60 HORMUZD EASSAM, ESQ.^ ON BIBLICAL LANDS, THEIE 



■church disciphne, and pecuhar rituals, they are in every 

 respect of the same communion as the Armenians, Copts, and 

 Abyssinians. The originator of these sects was Eutyches, 

 abbot of a Constantinople convent of monks, who, in opposi- 

 tion to the doctrine of the Nestorian (so-called) heresy, 

 which attributed to our Lord two persons, went to the 

 opposite extreme, and taught that there was only one nature 

 in Christ, that the Divine absorbed His human, so that Christ 

 consisted of but one nature, and that the Divine* The 

 Jacobites as well as all other Monophysites, however, 

 disclaim all connexion with Eutyches, and claim Jacob 

 Baradseus as their reformer, from whose Christian name they 

 have been called Jacobites by their enemies ; but the}'' term 

 themselves Si/rians, as they consider their doctrine came 

 originally from the church at Antioch. This Jacob Baradseus, 

 who was an indigent monk, and a most indefatigable and 

 persevering man, being ordained bishop by a few prelates, 

 who were confined in prison, travelled all over the east on 

 foot, constituted a large number of bishops and priests, 

 revived everywhere the depressed spirits of the Monophy- 

 sites, and was so efficient by his eloquence and his astonish- 

 ing diligence that when he died, in the year 578, at Edessa, 

 where he had been a bishop, he left his sect in a very 

 flourishing state in Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Egypt, 

 Nubia, and Abyssinia.f 



The Monophysite churches have generally followed the 

 corruptions and errors which have been introduced in 

 the Greek and Roman Catholic churches ; such as prayers to 

 the Blessed Virgin, and the saints, auricular confession, adora- 

 tion of pictures, the unscriptiu-al administration of the Lord's 

 Supper, and prayers for the dead, though with strange in- 

 consistency they do not believe in the existence of purga- 

 tory. They believe firmly in transubstantiation, and 

 worship the consecrated element. Unleavened bread is 

 used in the sacrament, and broken pieces of it are dipped 

 in undiluted wine, and given to the people only, the 

 priests receiving the wine separately. The communicants 

 are not allowed to touch the sacred elements, but it is 



* The Monophysite doctrine is not the a-eed of the "Ancient Syrian 

 'Church" (a translation of which was published in 1874 by the Syrian 

 Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius Peter III, and carefully investigated at 

 a meeting of some seventy specially qualified clergy in London, who 

 passed a resolution expressing their opinion that it " completely purged 

 that church of the Monophysite heresy commonly attributed to it "). — Ed. 



t Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii, p. 56. 



