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Rh rough estimate in villages of the proportion of their numbers in the different districts.

Making in all 230 villages now inhabited by Syrians. In Aleppo, where they once numbered several hundred families, not more than ten Jacobite families now exist, the rest having joined the Church of Rome. The same secession has left them only a name at Damascus, and their few remaining adherents in that district are confined to the villages of Sadad, Kariatain, Hafar, and Nebk, between Hamah and Aleppo. The Jacobite community of Baghdad has followed the example set them by their brethren at Aleppo and Damascus; Mosul now comprises an equal number of papal and Jacobite Syrians; at Mardeen and Diarbekir, as we have seen, there are rival communities of Romanist Syrians; at Urfah the Latin missionaries have already gathered a few stragglers to their flock; and if Jebel Toor has not hitherto furnished its quota of converts, it is because no measures have yet been taken to induce its rude inhabitants to acknowledge the supremacy of the Italian Pontiff. Such is the present degraded state of the Jacobites, such the dissensions among them, and such the conduct of their spiritual guides, that a combined effort on the part of Rome would speedily and inevitably result in their entire submission to the papal See.

And if the truth is to be told, it must be confessed that however much to be deplored this secession may be,—inasmuch as with a reception of the true Catholic doctrine respecting the divinity and humanity of our incarnate Lord, the seceders become confirmed in certain false doctrines and corrupt practices which, though prevalent among them now, are not sanctioned by their early fathers,—the Syrian proselytes to Rome are decidedly superior in many respects to their Jacobite brethren. Wherever they have formed themselves into a distinct body, they have established schools, rebuilt their churches, increased