Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 2.djvu/27

Rh become heretical and to wander from the true faith by the Council of Ephesus, and then afterwards blessed them as they have been blessed from that time down to the present moment. The hand of the Almighty must be seen in all this; and to us it is a proof of the fulfilment of the divine declaration: "Those who honour Me, I will honour; and those who despise Me shall be lightly esteemed." , in His providence, towards those who have kept the faith in the Person of His whole and undefiled, and those who either deny it or hold it wrongly, as do the Nestorians, has clearly manifested on which side His approbation rests. The former He has increased and exalted, the latter He has suffered to dwindle away, to be oppressed and enslaved by infidels, and to be reduced to a most pitiable state of poverty in all things appertaining to this world and the next, as they are at this day.

We may not, however, so fix our minds upon this one view of the providential dealings of the Almighty, as to overlook the important and most interesting fact of the continued preservation of the Nestorians. Thrown as they have been for centuries under the galling yoke of Islâm, and subjected ever and anon to the most cruel persecutions on account of their faith in, rising during intervals of rest and bestirring themselves to fulfil the last injunction of the Saviour to His Apostles by preaching the Gospel to the heathen beyond them, then struggling for their very existence,—now in favour with the infidels who rule over them, then ground to the dust by tyranny and oppression,—the wonderful preservation of this sect for 1400 years, and their own preservation too of so much of the pure doctrine of the Gospel, comes to us in the shape of an assurance from the Sovereign Ruler of all things, that He has not utterly cast off nor rejected them, nor suffered them absolutely to fall away into any fatal heresy.

May it not be, then, as many learned men have concluded, that though in error with respect to the language in which they declare their belief in the Second Person of the Glorious, and blameworthy in the unseemly comparisons and the improper expressions by which they attempt to explain a mystery which infinitely surpasses the extent of man's imperfect reason, and justly to be condemned for their refusal to submit to the