“Your going,” she writes, “is the greatest blow I have yet had. But God’s blessing and my love and gratitude go with you, as you well know. You know well, too, that I shall do everything I can for the Sisters whom you have left me. But it will not be like you. Your wishes will be our law. And I shall try to remain in the Crimea for their sakes as long as any of us are here. I do not presume to express praise or gratitude to you, Reverend Mother, because it would look as if I thought you had done the work not unto God but unto me. You were far above me in fitness for the General Superintendency, both in wordly talent of administration, and far more in the spiritual qualifications which God values in a superior. The being placed over you in our unenviable reign in the East was my misfortune and not my fault. Dearest Reverend Mother what you have done for the work no one can ever say. But God rewards you for it with Himself. If I thought that your valuable health would be restored by a return home, I should not regret it. My love and gratitude will be yours wherever you go. I do not presume to give you any tribute but my tears.” The letter concludes with the words, “The gratitude of the Army is yours.” Dublin Review, October, 1917.
[87] Anatolia is from the Greek word 'Ανατολπ which, like the Latin Oriens, signifies the eastern land, the land of sunrise. It is the modern name of Asia Minor which the Ottomans call Anadoli.
[88] For an interesting account of the two œcumenical councils of Nicæa see Hefele’s scholarly Histoire des Conciles, Tom. I, Livre II and Tom. III, Livre XVIII (trans. by Dom H. Leclercq, Paris, 1910).
[89] Cf. The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, p. 93 (by W. M. Ramsay, London, 1890).
[90] “The fate of these cities,” observes a recent traveler in Anatolia, “is that of numerous others whose names are a part of classic history. Everywhere throughout Asia Minor decaying ruins mark the sites where art and culture were united with barbaric power. Everywhere are evidences of past refinement, splendor and greatness. And over all the prostrate columns and broken entablatures, the domed mosques and black-green cypresses, the fertile valleys and the great desert, the dark-visaged men and the silent, veiled women lingers the spell, undefinable but wondrously fascinating, of Asia; the cradle of the human race, the land of luxurious magnificence, the abode of mighty empires that rose and crumbled long before the western world had emerged from darkness; the birthlace, too, of subtle mysticism and of every religion that has soothed the soul in anguish and comforted it with hope.” Asia Minor, p. 317 (by W. A. Hawly, London, 1918).
[91] See the author’s Woman in Science, p. 12 et seq. (New York, 1913).
[92] Ionia and the East, pp. 8, 9 (by D. G. Hogarth. Oxford, 1907). Another eminent Orientalist, H. R. Hall, expresses substantially the same view when he tells us that “It was in Ionia that the new Greek civilization arose; Ionia, in whom the old Ægean blood and spirit most survived, taught the new Greece, gave her coined money and letters, art and poesy, and her shipmen, forcing the Phœnicians from before them, carried her new culture to what were then deemed the ends of the earth.” The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis, p. 79 (London, 1916).
[93] The Story of Turkey, p. 78 (by Stanley Lane-Poole, New York, 1888).
[94] The historian Hammer-Purgstall tells us that the ablest generals and statesmen under the reigns of Selim and Solyman the Magnificent—those who raised the Ottoman Empire to its acme of prosperity—were renegades. During this period no fewer than eight out of ten of the grand viziers were likewise apostates. “Si donc la puissance ottomane foula aux pieds tant de nations, ce resultat ne doit pas être attribué au caractère indolent et grossier des Ottomans, mais à l’esprit de ruse et de finesse qui distingue les peuples grecs et slaves, a la témérité et a la perfidie des Allanais et des Dalmates, à la persévérance et à l’opiniâtreté des Bosnien et des Croates, enfin à la valeur et aux talents des renégats des pays conquis.” Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman, Tom. VI, p. 452–454 (Paris, 1835).
[95] The Story of the Barbary Corsairs, p. 66 (by Poole and Kelly, New York, 1893).