Society, requesting them to lay the subject before the Bishops of the Church at home, and to make known to me their decision. In the meantime we continued to keep up friendly relations with the well-disposed Chaldeans, distributed many copies of the Sacred Scriptures and other books to those who anxiously sought after them, and availed ourselves of every opportunity to explain to them the doctrines and discipline of our Church, of which we found them in general profoundly ignorant, owing chiefly to the misrepresentations of the Latin missionaries who had gone so far as to spread the report that the Arabic edition of our Prayer Book was not in reality the ritual of the Anglican Church, but a fiction got up by us to delude the eastern Christians.
The following extract from a report which I forwarded about this time to the Gospel Propagation Society contains the substance of the suggestions which I then made with regard to the opening among the Chaldeans of Mosul: "I wish the question to be determined by the proper authorities at home, whether I am to render the Chaldeans every assistance in my power to enable them to throw off the usurped supremacy of Rome, and to restore their church to its original independence.[1] Unless we support the Chaldeans in this way, I am afraid that we shall be able to benefit them but very little by less decided efforts. The Bomanists will increase their missionaries and their money; they will call in every other subordinate means to their assistance, or make concessions for a time, until they succeed in crushing every manifestation to the disadvantage of the Roman See. Under such circumstances, and with such opponents, we can hope but little from a school or two which we may establish among them, or from the distribution of books; for it will be in their power to a great extent to prohibit the reading of the latter, and perhaps to prevent any attendance at the former. But if the people know that we are ready to help them to regain their freedom, I am persuaded that no efforts of the Romanists will succeed in turning them away from their purpose, especially when they learn that it is not our wish to destroy but to build up their church,—not to assimilate it to ours, but to see it purified.
- ↑ By "independence" I mean freedom from the rule of a foreign bishop; not the being separate from the communion of the Catholic Church.
O
