In fifty years the American missionaries have gained a very considerable and wide-spread influence, not only by labours which are recognised as disinterested, but by the purity and righteousness of their lives; and the increased friendliness and accessibility of the Moslems of Urmi give hope that the purer teachings of Christianity and the example of the life of our Lord are regarded by them with less of hostility or indifference than formerly.
The history of the mission is best given in the words of Dr. Shedd, one of its oldest members.[28]
The communicants of the "Evangelical Syriac Church," which might be termed, from its organisation and creed, the Presbyterian Syriac Church, numbered 216 in 1857 and 2003 in 1887.
Apart from the results of Christian teaching and example, there can be, I think, no doubt that the residence of righteous foreigners in Urmi for over half a century has had a most beneficial effect on the condition of the Nestorians. At the time when the first American missionaries settled in Urmi the yoke of Islam was hardly bearable. The Christians were oppressed and plundered, their daughters were taken by violence, and they were scarcely allowed to practise the little religion left to them. The Persian Government, sensitive as it is to European opinion, has gradually remedied a state of matters upon which the reports of the missionaries were justly to be dreaded, and at the present time the Christians of Urmi and the adjacent plain have comparatively very little to complain of.
At the same time the Syriac Church was at its lowest ebb, absolutely sunk in ignorance and superstition. It had no exposition of the Bible, and all worship was in the ancient Syriac tongue, then as now "not understanded of the people." It had no books or any ability to establish schools. Bibles were scarce, and a single copy of the Psalms could not be bought for less than 32s. The learned nuns and deaconesses of the early days were without successors. Women were entirely neglected, and it was regarded as improper for the younger among them to be seen at church. In Urmi not a woman could read, and in the whole Nestorian region they were absolutely illiterate, with the exception of the Patriarch's sister and two or three nuns.
The translation of the Bible into modern Syriac, a noble work, now undergoing revision; the College; the Female Seminary; the translation and publication of many luminous books; the circulation of a periodical called Rays of Light, together with fifty years of intercourse with men and women whose chief aim is the religious and intellectual elevation of the people among whom they dwell, have wrought a remarkable change, though that the change is menaced with perils, and is not an absolutely unmixed good, cannot be gainsaid.
It is for the future to decide whether the Reform movement in Umri or elsewhere could survive in any strength the removal of the agency which inaugurated it, and whether a Church without a ritual and with a form of government alien to the genius of the East and the traditions of the fathers, can take root in the affections of an eminently conservative people.
The Mission, founded by the present Archbishop of Canterbury at the request of the Catholicos of the East, Mar Shimun, the Patriarch of the Syrian Church, arrived in Urmi in the autumn of 1885. At the time of my visit it consisted of five mission priests, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and an ordained Syrian, four of whom were at the headquarters in Urmi, one in the Kurdish mountains, and one on the Urmi Plain. Four Sisters of Bethany arrived in the spring of 1890 for the purpose of opening a boarding-school for girls and instructing the women.