which the Persian Church could receive Western philosophy and theology. By its means they might have been taught that the Greeks were not so far removed from them, after all, and through it they might have made their contribution to the fulness of Catholic life. The Church of the Empire now turned her back on the Church without the border; and the act is another and important stage in the gradual separation of the Assyrian Church from the rest of Christendom.
This circumstance brought to Bar-soma the great opportunity of his life, and it must be owned that he took advantage of it as an enlightened statesman and prelate should. He did a work for which his Church was to be his debtor during a thousand years of existence, and which may weigh in the balance against much that is evil in his chequered and stormy career.
The university that had been destroyed in Edessa he set up in Nisibis. Selecting an able head, Narses, he gathered tutors and pupils once more; found quarters for them somewhere; and established the great school that was to be the nursery of patriarchs and bishops for future generations, and which was to supply to the Church of the East that which Edessa had given her, and of which she was now deprived. It was a great deed, and one that was to have influence that the doer could not dream of. When we remember how much of the culture of mediaeval Europe was to come to her through the Saracens, and that the "Nestorians" were the teachers of the Saracens, one is set asking whether Oxford, Cambridge and Paris do not owe an unsuspected debt to Bar-soma, though the road from Nisibis to those centres may run through Baghdad and Salamanca.
While Bar-soma was superintending the growth of his school, and the Church was assimilating
