[Sidenote: Their missions]
As we have seen, the wider field of missionary work owed much to the labours of the Nestorians. It is possible that Cosmas,[8] who had travelled far afield in the first half of the sixth century, may have been a Nestorian; but the reverence with which he speaks of the orthodox faith, and his constant use of the Catholic writers, would seem to show rather that, when he became a monk at any rate, he was orthodox. From him, however, we obtain knowledge of the wide field of Nestorian missions. Recent discoveries have largely added to our knowledge. It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand. Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547. [Sidenote: in the Far East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9] amid the triumphs of Islam. China has been already mentioned, and though it is not clear that only Nestorian missions prospered in the far land, there is no doubt that their success was the most prominent. Christian communities existed near the borders of Tibet[10] in the seventh century; and in the eighth and ninth they were strong in India. Even in the eleventh century the "Nestorian worship retained a great hold over many parts of Asia, between the Euphrates and the Gobi desert." Into the later and fragmentary history of these missions it is not here the place to enter. Let it only be remembered that the labours of "those Nestorian missionaries who preached and baptized under the shadow of the wall of China, and on the shores of the Yellow Sea, the Caspian, and the Indian Ocean" [11] were made possible by the diplomatic and military triumphs which radiated from Constantinople in the sixth century, and by the Christian zeal of orthodox emperors and patriarchs.
[Sidenote: Nestorianism in Persia.]
Meanwhile in Persia the Monophysites contended for supremacy with the Nestorians, and organised themselves with considerable skill. But the Nestorians, who founded schools and developed a Christology on lines different from those on which European thought was {99} proceeding, became still more rigid in their rejection of the Catholic teaching. Maraba the catholicos (540-52) and Thomas of Edessa, his pupil, seem to have drawn very near to orthodoxy; but the controversy of the Three Chapters widened the breach. Council after council, theologian, catholicos, monastery, bishop, alike denounced Justinian; and they had the support of the pagan philosophers whom he had expelled from the schools of Athens.
In Persia monasticism and the life of hermits—though the introduction of either is difficult if not impossible to trace[12]—flourished and developed on lines of their own. For a long time there was no distinction between monastic and secular life: it was only gradually that an organised monasticism grew up out of the coenobitic life for men and for women. But from the sixth century onward the organisation of monasticism gave strength to the Church, and enabled it for some time to resist the Muhammadan invasion. The Church, mapped out into dioceses and well served by numerous clergy, and having its own canon law, its own liturgical forms, and its own theology, was able for long, in spite of the absence of all state support and in spite often of state persecution, to survive in some appearance of strength till the Muhammadan invasion. The Mussulman conquest, when once it was achieved, gave something like security to the Nestorians. Though there was a time of persecution in the ninth century, it was short. Christians as teachers, physicians, philosophers, were famous in the foundation of the learning of the palmy days of the khalifs. But the whole {100} structure fell before the invasions, in later days, of the Mongols and the Turks.
[Sidenote: The Church in Palestine.]
From the more distant parts of the Persian Empire we may pass to the land where the Church had its birth. During the period of revived power in the Empire, Palestine was at peace under Justinian's rule.
In Jerusalem itself[13] it is chiefly to be said that the emperor engaged in large restorations and some original church building after the style of his better known work. He had a severe struggle with the Samaritans, but it led to many conversions.[14]
[Sidenote: Conquest by the Persians.]
But here, as elsewhere, as time went on the encroachments of the Persians were a perpetual danger to the Christianity of the East. In 615 Jerusalem fell into their hands. The Jews, whom earlier emperors had, like Justinian, kept in subjection, had grown in the days of Heraclius to be much more powerful in Syria than the Christians, and it was they who secured Jerusalem and gave it into the hands of the Persians; and again, after the Christians had overpowered the garrison, the city was given back to them and to scenes of pillage and outrage; the churches, so splendid as early as the fourth century, and described in glowing language by Procopius in the sixth, were sacked and defiled; the clergy and the patriarch were made captive; the Holy Cross, discovered by the Empress Helena, was sent away into Persia; and "all these things," says the chronicler, "happened not in a year or a month, but within a few days." The ruined churches were, however, restored {101} before long by the alms of the faithful, and it was not long before the Christians themselves were favoured by the Persian king, and Chosroes, in consequence of a council at Jerusalem in 628, legalised, it would seem, the Monophysite heresy as the representative of Christianity. [Sidenote: Reconquest by Heraclius, 622.] The conquest of Egypt followed on that of Syria; and the union of the Coptic Church with that of the Syrian Monophysites was a result, natural and almost inevitable, of the community of suffering between them. Within a few years—his campaign began in 622—the heroic emperor Heraclius won back all that had been lost, utterly defeated the Persians, won back the Holy Rood, restored the patriarch Zacharias to Jerusalem, and returned in triumph to the imperial city. In 629 he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy City, and on September 14th—still observed as the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—he restored the Rood to the Church of the Resurrection.