England for the same purpose. He has also a warm recommendation from the Patriarchal Committee.[1] In his book you may see many strange things, including portraits of his mother-in-law and son,[2] of his wife and of himself in six varied and astonishing costumes,[3] but nothing that throws any light on the burning question what exactly he is. After mature examination of his collection of photographs, documents and infantile excursuses into Church history, I am reluctantly compelled to give up the Rev. Nestorius George Malech. But the possibility of so ambiguous a person as he throws a lurid light on the state of the present Nestorians.
The attitude of the Anglican mission is no less ambiguous, but in a different way. Its beginnings were of the usual Protestant type. It proposed to educate and purify the Nestorians, without directly disturbing their organization. Mr. Badger was old-fashioned enough not to worry much about the Council of Ephesus. He loathes Popery, of course, and never fails to lay his finger on the wickedness of Uniates. Otherwise he seems to think the Nestorians very much like the Church of England, Catholic but not Roman, outwardly divided but one in spirit. His second volume examines the faith of the Nestorians in a way that must be gall and wormwood to the present missionaries. For he takes as his standard of universal orthodoxy the Thirty-nine Articles (of all things!), and tests the Nestorians, not unfavourably on the whole, by their agreement with these. For this he is scolded hard throughout the notes by Dr. Neale,[4] who, although for some reason he does not seem to mind Monophysites,[5] is very angry with the Nestorians. He is, naturally, hardly less angry with the Articles. So, between the two, poor Mr. Badger suffers in the notes.[6] But since Mr. Riley went out to rejuvenate the Anglican mission it has become very High Church indeed. The
- ↑ P. 386.
- ↑ P. 381.
- ↑ P. 359.
- ↑ He sent his book to be edited by Dr. Neale.
- ↑ E.g. Badger: The Nestorians and their Rituals, vol. iii., note 1, p. 403.
- ↑ For instance: vol. ii. p. 425, n. 25: "Had Mr. Badger been more practically acquainted with the Filioque controversy, perhaps he would have written this paragraph differently." Note 31 (ib.): "It is rather strange to have the point of Nestorian heresy alleged in proof of the Twenty-first Article." Note 14 (ib. p. 424): "The flat downright heresy of this passage is well worthy notice."
