Amadia, on the western frontier of the Nestorians, had now surrendered to the Turks; and the war on that side of the mountains being ended, Mr. Hinsdale left Mosul on the last day of September, and in eight days was at Asheta. The prospect from the summit on the western side of the valley was of singular beauty. The village of Asheta extended below him for a mile and a half, with numerous plats of grain and vegetables interspersed, the whole diversified with shade trees of various kinds. A short distance above the village was a deep ravine, from which the snow never disappeared. The spot selected for the mission house, was on the summit of a hill, near the centre of the village.
Soon after the arrival of Mr. Hinsdale, the papal bishop of Elkosh and an Italian priest found their way to Asheta. They stated to the Patriarch, that many boxes of presents were on their way from Diarbekir, and requested permission to remain till they arrived. The following Sabbath the Patriarch, with Mar Yûsûf and several priests, held a public discussion with them on the prominent errors of the Papacy. The result was not favorable to their object, and the next day their presents were returned, and they had permission to leave the country. They left during the week, but not till they had taken much pains, though apparently without success, to shake the Patriarch's confidence in the American missionaries. Soon after, early in November, Mr. Hinsdale returned to Mosul.
Up to this time, Mar Yûsûf had been fearless and tolerably patient, but he had now become heartily tired of the mountains, and longed for his peaceful home on the plain. It was the first time in a life of fifty years, that he had been ill when far from home. Yet he had been faithful in imparting religious instruction, and the missionary regretted his departure. Near the close of November, Dr. Grant received a letter from Nûrûllah Bey, requesting his professional services at Julamerk. His Nestorian friends strongly objected to his going, as they were apprehensive of treachery, and not without some reason; but he went, committing his way unto the Lord. He found the chief sick of fever, from which he recovered, through the blessing of God on the remedies employed. There was now opportunity to counteract reports intended to enlist the Emir in measures to destroy the mission. He became convinced that Dr. Grant was neither building a castle at Asheta, nor a bazaar to draw away the trade. Elsewhere, as will appear in the sequel, these reports had a more serious effect.
Dr. Grant had already heard of the arrival of the Rev. Thomas Laurie and wife at Mosul; and two days after, returning from Julamerk, he received the painful intelligence that Mr. Hinsdale was dangerously sick. He at once hastened to his relief, but he was too late. The devoted missionary rested from his labors on the 26th of December, at the age of thirty-five, after a sickness of twenty-four days. His disease was typhus fever. Mr. Hinsdale was a native of Torrington, Connecticut, and received his education at Yale College, and the Auburn Theological Seminary. "On the night of his decease," says Dr. Grant, "while his deeply afflicted wife and Mr. Laurie were sitting by him, he was heard to say, amid the wanderings of his disordered intellect; 'I should love to have the will of my Heavenly Father done!' It was his 'ruling passion strong in death.' Desiring to have the will of God done in all the earth, he had toiled to fit himself for the missionary work, and then, regardless of sacrifices, he had come to a field rich in promise, but full of hardships. His daily spirit, as evinced in all his actions, made me feel that he was just the man for this portion of the Lord's vineyard."
The Papists were, to say the least, not the main cause of Mar Shimon's alienation from his American friends. In 1840, after Dr. Grant had passed through the mountains the second time, on his return to America, the Patriarch was visited by Mr. Ainsworth, travelling at the expense of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Royal Geographical Society. The statements of this gentleman and of his companion, Mr. Rassam, to Mar Shimon, so resembled those made by the Papists, that the Patriarch suspected them of being Jesuits in disguise, and they actually left the mountains without removing that suspicion. Nor was it creditable to them, that they passed through Oroomiah without even calling on the American missionaries there.1
1 See Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians, pp. 151-154. For Mr. Ainsworth's account of this visit, see Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, etc., vol. i. p. 1, and vol. ii. pp. 243-255. It is not necessary here to correct the erroneous statements in the passage referred to.
Had the interference gone no further, not much harm might have ensued. But Mr. Ainsworth's report induced the Christian Knowledge and Gospel Propagation Societies, in 1842, to send the Rev. George Percy Badger as a missionary to the Mountain Nestorians, or rather to the Patriarch and his clergy in the mountains. This was nine years after the commencement of the mission to the Nestorians at Oroomiah, eight years after the republication in England of the Researches of Messrs. Smith and Dwight among the Nestorians, and a year after the publication there of Dr. Grant's work, entitled "The Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes." Nor was there ever a time when the attention of the English nation was more directed to Western Asia.
How much the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London actually knew of the American mission, before officially and strongly commending Mr. Badger to the confidence of the Nestorian Patriarch, is not known. They make no reference whatever to that mission, and write as if they looked upon the field as entirely unoccupied, and open to a mission from the Church of England.
Mr. Badger spent the winter of 1842-43 in Mosul; and, early in the spring, before the mountain roads were open, and while Dr. Grant and Mr. Laurie were preparing at Mosul to visit Asheta, he hastened to the Patriarch, with letters and presents from the dignitaries of the Church of England. The civil relations of the Patriarch to the Koords, the Persians, and the Turks were such at that time, as to make him extremely anxious for the intervention of some foreign power; and he had been frankly told, by the American missionaries, that they could assure him of no such intervention. Coming with letters commendatory from the Primate of all England, the Lord Bishop of London, and the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, and with offers of schools, his power for good or evil must have been great. It cannot be that the patrons of Mr. Badger anticipated the attitude he would assume with regard to the American mission. The speedy close of his mission, may be assumed as proof that they did not. But while this is cheerfully admitted, the disastrous consequences of this interference should be distinctly stated. Mr. Badger gives the following account of his proceedings, in his report to the Committee of the Gospel Propagation Society, dated March 30, 1843. After stating the pains he took to explain the character, teaching, and discipline of his own Church, and how well his proposals to establish schools were received by Mar Shimon, he says, "The proceedings of the American Dissenters here necessarily formed a leading topic of our discourse. Through the influence of Nûrûllah Bey, they have been permitted to settle in the mountains, and two large establishments, one at Asheta and the other at Leezan, a village one day distant, are at present in course of being built. They have also a school in actual existence at Asheta, the expenses of which are defrayed by the Board, and, if I am rightly informed, another at Leezan. …. I did not fail to acquaint the Patriarch how far we are removed, in doctrine and discipline, from the American Independent missionaries. I showed him, moreover, that it would be injudicious, and would by no means satisfy us, to have schools among his people by the side of theirs, and pressed upon him to decide what plan he would pursue under existing circumstances. I think the Patriarch expressed his real sentiments on the peculiar doctrines of the Independents, when he said, 'I hold them as cheap as an onion;' but there are other considerations, which have more influence in inclining him to keep on friendly terms with the missionaries. In the first place, Dr. Grant has gained the apparent good will of Nûrûllah Bey, and the Patriarch may fear that, if he manifests any alteration in his conduct towards the American missionaries, the Emir might revenge it. Secondly, although I am fully convinced, that there is hardly a Nestorian in the mountains, who sympathizes with the doctrine or discipline of the Dissenters, whenever these differ from their own, yet I am persuaded, that, from the Patriarch to the poorest peasant, all value the important services of a good physician; and besides this, they highly prize the money which the missionaries have already expended, and are still expending among them with no niggardly hand, in presents, buildings, schools, etc."1
1 Nestorians and their Rituals, vol. i. pp. 248, 249.