There are also several Coptic churches in Cairo proper, and one in Beyn es-Sureen, near the Armenian Church, is said to be the oldest in Egypt, and consequently one of the earliest churches in Christendom. A portion of the Copts, who have joined communion with the Roman Catholics, have their church close by. I saw a great deal of their priest, and of some leading members of his community, while I spent a summer in a village on the Lebanon. They had gone there partly for their health and partly to escape the hottest months of the Egyptian summer. The priest was a very different type of man intellectually from the lethargic monks I met in the convents at Wadi el-Natrún. I am indebted to him for much information about the Catholic churches in the Near East. He had been prepared for Holy Orders in Rome, although he and his community are under allegiance to the Pope, and do not call themselves Roman Catholics, but members of the Coptic Catholic Church, while they are very tenacious of the privileges which they secured when they seceded from the main body of the Copts. The priests are allowed to marry, and also to say Mass in the obsolete Coptic language. My friend told me that though allowed to marry if he wished to do so, he had come to the conclusion that the Latin Church was right in enforcing celibacy on its clergy. ‘No! no! no!’ from the ladies who were present at our conversation, shows that my friend’s views were not popular.
Similar privileges have been allowed to the other members of eastern Christian churches when they submitted to the Church of Rome. It is the exception when their priests go to a theological college at Rome, and the great majority evidently do not hold my friend’s views on matrimony, for few remain single.
As only the Church of Rome repeats the Mass in Latin, it might have been expected that the eastern churches under her authority would have made use of languages understood by their congregations. But this is not so. No Copt can understand the Coptic liturgy which he hears repeated; only a few cultured Syrian Maronites can follow the Syriac Mass, and the Catholic Greeks, the Armenians, and the Chaldeans all hear the liturgy in languages long obsolete.
My friend could follow the meaning of the Coptic phrases he daily used; but apart from these, Coptic is a dead language to him. He kindly repeated the Lord’s Prayer to me, and, with possibly an Arabic accent, his words must have sounded the same as those in use in the days of the Ptolemies. A few Coptic words have still survived and are in use amongst the peasantry of Upper Egypt, and possibly philologists may discover some in the colloquial Arabic of the Delta. It is in Upper Egypt that we still find the type portrayed in the ancient sculptures, amongst the Moslems as well as the Christians; but in the Delta the Copt shows his ancestry more conspicuously, as the Moslems amongst whom he dwells have there a greater admixture of Arab blood. I was very much struck with the resemblance a Coptic gentleman, who was staying at the same inn as myself, bore to the celebrated ‘Sheykh-el-Beled,’ the fifth dynasty statue in the Cairo museum. He was younger and not as stout as the statue, but he might have passed for a younger brother. The broad nose and full lips, the rather prominent cheek-bones, and a slight upward inclination of the eyes from the nose, were all there as in his prototype of some sixty centuries ago. I remarked to him that while we were savages his forebears were the greatest people in the world. His answer was, ‘Yes; and now you are the greatest people in the world, while we are the savages.’ Lane remarks that the Egyptian, in answering a question, is more likely to say what he thinks may be agreeable to his hearer than to stick to the absolute truth. This looked rather like it.
I have heard our missionaries accused of deceiving the subscribers to the missions, by stating the numbers of their converts and not specifying whether these converts were from Islam or were merely Copts who had changed from one form of Christianity to another. If this is true, the subscribers might justly feel that they had been deceived. But I should like further proof of this accusation before accepting the truth of it; the tendency of Europeans in the East is to believe anything which may discredit the missionary. That Islam is a barrier which the missionary has so far failed to break through is true enough, and missionaries whom I have met have been the first to admit this. Can one wonder, then, that they turn from so barren a soil to sow their seed amongst the Copts, who have shown some tendency to receive it? The faith of the Copts has sustained them through centuries of persecution; but it is amazing how stagnant a faith may sometimes hold a people together.
When I think of those lazy monks at Wadi el-Natrún; their neglected chapels; their barren gardens, though water was there had they the energy to draw it; I marvel how this people has ever risen to be a power in Egypt. That they are a power to be reckoned with we have lately seen. The common mistake of judging a people from a few specimens who are forced into one’s notice is evident here. A very much larger proportion of them are literate compared with the Moslem Egyptians, and they fill, in consequence, a much larger proportion of situations where some instruction, other than that of the Koran, is necessary. The grievance they are ventilating is that they do not get their share of the highly salaried government posts, and as far as I could ascertain, they have a subject of complaint. Their numbers will probably increase largely, now that persecution no more drives their weaker brethren into the folds of Islam. They are fervent in business if they do not always serve the Lord, and some have accumulated great wealth.
The black and sometimes the blue turban, which distinguishes them from the Mohammedans, was originally forced on them with other and more vexatious enactments; they still wear it, however, though of course free to put on what they like. The women used to wear the face veil when out of doors, more as a protection than as an ordinance of their religion, and at present most of them have discarded it.
CHAPTER XII
THE SPHINX, AND A DISSERTATION ON TOMMY ATKINS
I WELL remember how sentiment was shocked when it was proposed to construct a tram-line to the Pyramids of Gizeh: I may also have turned up the whites of my eyes at the mere thought of such a desecration. It is now a well-established concern, and we may congratulate ourselves that neither the Pyramids nor the Sphinx seem much the worse for it. The line ends just below the plateau on which the Pyramids have been raised, and by the time these are reached the prosaic tram-cars are well out of sight. The Antiquities Department holds all the ground which contains anything here of interest, so we shall be spared the erection of anything tending to vulgarise it. The tram is in truth a great boon to many, and not the least to those who, like myself, spend much time in the bazaars and streets of the old city.