It is worthy of note that Mr. Dwight's first formal sermon to Armenian women, was in May, 1843. It was in Pera, and four of them had walked not less than three miles to attend the service. One was forty-five or fifty years old, and her sentiments were decidedly evangelical. The religion of the Gospel shone beautifully in some of the Armenian families. Mr. Hamlin had an interesting experience at Bebek. On the 13th of August, on returning from Constantinople, he found nine women and one man waiting his return to preach to them the Gospel. On the 21st, sixteen listened with breathless attention to a sermon on the unsearchable riches of Christ, and nine of these were women. On the 25th, another company of men and women called. Mr. Hamlin was at work upon some philosophical apparatus, when one of the men put his head through the door, and said, "Good-morning, reverend sir, come here, and preach to us the Gospel." September 22d, a company of Armenian men and women, four of them from Nicomedia, came and asked him "to teach them out of the Gospel." On the 24th eight, besides the students, were present at the services, forenoon and afternoon; two from Galata, one from Constantinople, three from Nicomedia, and two from Adabazar. On the day following, thirteen were present, most of whom had heard the maledictions of the Armenian Patriarch pronounced, the day before, on all who should visit the missionaries. On a day in December devoted to family visitations, Mr. Dwight preached the Gospel to more than thirty women.
It was not the missionaries alone, who labored in word and doctrine. Several priests were "obedient to the faith," and preached it more or less formally; and intelligent lay brethren,—scattered abroad, some by persecution, some in the prosecution of their worldly business,—like the primitive disciples, preached the Word; that is, they took such opportunities as they could get, to make known the truth to those of their countrymen who were disposed to hear it. Vertanes, who had suffered imprisonment and banishment for the sake of Christ, made an extensive missionary tour through Armenia.
In the summer of 1843, a body of Turkish police was seen conducting a young man, under twenty years of age, in the European dress, through the streets of Constantinople. His face was pale, and his arms were pinioned behind him. Arriving at a place of public concourse, they suddenly halted, the prisoner kneeled, and a blow of the yatagan severed his head from the body. His crime was apostasy from the Mohammedan faith. He was an obscure Armenian, and while under the influence of alcohol had abjured the faith of his fathers, and declared himself a Mohammedan. He had not submitted, however, to the rite of circumcision before he repented of his rashness. The penalty of apostasy being death, he fled to Greece. In about a year, impatient to see his widowed mother, he returned in a Frank dress, but was soon recognized, imprisoned, tortured to induce him to reabandon his original belief, and even paraded through the streets with his hands tied behind his back, as if for execution; but upon his proclaiming aloud his firm belief in Christianity, he was sentenced to decapitation. The British ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning, impelled by motives of humanity, made an earnest effort to procure his release, and the Grand Vizier promised that the young man should not be beheaded. On learning that he had been, the ambassador declared it to be an insult to the Established Religion of England, as well as to all Europe, and insisted that no similar act of fanaticism should ever again occur. In this he was said to be warmly seconded both by the French and Prussian ministers. The Grand Vizier, as before, was ready to give a verbal pledge; but soon a second act of treachery was discovered. A Greek, in the interior of Asia Minor, had declared himself it Mohammedan, and afterwards refused to perform the rites of that religion, and the Turkish minister was preparing the death-warrant for him, at the very time when he was making these promises to the ambassador. Sir Stratford now very peremptorily demanded, that a written pledge be given by the Sultan himself (as his ministers could no longer be trusted), that no person embracing the Moslem religion and afterwards returning to Christianity, should on that account be put to death; and the Earl of Aberdeen, on the part of the home government, instructed him in a noble letter not to recede from the demand. The Prussian and French governments were equally decided; and after some hesitancy, even Russia threw the weight of her influence into the scale. After a struggle of some weeks the required pledge was given, signed by the Sultan himself, that henceforth NO PERSON SHOULD BE PERSECUTED FOR HIS RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN TURKEY. The British ambassador distinctly acknowledged the finger of God in this transaction, which he said seemed little less than a miracle.
It will hereafter appear, that the pledge had a wider range, than was thought of at the time by the governments of Europe, by their representatives, or even by the Turks. God was setting up a spiritual kingdom, and his people must have freedom to worship Him in his appointed way. The battle for religious freedom in Turkey was fought over the mutilated remains of the Armenian renegade, and the Sultan's pledge secured to the Protestant native Christians the full enjoyment of their civil rites, while openly practicing their own religion.1
1 This brief statement is compiled from the Correspondence relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostasy from Islamism, published by the British Parliament in 1844, occupying forty folio pages. The correspondence is highly honorable to the great men who were then controlling the political affairs of Europe, and to a large extent also of Western Asia.
But before this comprehensive meaning of the pledge could be understood, and the benefit of it actually enjoyed by the people of God, they were subjected to more grievous sufferings for their faith than any yet endured. From 1843 to 1846, there was no long respite from persecution; yet in all this time the spirit of inquiry wonderfully spread, and believers were the more added to the Lord.
In 1843, Priest Vertanes was rudely deposed from office, and thrown into prison. Finding he could not be induced to sign a paper of recantation, drawn up for him by the Patriarch, he was hurried by the Patriarch's beadles, with great violence, into an open sail-boat, without opportunity to obtain even an outer garment from his house, although it was midwinter, and sent across the sea of Marmora to the monastery of Ahmah, near Nicomedia.
The Foreign Secretary of the Board spent eleven weeks in this mission, in the winter of 1843-44, accompanied by Dr. Joel Hawes, of Hartford. At that time it was arranged by the mission, in full accordance with the views of their visiting brethren, to discontinue the Greek department, to give distinct names as missions to the Jewish department and to the work among the Armenians, to open a female high school at Constantinople, and to associate Mr. Wood with Mr. Hamlin in the seminary at Bebek. It was also decided, that Messrs. Riggs and Ladd, turning from the Greeks to the Armenians, should acquire the use of the languages spoken by the latter people; that Mr. Calhoun should be authorized to visit Syria, with a view to an opening for him in connection with the projected seminary on Mount Lebanon; that Mr. Temple, then too old to learn either the Armenian or Turkish languages, ought to be authorized, in view of the discontinuance of the Greek department, to return to the churches whose faithful messenger he had been so long; and that the native Armenian agency should be put upon a footing on which it would be more likely to be sustained ultimately by the people.
There was reason afterwards to believe, that it would have been better for Mr. Temple to remain in Turkey, in the exercise of his eminently apostolic influence upon his brother missionaries and the native Protestant community, Greek and Armenian. Yet his own opinion was in favor of the course he pursued. "I am too old," he said, "to think for a moment of learning a new language, and no opening invites me here in any language I can command." After a farewell visit to his brethren in Constantinople, he set his face homeward, and arrived in Boston in the summer of 1844. He was usefully employed as an agent of the Board, or in the pastoral relation, until his health broke down. In January, 1851, through the kindness of a friend, he made a voyage to Chagres, and another to Liverpool. But he returned from the last of these voyages enfeebled by the roughness of the passage; and his strength gradually declined, until the 9th of August, 1851, seven years after his return to America, when he died at Reading, Massachusetts, his native place, in the sixty-second year of his age. It may be truly said, that few men have borne more distinctively than he, the impress of the Saviour's image.1
1 See Life and Letters of Rev. Daniel Temple, for twenty-three years a Missionary in Western Asia. By his son, Rev. Daniel H. Temple, Boston, 1855.