of Corbic, thus first explained the doctrine: "If thou believest in the miracle of the incarnation of the Son of God, thou must believe also in the miracle which is wrought by the same divine power, through the words of the priest. The same body is here present, as that in which Christ was born, suffered, arose, and ascended to heaven."* This doctrine was not received without dissent, and in the next century Berengar published his famous protest for which, after a long controversy, he was condemned as a heretic, and once and again, through fear of death, compelled to make a public recantation, of which he as frequently repented, when delivered from impending terror, adding those most significant words: "Very true, human wickedness could by outward force extort from human weakness, a different confession; but a change of conviction is what God Almighty's agency can alone effect." Unable to withstand the blinded and depraved spirit of his age, Berengar died in solitude on the island of St. Comas, while the truth he had avowed was denounced; though blessed be God truth cannot be destroyed.

We have finished our task; and traced the simple rite of the Apostles,' when they broke the bread and distributed the cup after the example and commandment of the Saviour, to the splendid ritual, wherein an anointed Priest, amid prostration, and chanting, and loud amen, elevates the host and divides the elements, granting only the wafer to the people; claiming by this rite to crucify anew the Lord of glory, and put Him to an open shame for the transgressions of man and the deliverance of those in purgatory. We have shown how the Lord's Supper, after nine centuries, became the Latin Mass. Yet, notwithstanding the dominant Paganism, which thus impaired the rites and doctrines of the Primitive Church; it has been, we trust, sufficiently indicated that these corruptions were not effected without a protest, and after a severe struggle, and that even thus the truth was only buried, the life hidden, whose transforming energies shall yet burst its entanglements and reform even the Heathenism in which it has been imprisoned. We always think, in surveying the history and prospects of Papacy, of Wordsworth's beautiful Poem:

"Who shrinks not from alliance

Of evil with good Powers,

To God proclaims defiance,

And mocks whom He adores.

"A ship to Christ devoted

From the land of Nile did go;
Alas! the bright ship floated,
An idol at her prow.

* Torrey's Neander's Church History, vol. iii, p. 495.

"By magic domination,

The Heaven-permitted vent
Of purblind mortal passion,
Was wrought her punishment.

"The Flower, the Form within it,
What served they in her need?
Her port she could not win it,
Nor from mishap be freed.

"The tempest overcame her,

And she was seen no more;
But gently, gently blame her,
She cast a Pearl ashore."

It might have been a pleasanter but scarcely so profitable a task, to have traced the preservation of this rite in its original simplicity, since we could not thus have been so fully convinced of its importance. All that is corrupt in the worship or pretensions of the Papacy, is founded upon the corruptions of this Sacrament. Hence was built up that stupendous Liturgy which confounds the laity, instead of the simple devotion which breathed from hearts filled with the Holy Ghost in the chamber at Troas, and from the hired house at Rome, where the apostle to the Gentiles met with his brethren. On its perversion. were established the doctrines of purgatory, of masses for the dead, and of the worship of saints. The corruption of the type into a sacrifice, changed the Pastor into a Priest, and introduced another ground of justification before God than simple faith in Jesus Christ. Restore the simplicity of the Apostolic doctrine and practice in celebrating the Lord's Supper to the Latin Church, and you have sapped the foundations of her magnificent ritual and splendid hierarchy, and her palaces would be as the temples of Edom, and the walls of Tyre, a place for the owl to hoot, and over which the ploughshire could pass.

We have, moreover, in this history, discovered the similarity between our method of celebrating this Sacrament and that of the Apostles, so that it seemed as if we were narrating the practice of a congregational church, when we read the Scripture story of the scene where Paul broke the bread and distributed the cup. The tendency to corruption, to the making the service merely formal, to the attaching of a magical influence to the elements, and a consequent forgetfulness of the higher benefit to be derived from spiritual communion, is still as in ancient days everywhere to be discerned. The father of evil has not forgotten his craft, and if he could, would persuade the disciples to hew down the living God-nourished plants in whose shade they are sheltered, and on whose fruit they are supported,

to build up from their lifeless trunks a temple of Baal. Be it our effort ever to remember and obey those words of the Master, "It is the spirit that quickeneth-the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life."

ART. VII.--DR. GRANT AND THE MOUNTAIN NESTORIANS.

Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians, by Rev. Thomas Laurie, surviving associate in that mission. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1853.

The

THIS is a delightful volume. It is not often that so many attractions are united in a single book. Viewed simply as a tale of thrilling adventures and hair-breadth escapes, it would lose nothing by comparison with any similar work. There are passages in it that read like the stories of old romance. scenes are laid in a region of surpassing interest, where every broad plain and every cloud-capped peak, carries the mind back to the remote past, to the days of patriarchs and prophets. The curious observer may still detect in remote hamlets, customs that were in vogue before the time of Solomon. There are those vast mounds in which are entombed the palaces of great kings. There lived and reigned the monarchs whose glory and whose shame filled the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah. We cross those wide table-lands where successive empires have struggled for the sceptre of the world; where Medes and Macedonians, Romans and Saracens, have arrayed their embattled hosts. Across yonder river Tamerlane poured for seven continuous days his uncounted hordes; along that valley Xenophon guided his betrayed but undaunted followers; and further to the East the eye discerns the spot where the Persian staked and lost a crown on Arbela's field of blood. To these historic memories is added every natural charm. Mr. Laurie's own residence in the East, and his travels with Dr. Grant, have given him rare qualifications for his task. He has interspersed his narrative with delightful pictures of the wild scenery amid the Kurdish Alps, and of the unrivaled beauty of those valleys of the Sun,

"Where all the loveliest children of his beam,
Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream."

From amid snowy and stupendous peaks, and overhanging and appalling cliffs, and deep precipices and dark, fearful chasms, and mountain torrents dashing down the steep sides of the hills, and foaming and boiling over rocks and stones, we descend to luxuriant plains, and scenes of fairy beauty, surpassing all that the fancy of Spenser could throw about the enchanted gardens of Acrasia. We wander by the banks of streams which are shaded by the willow, the poplar and the sycamore, or journey down sequestered lanes where the peach, the apricot and the plumb hang over our heads, where the "golden pomegranate and the luscious fig blend with the rich green of the olive, and the modest blackberry holds out its fruit to the trav eler, within his reach on the saddle," where "flowering plants line the path, and birds carol sweetly under the shade of ancient oaks, on whose branches grows the mistletoe."

But this by no means exhausts all the merits of Mr. Laurie's book. It is a generous and affectionate, but unostentatious portraiture of a character that possessed many attractive and many noble qualities; a simple record of a life time that has seldom been equaled in its exhibition of disinterested benevolence and untiring zeal. It deals with the history of a unique and most interesting people, and records one of the saddest catastrophes of modern times. It recalls vividly to mind the fierce persecutions of past ages, those baptisms of blood which we had fain hoped were never to be renewed. It tells how in our own time have been repeated the fearful scenes of Beziers and Cabaret, tragedies so fiendish and inhuman that we have almost come to regard them as monstrous and unreal myths; how an ancient and independent Christian community has been overthrown, how a light has been extinguished which for eighteen centuries shed its lustre over the dark places of the earth.

Asahel Grant was born in Marshall, New York, on the 17th of August, 1807. A predilection which was early manifested, led him to study medicine. At the age of twenty he married and settled in Braintrim, on the Susquehannah, but losing his wife four years after, he removed to Utica. We are compelled for want of space, to pass hastily over his early life, so rich in promise of future excellence. The meeting of the American Board at Utica, in the year 1834, wrought an entire change in his destiny. His attention was strongly directed to Foreign Missions, and after weighing the subject with much care, he made an offer of his services, in a letter to Dr. Anderson. As he expressed a decided preference for the mission

which was contemplated among the Nestorians, he was directed to join Mr. Perkins, who was already on his way to Persia. He sailed from Boston, May 11th, 1835, having just before been united to his second wife, a lady who possessed unusual qualifications for the position she was to occupy. Passing up the Mediterranean, and stopping at Smyrna and Constantinople, on the 30th of August they saw Trebizond rising up before them, its homes half buried in fruit trees, while beyond towered those rugged hills, sacred in every school boy's memory as the spot where the glad Greeks first shouted, "the sea, the sea.' A fatiguing journey through Erzroom and Tabriz, and under the shadow of Mount Ararat, brought them on the 27th of October to Oroomiah, their future home.

The district of Oroomiah is in the western part of Azerbijan, the ancient Atropatene, and forms the frontier line of Persia, in the direction of the Turkish empire. The scenery is unrivaled even beneath a Persian sky. A gently sloping plain, covered with smiling villages and with gardens loaded with delicious fruits, extends from the shores of Lake Oroomiah to the bleak acclivities of the Kurdish hills. The waters of the lake sparkle with the bright reflection of an Eastern sun, and with the gay plumage of innumerable waterfowl. Between the mountains and the lake stands the city, with its mud walls, and its houses of unburnt brick. It boasts of remote antiquity, and is revered by all devout Parsees as the birthplace of the founder of their faith. Tradition still points to a vast field of ashes, that seems to have accumulated during the lapse of ages, as the spot where Zoroaster was wont to kindle the sacred fire.

But to the missionary the scene was endeared by more sacred associations. In the city of Oroomiah, and amid the three hundred villages of the plain, there still lingered the scattered remnant of a once illustrious church, of a church that had disputed with Rome herself the spiritual dominion of half the world. Its history was more ancient than the dynasty of the Caliphs. If their own traditions are to be credited, the Nestorians received the Gospel from one who sat down with Peter and with John at the last Supper of the Lord. When Mahomet was still a camel-driver, they had preached it from the valley of the Nile to the shores of the Pacific, and from the steppes of Northern Tartary to the islands of the great Indian sea. At one time they boasted, in India alone, of fourteen hundred churches, numbering not less than two hundred and eighty thousand souls. The patriarch at Bagdad swayed an organization as extended and as powerful as that which submitted to Hildebrand. His word was law at the council-tables of great