It has been stated that the Turkish government had refused a firman to Dr. Azariah Smith, in case he were a missionary to the Nestorians of Koordistan. He accordingly remained in the Armenian mission, where he found useful occupation till the arrival of the Foreign Secretary; when it was arranged that he should proceed to Mosul by way of Beirut and Aleppo, and either remain permanently connected with the mission, or return to the Armenians as a missionary physician. A firman was now given him, and he reached Mosul in safety on the 29th of March. Little did any one think that his first duty would be to smooth Dr. Grant's descent to the grave, yet an all-wise Providence had so ordained. A typhoid fever, which had carried off many of the refugee Nestorians in Mosul, seized their beloved physician on the 5th of April. He was delirious from the moment it assumed a threatening character, and died on the 24th of April, 1844.
While the author was at Constantinople, he received a letter from Dr. Grant, stating how much his presence was needed, for a time, by his children at home. The case being urgent, he was encouraged to return and was preparing for this, when his gracious Lord called him into his presence above. The tidings of his dangerous sickness awakened much interest in Mosul. People of every rank, men of all sects and religions, watched the progress of his disease with the most earnest anxiety. The French Consul visited him almost daily. The Turkish authorities sent to inquire for him, and some came in person. One, who arrived immediately after his decease, could not refrain from tears when he heard of it. A leading Jacobite remarked, that all Mosul was weeping. The poor Patriarch, roused to a sense of his loss, exclaimed, "My country and my people are gone! Nothing remains to me but God!"
Those who have attentively read the preceding history will need nothing more to set forth the character of this eminent servant of Christ. His courage, his calmness and yet firmness of purpose, his skill in the healing art, his devotion to the cause of his Saviour, his tact in winning the confidence even of those who never before trusted their own friends, his fearlessness in the presence of unscrupulous and cruel men and his ascendency over them, his lively faith under appalling discouragements, and his unyielding perseverance, form an array of excellence rarely combined in one man. Like the holy Apostle, he was "in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." Yet was he not cast down by these things. He regarded them as incidental to his calling of God in Christ Jesus; and in the pursuit of this heavenly calling, he was more happy in the savage wilds of Koordistan, than he would have been in the most favored portions of his native land.
Mr. Laurie and Dr. Smith, the surviving brethren at Mosul, entered the mountains in the summer of 1844, explored the district of Tiary, and visited Nûrûllah Bey at Birchullah above Julamerk. Wherever they went among the Nestorians, they found a painful scene of desolation. On their return to Mosul, they forwarded their journal and a summary view of the facts, and asked the Committee to decide whether to continue the effort to approach the Nestorians from the west, and the Committee now forwarded definite instructions to discontinue this branch of the mission.1 They proceeded to Beirût in Syria, accompanied by Mrs. Hinsdale, who had been bereaved of her only child. Mr. Laurie became a member of the Syrian mission, and Dr. Smith of the Armenian; and Mrs. Hinsdale was for some time employed in the instruction of missionary children at Constantinople.
1 Missionary Herald, 1845, pp. 116-125.
CHAPTER XIV.
SYRIA.
1830-1838.
Syria was not in a condition for a return of the missionaries until after two years. Messrs. Bird and Whiting left Malta for Beirût on the 1st of May, 1830. Mr. Abbott, the English Consul, had already returned, and gave them a cordial welcome. The members of the Greek Church greeted them in a friendly manner, and were ready to read the Scriptures with them; but the Maronite priests, faithful to the Church of Rome, forbad their people all intercourse with the "Bible men," whom they described as "followers of the devil." Among those who received them gladly were a few young men, over whom the missionaries had rejoiced in former years, and who had remained steadfast in the faith, and had honored the Gospel by their lives.
Gregory Wortabet, one of the two Armenian ecclesiastics who early became connected with the mission, is already somewhat known to the reader. He belonged to the monastic priesthood in the Armenian Church, and there is an interesting autobiography of him in the "Missionary Herald" for 1828. His career up to that time, as described by himself, shows him to have been an uncommon character; and his personal sufferings, both for good and evil doing, prepared him to receive benefit from his converse with the missionaries at Beirût, which began in 1826, when he was twenty-six years of age. He was then ignorant of the Gospel, with his mind in great darkness and confusion. His first ray of light was from the good example of his missionary friends. Comparing their lives with their preaching, he admired the consistency of the two. He then compared both with the Scriptures, reading through the entire New Testament. At length day dawned upon his darkness. He became fully satisfied, that the Scriptures were from God, and committed himself to their divine teaching. Renouncing his self-righteousness, and all dependence on the absolutions of the Church, he trusted for salvation only in the blood of the Lord Jesus. Having adopted the opinion, that his monastic vows were unscriptural and therefore void, he married a discreet woman, who not long after gave good evidence of piety.