"With the return of these old superstitions, there is also a painful throwing off of moral restraint, and intemperance and kindred vices have greatly increased.
"In these circumstances the question has arisen, first in Geog Tapa, and subsequently in other places; Can 'the evangelicals' further unite in the morning and evening service conducted by priests—and there happen to be five or six in that village—who are reviving these superstitions? Almost the whole church are surprisingly united in the decision to withdraw. This has been done for the last two months, and we find upwards of one hundred members there, who are firm, and daily waxing stronger in faith and opposition to the old superstitions."
These and other distractions seriously hindered the spiritual growth of the churches in the winter of 1869 and 1870. But in the spring, a very thorough work of grace was enjoyed at Degala, and it was believed that there were more than twenty genuine conversions, mostly among the aged and middle-aged. The church in that place paid half the salary of its pastor, and was expected soon to pay the whole. Mar Yooseph, the young bishop at Bootan, wrote that his congregation had increased to one hundred and fifty, and that, for much of the time, Christ and his salvation formed the only theme of conversation. He had hopes concerning considerably more than a score of new converts. Deacon Toma, who had spent a year in the Seminary, was with him as a helper, and promised to become another Deacon Guwergis.
The immediate foreign mission field of the Nestorians, is among the Armenians in Russia, and the same people at Tabriz, Hamadan (the ancient Ecbatana), Teheran, and Ispahan in Persia, with the numerous villages in the intervening regions; descendants, to a great extent, of Armenians carried captive, in the year 1605, from the regions of Ararat by Shah Abbas the Great. They furnish the field providentially offered to the Nestorians, as the Koords do for the Armenians in Turkey. Hamadan is about three hundred miles southeast of Oroomiah, on the great caravan road between Tabriz and Bagdad. On the 28th of May, 1870, the mission resolved, that they considered it a duty urged upon them to embrace at once within their efforts the Armenians and the Mussulman sects of Central Persia, by planting a station at Hamadan; and they expressed the hope that the Board would heartily endorse this action, and help them to carry it out without delay, and also to occupy Tabriz.
The members of the mission, in the spring of 1870, were the Rev. Messrs. Coan, Labaree, Cochran, and Shedd, and Dr. Van Norden, with their wives, and Miss Dean, principal of the female seminary. The mission was now known as the "Mission to Persia," in view of plans to reach the entire population of the country. To Mr. Cochran was assigned the superintendence of twenty out-stations in Oroomiah, Sooldooz, and Tergawer, and the field outlying these, together with the male Seminary, To Mr. Coan was committed the press, the editing of the "Rays of Light," care of the treasury, and the oversight of the city church, and of two out-stations. To Messrs. Shedd and Labaree, jointly, was given the care of twenty out-stations in Oroomiah and Salmas, besides Tabriz and Hamadan, with the Armenian work in general; and, separately, to Mr. Shedd the mountain field, and to Mr. Labaree the Mussulman work. Dr. Van Norden was to carry on his medical department, and to translate the Gospel of John into Turkish.
In the autumn of this year the Mission to Persia was formally transferred to the care of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions; reserving, however, the Armenian work in the northern portion of the field, from its intimate connection with the mission to the Armenians of Turkey.
It remains only to speak of the honored founder of the mission.
Dr. Perkins lived through the entire connection of the mission with the American Board, and died at Chicopee, Massachusetts, on the 31st of December, 1869, when he had nearly attained the age of sixty-five; having been born on the 12th of March, 1805. He graduated at Amherst College in 1829, taught the next year in Amherst Academy; spent the two following years in Andover Seminary; and was tutor in his Alma Mater for the greater part of another year. The engagement last named was shortened by his call to commence the mission among the Nestorians. His life, from the time of his sailing from Boston, with Mrs. Perkins, in September, 1833, for six-and-thirty years, is largely the history of the Nestorian mission.
The careful reader of this history will not need a portraiture of his character. He was evidently made for the position he so long occupied. He was an acknowledged leader in the Lord's host; a Moses and a Joshua, with traits of character resembling those both of Elijah, and of the Apostle Paul. To idleness, vagrancy, and drunkenness, besetting sins of the Nestorians, he was the old prophet; and in his longing desire to make them savingly acquainted with the gospel, he was the apostle. Their spoken language he reduced to a written form, and gave them, in their vernacular, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments; with a commentary on Genesis and on Daniel. Is it too much to pronounce him the Apostle to the Nestorians? He came to his end as a shock of corn fully ripe; and glorious results of his self denying, and in some respects suffering mission, he will assuredly behold in the heavenly world. Where in his native land could he have labored, with the prospect of so large a spiritual harvest, taking no account of the widely reacting influence of his labors on the churches at home? And we might propose the same inquiry with respect to the departed Stoddard, and Rhea, and Grant, and Fidelia Fiske, and others, both among the dead, and the living.