Eli and Sibyl Jones, Their Life and Work

by Rufus M. Jones

Until the fourth century after Christ feasts were held annually in Syria to commemorate the death of Adonis—or Tammuz, as he was called in Syria—and his birth was celebrated again in the spring. These rites came from the story of Adonis being killed at the sources of the river which bears his name. This stream, which comes down with a swollen current in autumn, carries away much red iron ore; this gives the water a reddish color, which was said to be caused by the blood of Adonis, while in the spring Adonis was supposed to rise from the dead in all his beauty, at which time all gave themselves up to unrestrained joy. It was this mourning for Adonis of which Ezekiel speaks: "He brought me to the door of the Lord's house, and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz" (or Adonis). All the heathen temples were destroyed and the worship stopped by Constantine the Great. At present there are in Syria about one million Mohammedans, two hundred and fifty thousand Maronites, two hundred and thirty-five thousand members of the Greek Church, eighty thousand Roman Catholics, eighty thousand Druses, thirty thousand Jews, but only five thousand Protestants; besides many other kinds of religions.

The Maronites are thought by some to have taken their name from Maroon, an abbot who lived near the Orontes in the sixth century. He was considered as a saint by these people, though by the pope he was deemed a heretic. In the time of the Crusades the Maronites joined the Christian army from the West, and so came in contact with the Roman Church. They are divided into four orders—Jesuits, Franciscans, Lazarists, and Capuchins—over whom one patriarch is the governor. The order of the Jesuits, with the influence of the patriarch, has from the first opposed the work of all missionaries, and a heap of stones near the convent of Kanobin marks the spot where a missionary was martyred in 1830 by the will of the Maronite patriarch.

The Druses are perhaps the most remarkable people of Syria, and they are, too, the most mysterious. It was formerly thought that they were the descendants of a band of the crusaders who were left behind and finally forgot their land and religion, taking their name from the count of Dreux. There is a more plausible theory which identifies them with some of the tribes introduced into the Palestine by Esarhaddon, the great Assyrian, in the seventh century, B. C. Their name seems to have come from Ismael Darazi, and dates no farther back than the eleventh century A. D.

Hakim, one of the caliphs, who reigned in 1019, and who seems from his tyranny and fanaticism to have been a madman, maintained that he had direct intercourse with the Deity, and that he was an incarnation of the divine intelligence. The claim was made known in the mosque at Cairo by Ismael Darazi, whose testimony was hostilely received by the people and he himself compelled to flee; but he at last succeeded in winning over the ignorant inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, whence the origin of this religion. The Druses hold that there is only one God, indefinable, incomprehensible, ineffable, and passionless—that he has made himself known by ten successive incarnations, lastly by Hakim. They believe in the transmigration of souls, and they say that virtuous souls pass into Chinese Druses, but those of the wicked into dogs or camels. These people have a high reputation for hospitality, and especially toward the English or Americans. God, they say, is great and liberal and all men are brothers, though in their bloody massacres they forget this, as Christians sometimes do.

The last hundred years have witnessed fearful struggles between the Maronites and Druses, and the rivers have run red—not from the supposed blood of Adonis, but from that of human beings—and many Christians have fallen victims.

Another sad fact is the low position which woman holds in Palestine. It is only Christianity that can put her in her true place as man's equal.

Those, then, who go to Syria to herald the gospel and plant the seeds of progress in the hearts of these people have as much to contend with as those who go among uncivilized heathen, or perhaps more. Here they are opposed by uncompromising bigotry, by the despotic hand of a mighty ruler, and they must find untold obstacles in a land where the muezzin's voice is heard from a thousand Moslem minarets, with the hate which has ever existed between the two religions, and has not been lessened by the contests around Jerusalem for the possession of the holy sepulchre. But missionaries are peacemakers, and it is well that members of the Society of Friends have been led to do work here—a Society which would proclaim the "truce of God to the whole world for ever;" a Society which would give to woman the nobility for which she was created. We may hope that the hills which witnessed the chorus of angels singing, "Peace on earth, good-will to men," shall look on a community in which this is fulfilled, and, though Jerusalem's altar-fires have gone out, there may a brighter light shine into the hearts of a people worshipping God in spirit and in truth.

We can hardly realize that this important land, "the cradle of revelation," is so small that it is only about the size of Wales. "From Dan on the north to Beersheba on the south is a distance of only one hundred and thirty-nine miles, and the paltry breadth of twenty miles from the coast to the Jordan on the north increases slowly to only forty between the shore of the Mediterranean at Gaza and the Dead Sea on the south."

To this little country, made great and again humbled, raised up and again degraded, to this people divided into so many religions, Eli and Sybil Jones felt a call to bear the gospel first promulgated from its hills and in its valleys.