of their monasteries was called by their Latin visitors that of "St. Mary Deipara," i.e. the Mother of God; and the whole valley took the name of Scete, or of the Ascetics. Another adjacent monastery was named after St. Macarius, one of the first of the hermit saints of Egypt, and the pride of the valley was, and still is, a beautiful tamarind-tree, which is said to have grown out of the staff of St. Ephrem which he planted in the sand.

When the Mahometans conquered Egypt, they at first spared the monks, because they had a respect for the stern hermit life of devotees of all kinds; but after a time they fell upon Nitria, plundered, destroyed, and sold many of the monks for slaves. Still the hermits returned, and at last permission was gained to surround the convents with a high wall, to secure them from the attacks of the wandering Arabs in the desert. From this time they seem to have afforded a secure refuge to the monks, and likewise to the manuscripts, which were collected from both Syria and Egypt as a welcome gift and precious charge for the recluses.

From time to time reports reached Europe of the wealth of sacred literature here stored up, and Robert Huntington, who had left home whilst Archbishop Usher and Bishop Pearson were diligently investigating the Ignatian Epistles, accomplished a journey from Aleppo to Nitria, in hopes of there finding the much-desired Syrian copy. Though facilities for European travellers in the East were much fewer in the year 1679 than at present, Mr.

Huntington reached Nitria, and saw the monks; but they could not understand the object of their visitor, and probably feared him, for at St. Mary Deipara they refused to let him into their library, and only allowed him to see one grand manuscript of the Bible; nor would they (nor perhaps could they) even tell him whether they possessed a Syrian copy of the letters of Ignatius. The books which he collected from other sources are now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He afterwards became Bishop of Raphoe.

Some thirty years after, a learned Syrian, named Elias Assemani, was sent from Rome, by Pope Clement XI., and being better understood by the Nitrians, was shown by them a cellar, or cave, filled with manuscripts, which they avowed themselves to be unable to read. He persuaded them to sell him forty, and conveyed them to Rome, in spite of their being once all submerged in the Nile on their way. But as it is very difficult to obtain leave to study in the Vatican library, and copying is never permitted, no great benefit has accrued to the world from their presence there. Other travellers obtained the certainty that these monasteries contained most precious stores, which the monks were allowing to decay, tearing up and ruining by neglect, but which they valued in proportion to the curiosity evinced about them by travellers, refusing to sell them at any price, though their own Patriarch gave them permission, and represented that they might thus obtain the means of repairing their broken and ruined buildings. At last, in 1838

an English clergyman, Archdeacon Tattam,* hearing that the determination of the monks was beginning to yield, set forth for the valley of Nitria, and found that the monks, though at first denying that they possessed any such books, might be dealt with so as to part with such as had not in the first page an imprecation from the donor against any who should dispose of them.

He was admitted into a dark, vaulted room, the whole floor covered with leaves of books, in which he waded about with a taper in one hand, and a stick to stir them in the other! Thus having gained permission of the Patriarch of Egypt, and even the influence of a desert sheikh, he succeeded in purchasing and carrying off in a bag on the backs of donkeys, from this and the other monasteries, a number of old Syrian manuscripts, forty of which are now in the British Museum. They were carefully examined by Mr. Cureton, who found among them three of the much-desired Syriac letters of St. Ignatius ! It appeared at first as if a difficulty existed, as far as regarded these three,—namely, those to Polycarp, to Ephesus, and to the Romans; but on inspection it proved that these three were very much shorter than even the Greek version accepted by scholars, and, though agreeing with them in the main, were like a very brief abstract of them.

Some hold that the three short Syriac are the only genuine ones. Others regard them as abridgments of the shorter Greek, and thus confirmations of their * Deceased since these pages were penned.

existence at a very early period, and others continue to view the whole as unauthentic.

Such is the doubt in which it is the lot of mankind usually to be left, when very great stringency of proof is demanded for what, in the nature of things, can often not be closely traced out. Altogether, however, the consent of the most learned scholars and divines has accepted the shorter Greek version as the probable reality, and as the legacy to the Christian world left by the martyred pupil of St. John.

Therefore it is from thence that the quotations given in the last chapter have been taken, with the exception of that beautiful description of the Lord's Day, which is only to be found in the longer Greek, and is an amplification of the brief counsel in the shorter version.

CHAPTER X.

THE HEBREWS OF THE EAST.

"Reft of thy sons, amid thy foes forlorn,
Mourn, widow'd queen; forgotten Zion, mourn.
Is this thy place and city, this thy throne.
Where the wild desert rears its craggy stone;
Where suns unblest their angry lustre fling,

And wayworn pilgrims seek the scanty spring?
Where now thy pomp, which kings with envy view'd?
Where now thy might, which all those kings subdued ?"
BISHOP HEBER, Palestine.

AMONG the disciples of St. John must not only be reckoned those Syrian Greeks among whom the latter years of his life were passed, and who appear to have imbibed the most of his spirit.

His first teaching had been among those "of the circumcision," the Jews, and apparently the Parthians, and the account of his pupils would not be complete if we did not follow the history of the generation among whom his teaching was fresh, although in some cases it was rejected and in others perverted.

When the signs and warnings, foretold by our Lord, had begun to gather around Jerusalem, the Christians, as has been already said, had left the