Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/443

Rh April 10th.—We left Doori at 8, and commenced the toilsome ascent of the high mountain range which separated us from the Tyari country. Here a scene indescribably grand was spread out before us, which I cannot depict better than by borrowing the beautiful language of the author just quoted, intermingled as it is with the noble aspirations of a devoted missionary: "The country of the independent Nestorians opened before my enraptured vision like a vast amphitheatre of wild precipitous mountains, broken with deep dark looking defiles and narrow glens, into few of which the eye could penetrate so far as to gain a distinct view of the cheerful smiling villages, which have long been the secure abodes of the main body of the Nestorian Church. Here was the home of a hundred thousand Christians, around whom the arm of Omnipotence had reared the adamantine ramparts, whose lofty snow-capped summits seemed to blend with the skies in the distant horizon. Here, in their munition of rocks, has preserved, as if for some great end in the economy of His grace, a chosen remnant of His ancient Church, safe from the flames of persecution, and the clangour of war. [How changed is the condition of the poor Nestorians since these lines were written!]

"I retired to a sequestered pinnacle of rock, where I could feast my vision with the sublime spectacle, and pour out my heartfelt gratitude that I had been brought at length, through many perils, to behold a country from which emanated the brightest beams of hope for the long benighted empire of Mohammedan delusion, by whose millions of votaries I was surrounded on every side. My thoughts went back to the days when the Nestorian missionaries were spread abroad throughout the East, and for more than a thousand years continued to plant and sustain the standard of the cross through the remote and barbarous countries of central Asia, Tartary, Mongolia, and China, to the time when, as tradition and history alike testify, the Gospel standard was reared in these mountains by Apostles' hands, for it was not from Nestorians, but from Thomas, Bartholomew, Thaddeus, and others, that this people first received the knowledge of a.

"I looked at them in their present state, sunk down into the