Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/199

Rh nions. Twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops composed their hierarchy; but several of these were dispensed, by the distance and danger of the way, from the duty of personal attendance, on the easy condition that every six years they should testify their faith and obedience to the Catholic or patriarch of Babylon, a vague appellation, which has been applied to the royal seats of Seleucia, Ctesiphon, and Baghdad. These remote branches are long since withered, and the old patriarchal trunk is now divided by the Elîas of Mosul, the representatives, almost in lineal descent, of the genuine and primitive succession, the Yoosefs of Amida, who are reconciled to the Church of Rome, and the Shimoons of Van or Ooroomiah, whose revolt at the head of forty thousand families was promoted in the 16th century by the Sophis of Persia."

The latter part of the above extract is confirmed and illustrated by the following quotations from Mosheim:12 "The ambitious views of the Roman pontiffs sowed the pestilential seeds of animosity and discord among all the eastern Churches; and the Nestorian Christians felt early the effects of their imperious councils. In the year 1551, a warm dispute arose among that people about the creation of a new patriarch, Simeon Barmamas being proposed by one party, and Sulâka earnestly desired by the other. The latter to support his pretensions the more efiectually, repaired to Rome, and was consecrated patriarch, in the year 1553, by Pope Julius III. whose jurisdiction he had acknowledged, and to whose commands he had promised unlimited submission and obedience. Julius gave the name John to the new Chaldean patriarch, and upon his return to his own country, sent with him several persons, skilled in the Syriac language, to assist him in establishing and extending the papal empire among the Nestorians. From this time that unhappy people were divided into two factions, and were often involved in the greatest dangers and difficulties by the jarring sentiments and perpetual quarrels of their patriarchs.

"These divisions still subsisted during the 17th century, and