armenia, including the