Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/202

148 present day maintain that Shimoon, (the nephew of the deceased patriarchy whose claims were set aside by the assembly of Bishops at Mosul, when they elected Sulâka in his room, 1552, as recorded by Mosheim,) was the rightful successor. According to their account, this Shimoon was recognized by them, and from him the patriarchate has descended to the present occupant Mar Shimoon, the eleventh of that name. About the same time a more distant relation was raised to the primacy by the Bishops of Ooroomiah; but on his death the Nestorians of Persia and those of Coordistan settled their differences, and agreed to unite under one spiritual head, and this patriarchate has been kept up ever since in a direct succession, of which the present Mar Shimoon is the rightful representative.

The Romanist accounts of these occurrences are somewhat different, and as contradictory as they are improbable.15 They tell us, on the one hand, that Shimoon, the rejected nephew, incited the Turks to the murder of Sulâka, thinking by this means to establish his authority over the Nestorians of the plains as well as those in the mountains; and, on the other, that a Nestorian layman was the author of the schism. I shall give their narrative of this latter event in the words of the Jesuit Boré, without retorting the malignant and false reproach which he casts upon our Church: "The Pasha of Van had a Chaldean treasurer, who not having had any children by his first wife took unto himself another. He vainly entreated the catholic patriarch to legalize this new alliance: neither presents nor threats could induce the pastor to infringe a formal law of the Church. In his vexation, the gallant treasurer of the pasha, unwittingly perpetrated the crime of Henry VIII. and created a schism in the community. Thus the new Chaldean [Nestorian] like the Anglican Church was regenerated by an adulterer! He soon found among the descendants of the first Shimoon a grand-nephew disposed to usurp the spiritual authority whom be first established at Somai and afterwards at Kochânes." The mischievous Frenchman adduces no authority in support of this tale, and it is greatly to be doubted whether, like many similar fictions contained in his "Correspondance d'Orient," it has any better foundation than the wantonness of his own fertile imagination.