they virtually impugn the doctrine of the blessed Atonement and deprive the human race of salvation, has been followed with the most signal displeasure of the Almighty. When we call to mind their early history, the 150 archbishops and bishops under the patriarch and maphrian of which their hierarchy once consisted, their numbers, the extent of country over which they spread, and the zeal and learning of some of their eminent doctors; and then look upon their present spiritual destitution, as also upon that of their co-religionists the Copts of Egypt and the Monophysites of Abyssinia, we cannot withhold the confession that the hand of the Lord has fallen heavily upon them.
But as it is not my intention to enter into any details of the past history of the Syrians, I shall proceed to give an account of their actual condition as a religious community, begging the reader to bear in mind that the following remarks are the result of two years' constant intercourse with them, of an intimate acquaintance with their patriarch and most of their bishops, and of personal visits to the districts in which they principally reside, as the foregoing and succeeding narrative will more fully testify.
The present hierarchy of the Jacobites in Turkey consists of a patriarch, who claims the title of "Patriarch of Antioch and successor of S. Peter," eight metropolitans, and three bishops. Of these one resides at Mosul, one in the convent of Mar Mattai in the same district, one at Urfah, one at Diarbekir or Kharpoot, one at Jerusalem, one at Mardeen, three in Jebel Toor, and two are called Temeloyo, i.e. universal, without any regular dioceses. The late patriarch Elias, whom I met at Constantinople in 1844, was a venerable old man of a kindly disposition, but wanting energy to rule. Moreover his time and attention were so absorbed in seeking to regain possession of the churches which the Syrian Romanists had seized upon, that little or nothing was done by him for the amelioration of the spiritual condition of his people. His successor, Mutran Yacoob, has already been introduced to our readers at Deir Zaaferân. From the almost universal testimony of the Syrians themselves, he is a man of a grasping and ambitious spirit, who only aims at exacting from his flock all that he can, not for any purposes of
