INFERENCES FROM THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES.
First: That devotion to Christ is not lessened but increased. Many people think the spirit of unbelief and indifferentism has spread so widely that in this nineteenth century people will no longer die for Christ. But out of 100,000 Armenians massacred, 90,000 were actually martyred because they would not deny Christ. In all lands, Christians praise the old martyrs, the church fathers: let them know that there are as noble church sons and daughters to-day in Armenia as there were church fathers anywhere in the early centuries. Thus these hideous scenes ought to awaken a true Christian spirit both in this country and in Europe.
Second: That it was a religious persecution. Though the false and cruel Sultan gave a political color to it, his universal order was to offer the Armenians the choice of Mohammedanism or death. This is proved by the fact that the leading gospel ministers were specially chosen for martyrdom. And some of the Armenian priests, after having been converted by force, to escape unbearable tortures, were led through the streets, followed by great crowds, as a warning to the remaining Armenians that they must follow the same road. When some of them did it, the Turks forced them to take arms and kill their brothers and sisters for refusing to accept Mohammedanism. To speak of the massacres as political affairs is doing injustice to the cause of Christ.
Third: That whatever a man sows, he shall reap the same. The Sultan and the Turks are sowing,—they are killing, and thousands of the Christians are converted by force to Mohammedanism; but the time is coming when more Mohammedans will be killed than Armenians have been, and thousands, and even millions of the Mohammedans will be converted to Christianity, and the blood of the Armenian martyrs will be the means of their salvation through Jesus Christ. The time is coming when out of this great persecution a great and happy freedom will proceed. Out of this great darkness a very bright light shall shine.
Fourth: Some of the Turks helped and saved the Armenians. Certainly these were secret converts to Christianity, but their lives being in danger, they cannot confess Christ publicly. All they can do for the present is to help the needy Christians and save them from murder. Another class of Turks who helped is those who were themselves getting a living out of the Armenians. The Armenians gave them employment, and if their employers were killed, how could they get a living? Still another class protected the Armenians, because if the Armenian houses were burned, their houses also would be burned; and they asked and got money from the Armenians as a reward for having saved them. It is a mistake to think that there are good Mohammedans, who, from a good Mohammedan motive helped the Armenians. There cannot be a good Mohammedan motive towards a Christian; if there is a good motive, it is not a Mohammedan motive.
Fifth: That the time has come when American and European Christians should trust no longer in the promises of the Sultan and the European governments, but as Christian people must use something more than “moral principle” before all the Armenians and American missionaries are killed. Moral influence is very good as far as it goes; being a Christian minister, I also believe in it. But as far as the Turks are concerned it can do nothing, because they do not know what morals are, or what moral character is. All the Turks are morally corrupt. They know only two things; one is the sword, the other is moral corruption. They came and captured that country by the sword, and they must go by the sword; there is no other way. Europe tried the experiment century after century, but could find no other way. Moral advice, wise counsel have never moved the Turks, and will never move them hereafter. Europe and a part of Armenia were taken from them by the sword, and the only way Armenia and the Armenians can be saved is by using the sword. When Christ comes again He will never yield; He will never be crucified, but he will judge and condemn. The time has come when Christians have suffered enough; they must unite and remove that great curse, the Mohammedan power, and make free that happy and beautiful Bible Land, Armenia and Palestine.
Reader, you cannot go and visit to-day the places where man was created, where Noah’s ark rested. You cannot go in safety to visit the places where Christ was born and walked. Why? Simply because a corrupt Mohammedan power wills there, and will not permit you. Is it not a shame to mighty Christian nations and powers that this is so? Will not the Christian nations be aroused with great indignation and give the last blow to such a cruel Mohammedan tyranny?
Sixth: That Turkey is a mere barbarism; it is not to be considered or treated as a nation, for it is not one in any sense. International law cannot be applied to Turkey. The Sultan must be considered as a brigand, a mere lawless oppressor, and the Turks as mere murderers, and dealt with accordingly. The powers must give up the farce of treating the Sultan as a national sovereign, who speaks for his people, and may govern, therefore, much as he pleases. As Mr. W. W. Howard says, “The blackest spot in the round world is the heart of the Sultan of Turkey.”
A Farewell Letter from a Prominent Armenian. March 24, 1896.
“We are evidently a doomed people. A hundred thousand of us have been butchered, and more than a million of us are in extreme suffering from hunger, and cold, and nakedness. Multitudes beyond the reach of foreign aid must inevitably perish before spring. As to the rest of us, our supplies of food and money are rapidly diminishing. We can prosecute no business, we are not at liberty to earn our daily bread, and for even the most fortunate, the future has only the prospect of starvation a little later than our poor brethren.
“We hear the announcement that order and peace are being restored, but to us these are empty words. The terrible and wholesale massacre at Oorfa and Birijik occurred long subsequent to the most solemn and emphatic assurances that nothing more of the kind was to be apprehended,—long after the commission sent out from Constantinople to carry the message of peace and reform to Armenia had reached its field of labor.
“Massacres are not now so frequent as they were a few months ago, but the attitude of relentless hostility on the part of the government towards us, the ferocious aspect of our Moslem neighbors, has not a whit improved. They seem to be eagerly watching for an opportune moment in which to finish their bloody work, and rid themselves forever of this troublesome demand for reform.
“May we not then rightfully offer our farewell message to our fellow men?
“First—To our Moslem fellow countrymen:
“We desire to express our deepest gratitude to those of you who have sympathized with and helped us in these days of calamity and bloodshed. Towards those who have robbed and massacred us, and plundered and burned our houses, we have chiefly feelings of compassion. You have perhaps done these terrible things in what has seemed to you the service of your religion and government.
“Second—To our Sultan—most dread and potent sovereign:
“Apparently you have been persuaded that we are a rebellious people deserving only utter and speedy extermination. For such as you, this work of destruction is no doubt an easy one, the more so as we have had neither the means nor the disposition to resist it.
“Third—To the European powers:
“We have not been an importunate nor a turbulent people. We did not incite the Crimean War, nor any of the subsequent wars which have stricken this empire. It is not of our will that we were begotten to a new political life by the treaty of 1856. Our complaints and appeals have been based solely on the sentiment of humanity and the common rights of man. It was you who arranged the “scheme of reforms,” and urged it upon our Sultan till he was irritated to the extent that he seems to have adopted the plan of ridding himself finally of this annoyance by exterminating us as a people; and now, while he is relentlessly carrying out this plan, you are standing by as spectators and witnesses of this bloody work.
“We wonder if sympathy and the brotherhood of man and chivalry are wholly things of the past, or are the material and political interests dividing you so great that the massacre of the whole people is a secondary thing? In either case “We who are about to die salute you.”
“Fourth—To the Christians of America:
“Although we have cherished strong prejudice against your mission work among us, recent events have proved that our Protestant brethren are one with us, and have shared fully our anxieties and our perils. You have labored through them to promote among us the peace and prosperity of the gospel. It is not your fault that one result of their teaching and example has been to excite our masters against us. The Turkish government dreads and dislikes nothing so much as the ideas of progress which you have sent us.”
[1] The above description is taken literally from a report of the British Vice-Consul of Erzeroum. Copies are in possession of the diplomatic representatives of the powers at Constantinople. The scene occurred in the Village of Semal before the massacres, during the normal condition of things. [↑]
[2] Extracts from letters are left unsigned for fear of endangering the writers’ lives. [↑]
VIII.
THE ARMENIANS OF TO-DAY.
There are about five millions of Armenians in the world at present: three millions in the Turkish Empire, a million and a half in Russian Armenia, and half a million more scattered through Persia, India, and Burmah, Egypt, Europe (there are two or three hundred thousand in the Austrian Empire), and America. There are poor and ignorant people among them, as among every people; the majority, however, are (or were before the late horrors) well off, and many of them rich, educated, refined, and, in a word, modern Christian people. Of all the impudent inversions of truth ever perpetrated, the most outrageously impudent and shamelessly the exact contrary of fact is the assertion of Mavroyeni Bey, the Turkish minister at Washington, that the case of the Turks against the Armenians is like that of the whites against the Indians in this country; that the American whites must be allowed to keep the Indians down, and the Turks must be allowed to keep the Armenians down. If the Indians possessed all the money, all the intelligence, all the cultivation, and all the morals in America, and the whites were a mob of ignorant, cruel, lustful ruffians holding them down by the organized power of the sword, the comparison would be just. As it is, the Turks correspond fairly enough with the Indians, and the Armenians to the whites, in every other respect than military power. Does a Turk—a true Turk—ever write a book? Does he ever publish a newspaper, or read one? Does he ever build a church, or pay attention to the moral precepts taught in one? Does he ever found or manage a business, or even an estate? In a word, does he have any more intellectual, moral, or business part in the life of modern civilization than a Hottentot or a Matabele? And do not the Armenians do and have all these things? Are they not in the stream of the same kind of cultivated Christian life led by Americans? Nowhere else on earth, but in the Turkish Empire, can one find millions of gentlemen and ladies and civilized modern citizens ruled over, oppressed, and massacred in hundreds of thousands by a gang of mediaeval Asiatic barbarians, not advanced from the time of Timour or Jenghiz Khan. It is the greatest anachronism and monstrosity of modern times.
AN ARMENIAN FAMILY.
ANATOLIA COLLEGE AT MARSOVAN.
If my work is thought prejudiced, listen to what is said of them by men of the first authority,—the greatest statesmen, the best informed special correspondent, and one of the chief historians of England at the present time. First the statesman:—
“The Armenians are the representatives of one of the oldest civilized Christian races, and beyond all doubt one of the most pacific, one of the most industrious, and one of the most intelligent races in the world.”—[Gladstone.
Next the special correspondent:—
“The Armenians constitute the whole civilizing element in Anatolia (Asia Minor); peaceful to the degree of self-sacrifice, law-abiding to their own undoing, and industrious and hopeful under conditions which would appall the majority of mankind. At their best, they are the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are moulded.”—[E. J. Dillon.
Lastly the historian:—
“The best chance for the future of the Asiatic provinces of Turkey lies in the uprising of a progressive Christian people, which may ultimately grow into an independent Christian state. The Armenians have, alone among the races of Western Asia, the gifts that can enable them to aspire to this mission. They are keen-witted, energetic, industrious, apt to learn, and quick in assimilating western ideas.”—[James Bryce.