husbandmen cultivated the palm-tree; their merchants were enriched by the pepper-trade; they were instructed in the use of arms from their eighth to their twenty-fifth year, and their soldiers took precedence of the Nairs or nobles of Malabar, who regarded it as a great honour to be esteemed as their brothers; and their privileges, as second in rank only to the Brahmins, were held in respect by the highest Hindoo princes, who manifested for them an extraordinary veneration.

The people were resolute in defending their ancient faith, and refusing submission to the pope. By stratagem, fraud, and conspiracy, therefore, the Portuguese persecutors attempted, and, for a season, seemed to accomplish their submission. A Synod was convened in the year 1599, at Udiamper, and 150 of the Syrian clergy compelled to appear, where they were required to abjure such of their opinions as did not accord with the Romish creed. Archbishop Menezes presided: the only alternative held out was, suspension and the inquisition; all their original works on ecclesiastical subjects were ordered to be consumed. The supremacy of the pope was thus set up: but the people declared they would rather part with their lives than use the Latin language in their prayers; their Syriac liturgy, purged in conformity with papal usurpations, was retained, and a nominal conformity was thus established; and some of their flocks and chapels alienated on the sea coast, among which St. Thome was included. At such a time it was well for their church

she had a wilderness to which she might flee. The churches in the interior would not yield to Rome. They proclaimed perpetual hostility to the Inquisition; they hid their books, and fled to the mountains, and sought protection from even heathen princes. They partially recovered their religious liberty, when the courage and industry of the Dutch shook the Portuguese empire. The Syrians asserted, with vigour and effect, the religion of their fathers. The Jesuit persecutors were unable to defend the power which they had usurped and abused: Gibbon says, "the arms of forty thousand Christians were pointed against their falling tyrants: and the Indian archdeacon assumed the character of bishop, till a fresh supply of episcopal gifts and Syrian missionaries could be obtained from the patriarch of Babylon." Yet the leaven was too intimately diffused to be so easily expelled, and there is now a Syrian Roman church, where the nominal Nestorians maintained their worship for thirteen centuries. The Syrian christians of both sections, however, exhibit the ruins of antiquity, venerable for their continuance, and interesting for their history. They were driven from their beloved abodes, but their present sequestered residence is not without its charms. The enthusiast among them for nature's beauties (and why should not there be among the Syrian Christians, lovers of nature?) will scarcely mourn the event which led to a seclusion in their present abode. They are placed in the vicinity of stupendous mountains; the face of their country presents a varied scene of hill and dale, and winding stream. The extreme limits of the Syrian churches from south to north, are more than 150 miles apart, and from east to west, or in breadth, 30 miles. Besides many mountain streams, the ebbing or receding backwaters wind through the valleys. The perennial streams from the hills preserve the valleys in the richest verdure; forests, gardens, and plantations abound, and the produce of the soil is most exuberant. The mountain lands are not barren or uncovered, but present a richness of scenery of unequalled grandeur; here the Indian oak, otherwise called the teak, flourishes in immense forests of the finest timber; while the lower woodlands produce pepper and frankincense, cardamoms, cassia, and other aromatics. Fruits of a hundred diversified names and qualities are here poured from the lap of nature; the pine and plantain, the papayah and pombilmo, the citron and melon, the chaina and mango, the cocoa-nut and cucumber. The appearance of the villages and their rural and simpler places of worship in this mountainous and wooded country, is most picturesque. Remote from the busy haunts of commerce, or the populous seats of manufacturing industry, they may be regarded as the eastern Piedmontese, the Vallois of Hindostan, the witnesses prophesying in sackcloth through revolving centuries, though indeed their bodies lay as dead in the streets of the city which they had once peopled.

Angamala, the ancient seat of their bishop, is one

of the most remote of Syrian towns, and is situated on a high land: yet here a Jewish synagogue stands near to, or joins hard by the christian chapel, and Jew and Christian have been wont to live in peace in this land of common exile. Cranganore is the place celebrated for the landing of the Apostle Thomas in India, and not far off is the town of Pavoor, where stands an ancient Syrian church, supposed to be the oldest in Malabar, which bears the name of the Apostle. It has a sloping roof, arched windows at one gable, which is the front and main entrance; there are five crosses erect, two on either side of the peaked roof, and one on the highest point, and one in the wall over the door: at the other gable is a round detached tower, slanting roof, and surmounted with a cross; the bells of the Syrians are hung within their chapels, lest they should disturb the heathen gods which may be in the vicinity. The buildings have been compared to some old parish churches in England, the style of which is of Saracenic origin, with buttresses supporting the walls the beams of the roof, where exposed to view, are ornamented, and the ceiling of the altar and choir is circular and fretted. While we dwell upon these vestiges of antiquity, and recount the events of their history with a sympathetic interest, it is to us a matter of regret and lamentation, that they should have so long existed, surrounded by darkness and superstition, by error and delusion, both degrading and ruinous, without any successful effort to propagate that truth which

they affirm an Apostle came to Western India to proclaim. And while it is a cause of mutual congratulation between them and us, that we should both possess, in a language which we understand, the sacred oracles of the living God, it is to be deplored, that, though they had obtained them at a very early period, they should have continued to hold them in the Syriac language, without any attempt to translate them into the vernacular dialect of the people themselves. It seems a humbling rebuke to the professors of the Christian name, that a fourth part of the nineteenth century should have passed away before any great progress should be attained in rendering the inspired volume into the Malayalim, their own language, and that this, too, should at last be the work of strangers, who had travelled ten thousand miles to labour among them. Would it not be presumptuous to anticipate or look for exertions becoming Christians from these Syrians, to promote among their neighbours the knowledge of the true God? The people at their doors, the subjects of the same government, still remained bewildered idolaters, and had not been regarded for many ages as fit subjects for evangelical exertion. No wonder that one of themselves should confess, "We are in a degenerate state compared with our forefathers; the glory of our church has passed away; we have preserved the Bible; we have also converts from time to time; but in this christian duty we are not so active as we once were; it is not so creditable now to become Chris