Volume I Part 7 (1/2)

Vertanes, who had suffered imprisonment and banishment for the sake of Christ, made an extensive missionary tour through Armenia.

In the summer of 1843, a body of Turkish police was seen conducting a young man, under twenty years of age, in the European dress, through the streets of Constantinople. His face was pale, and his arms were pinioned behind him. Arriving at a place of public concourse, they suddenly halted, the prisoner kneeled, and a blow of the yatagan severed his head from the body. His crime was apostasy from the Mohammedan faith. He was an obscure Armenian, and while under the influence of alcohol had abjured the faith of his fathers, and declared himself a Mohammedan. He had not submitted, however, to the rite of circ.u.mcision before he repented of his rashness. The penalty of apostasy being death, he fled to Greece. In about a year, impatient to see his widowed mother, he returned in a Frank dress, but was soon recognized, imprisoned, tortured to induce him to reabandon his original belief, and even paraded through the streets with his hands tied behind his back, as if for execution; but upon his proclaiming aloud his firm belief in Christianity, he was sentenced to decapitation. The British amba.s.sador, Sir Stratford Canning, impelled by motives of humanity, made an earnest effort to procure his release, and the Grand Vizier promised that the young man should not be beheaded. On learning that he had been, the amba.s.sador declared it to be an insult to the Established Religion of England, as well as to all Europe, and insisted that no similar act of fanaticism should ever again occur. In this he was said to be warmly seconded both by the French and Prussian ministers. The Grand Vizier, as before, was ready to give a verbal pledge; but soon a second act of treachery was discovered. A Greek, in the interior of Asia Minor, had declared himself it Mohammedan, and afterwards refused to perform the rites of that religion, and the Turkish minister was preparing the death-warrant for him, at the very time when he was making these promises to the amba.s.sador. Sir Stratford now very peremptorily demanded, that a written pledge be given by the Sultan himself (as his ministers could no longer be trusted), that no person embracing the Moslem religion and afterwards returning to Christianity, should on that account be put to death; and the Earl of Aberdeen, on the part of the home government, instructed him in a n.o.ble letter not to recede from the demand. The Prussian and French governments were equally decided; and after some hesitancy, even Russia threw the weight of her influence into the scale. After a struggle of some weeks the required pledge was given, signed by the Sultan himself, that henceforth NO PERSON SHOULD BE PERSECUTED FOR HIS RELIGIOUS OPINIONS IN TURKEY. The British amba.s.sador distinctly acknowledged the finger of G.o.d in this transaction, which he said seemed little less than a miracle.

It will hereafter appear, that the pledge had a wider range, than was thought of at the time by the governments of Europe, by their representatives, or even by the Turks. G.o.d was setting up a spiritual kingdom, and his people must have freedom to wors.h.i.+p Him in his appointed way. The battle for religious freedom in Turkey was fought over the mutilated remains of the Armenian renegade, and the Sultan's pledge secured to the Protestant native Christians the full enjoyment of their civil rites, while openly practicing their own religion.1

1 This brief statement is compiled from the _Correspondence relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostasy from Islamism_, published by the British Parliament in 1844, occupying forty folio pages. The correspondence is highly honorable to the great men who were then controlling the political affairs of Europe, and to a large extent also of Western Asia.

But before this comprehensive meaning of the pledge could be understood, and the benefit of it actually enjoyed by the people of G.o.d, they were subjected to more grievous sufferings for their faith than any yet endured. From 1843 to 1846, there was no long respite from persecution; yet in all this time the spirit of inquiry wonderfully spread, and believers were the more added to the Lord.

In 1843, Priest Vertanes was rudely deposed from office, and thrown into prison. Finding he could not be induced to sign a paper of recantation, drawn up for him by the Patriarch, he was hurried by the Patriarch's beadles, with great violence, into an open sail-boat, without opportunity to obtain even an outer garment from his house, although it was midwinter, and sent across the sea of Marmora to the monastery of Ahmah, near Nicomedia.

The Foreign Secretary of the Board spent eleven weeks in this mission, in the winter of 1843-44, accompanied by Dr. Joel Hawes, of Hartford. At that time it was arranged by the mission, in full accordance with the views of their visiting brethren, to discontinue the Greek department, to give distinct names as missions to the Jewish department and to the work among the Armenians, to open a female high school at Constantinople, and to a.s.sociate Mr. Wood with Mr. Hamlin in the seminary at Bebek. It was also decided, that Messrs. Riggs and Ladd, turning from the Greeks to the Armenians, should acquire the use of the languages spoken by the latter people; that Mr. Calhoun should be authorized to visit Syria, with a view to an opening for him in connection with the projected seminary on Mount Lebanon; that Mr. Temple, then too old to learn either the Armenian or Turkish languages, ought to be authorized, in view of the discontinuance of the Greek department, to return to the churches whose faithful messenger he had been so long; and that the native Armenian agency should be put upon a footing on which it would be more likely to be sustained ultimately by the people.

There was reason afterwards to believe, that it would have been better for Mr. Temple to remain in Turkey, in the exercise of his eminently apostolic influence upon his brother missionaries and the native Protestant community, Greek and Armenian. Yet his own opinion was in favor of the course he pursued. ”I am too old,” he said, ”to think for a moment of learning a new language, and no opening invites me here in any language I can command.” After a farewell visit to his brethren in Constantinople, he set his face homeward, and arrived in Boston in the summer of 1844. He was usefully employed as an agent of the Board, or in the pastoral relation, until his health broke down. In January, 1851, through the kindness of a friend, he made a voyage to Chagres, and another to Liverpool.

But he returned from the last of these voyages enfeebled by the roughness of the pa.s.sage; and his strength gradually declined, until the 9th of August, 1851, seven years after his return to America, when he died at Reading, Ma.s.sachusetts, his native place, in the sixty-second year of his age. It may be truly said, that few men have borne more distinctively than he, the impress of the Saviour's image.1

1 See _Life and Letters of Rev. Daniel Temple_, for twenty-three years a Missionary in Western Asia. By his son, Rev. Daniel H.

Temple, Boston, 1855.

A daughter of Dr. Hawes accompanied him on his voyage to Smyrna as the wife of Mr. Van Lennep, but was permitted only to enter upon the work to which she had devoted herself in Asia. She died at Constantinople of fever, within less than a year from the time of her embarkation. The health of Mrs. Benjamin was such as to oblige her and her husband to return home. A similar cause occasioned also the return of Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.

CHAPTER X.

GREECE AND THE GREEKS.

1824-1844.

When the missions to the Oriental Churches were commenced, Greece was suffering under the oppression of the Turks, and the people were glad of sympathy from any quarter. In the department of education, they seemed even to welcome Protestant missionaries. They compared favorably with the Roman Catholics, in their reception of the Scriptures, and in the matter of religious toleration. But an unfavorable change came over them after they had achieved their national independence.

Mr. Gridley was the first missionary to labor among the Greeks of Turkey, though he was not sent with special reference to them. He arrived at Smyrna in December, 1826. After acquiring the modern Greek, he visited Cesarea, four hundred miles to the eastward, hoping for better advantages in acquiring the Greco-Turkish language, and also to learn the condition of the Greeks in the interior. He was accompanied by Abraham, his teacher, a well-informed native of Cappadocia, and for two months applied himself to his studies, until admonished of danger by the frequent recurrence of headaches. Finding that these yielded to exercise, he deemed it prudent to execute a purpose he had long cherished of ascending Mount Argeus, from the top of which, according to Strabo, the Black and Mediterranean Seas might both be discerned in a clear day. Outstripping his attendants, Mr. Gridley mounted with great agility till he reached an elevation within three or four hundred feet of the highest summit, when he was prevented from advancing farther by the steepness of the ascent. There, in the region of perpetual snow, he remained a quarter of an hour, but could not discover the objects he had specially in view. The height of the mountain he estimated at thirteen thousand feet. Descending rapidly, he was overpowered with fatigue when he reached his companions, and they were soon after exposed to a violent storm of hail and rain.

The headache soon returned with increasing violence, and was followed by fever, so insidious in its progress as at no time to suggest to him his danger. His death occurred on the 27th of September, fifteen days after the ascent, and a year after leaving his native land.

Thus he fell at the age of thirty-one, and at the very commencement of his career. The predominant characteristics of Mr. Gridley were resolution, promptness, and generosity. In all the duties of a Christian missionary, he was indefatigable in no ordinary degree, and his early removal was very trying.

The cause of education naturally became prominent at the outset of a mission among the Greeks. Scio was the seat of their most favored college, and when the people of that ill-fated island fled from the murderous sword of the Turks, some of the families sought refuge in Malta. There were bright youths among them, and six of these, and two from other Greek islands, so interested Messrs. Fisk and Temple, that they obtained permission to send them home, to be educated chiefly at the expense of the Board. This was before the results of the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall had become manifest. Three others arrived in 1826, and one in 1828; and nearly all received a liberal education, either at Amherst or Yale. Evangelinos Sophocles, from Thessaly, who came last, has long held the honorable position of a Professor in Harvard University. Four others,--Anastatius Karavelles, Nicholas Petrokokino, Alexander G. Paspati, and Gregory Perdicaris, were useful to the mission at different times after their return to the East. Several young men from the Armenian nation were likewise educated in the United States, and one of these, Hohannes, was until his death, a useful minister of the gospel among his countrymen. But the conclusion on the whole, to which the Board came, both in respect to Greeks and Armenians, was that a native agency must be trained in the country where it is to be employed.

The return of Mr. King to Greece, in 1829, has been mentioned.

During the visit of Mr. Smith and myself to the island of Poros, in July of that year, he was united in marriage to a young Smyrniote lady, whose acquaintance he had formed some years before, while detained there on his return from Syria. Though Tenos was one of the more bigoted of the Greek islands, nearly every person of standing in the place called upon the newly married couple. A Greek priest sent a pair of doves, and soon followed with his blessing. It was this marriage which, in the providence of G.o.d, kept Mr. King in Greece until the close of his long and useful life.

Mr. King opened a school for girls in Poros, and the chief men sent their daughters to it. The town was noted for a modern church, called the Evangelistria, which, though built during the revolution, was the most showy edifice in Greece. It was the annual resort of hundreds of pilgrims, chiefly the lame, sick, and lunatic, who were brought there to be cured. It was the centre of modern Grecian superst.i.tion; as Delos, in full view of the church, had been in ancient times.

After some months, the trustees of the church became alarmed for their craft, and made vigorous efforts to destroy the school. Some of the scholars were withdrawn, one of the teachers was compelled to leave, and the school-books were denounced as heretical. Through the whole commotion Mr. King held on his way with characteristic calmness, teaching and praying in the school as aforetime, and freely expounding the Scriptures, every Lord's day, to more than fifty of his pupils and a number of their friends. Two of the most prominent inhabitants espoused his cause; and, just in the crisis of the difficulty, he received a box of ancient Greek books from the government, as a present to the school. Soon after, there appeared in the government gazette a commendation of the school and of its course of instruction. From that time, opposition from members of the Greek Church seems to have ceased. A handsome donation of school-books, slates, and pencils was made by the Greek School Committee in New York, and forwarded to the President of Greece, through the American Board. It was gratefully acknowledged by the government.

In the autumn of 1830, Mr. King, antic.i.p.ating the evacuation of Athens by the Turks, made a visit to that city, then a ruin, and arranged for his future residence. In April of the next year, having resumed his connection with the American Board, he made a second visit, and opened a Lancasterian school for both s.e.xes; placing a Greek, named Nikotoplos, at the head of it, who was author of an epitome of the Gospels. The school was soon filled. He purchased from a Turk, with private funds and at a nominal cost, the ruins of a stone edifice with a garden, and there built himself a home, to which he removed his family. He also purchased for a few hundred dollars, while the city was still in Turkish hands, about an acre of land delightfully situated, on which he subsequently erected a building for a young ladies' school of a high order.

Capodistrias, the President, was a.s.sa.s.sinated about this time by two men belonging to one of the first families in Greece. The protecting powers required that his successor be a king, and a Bavarian prince named Otho was put upon the throne of the new kingdom in 1833. The Acropolis of Athens was soon after delivered up to its rightful owners, and that event consummated the emanc.i.p.ation of Greece from Turkish rule. A cabinet was formed, of which Tricoupis, a Greek gentleman of patriotic and enlightened views, was the president.

Athens became the seat of government in 1834.

The Rev. Elias Riggs arrived as a missionary, with his wife, in January, 1833, and was cordially welcomed not only by his a.s.sociate, but also by the brethren of the American Episcopal mission. Mr.

Riggs had paid much attention to the modern Greek, and was pleased with Dr. King's manner of preaching on the Sabbath, and with his familiar exposition of the Scriptures in his flouris.h.i.+ng h.e.l.lenic school.1 There were now two schools, called the ”Elementary School”