URMI THE ANGLICAN MISSION 2229

The translation of the Bible into modern Syriac, a
noble work, now undergoing revision; the College; the
Female Seminary; the translation and publication of many,
luminous books; the circulation of a periodical called
Says of Light, together with fifty years of intercourse
with men and women* whose chief aim is the religious
and intellectual elevation of the people among whom they
dwell, have wrought a remarkable change, though that the
change is menaced with perils, and is not an absolutely
unmixed good, cannot be gainsaid.

It is for the future to decide whether the Eeform
movement in Umri or elsewhere could survive in any
strength the removal of the agency which inaugurated it,
and whether a Church without a ritual and with a form
of government alien to the genius of the East and the
traditions of the fathers, can take root in the affections of
an eminently conservative people.

The Mission, founded by the present Archbishop of
Canterbury at the request of the Catholicos of the East,
Mar Shimun, the Patriarch of the Syrian Church, arrived
in Urmi in the autumn of 1885. At the time of my
visit it consisted of five mission priests, graduates of
Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and an ordained
Syrian, four of whom were at the headquarters in Urmi,
one in the Kurdish mountains, and one on the Urmi
Plain. Four Sisters of Bethany arrived in the spring
of 1890 for the purpose of opening a boarding-school
for girls and instructing the women.

It is hardly necessary to say that the lines on which
the Ajiglican and American missions proceed are diametri-
cally different, and the modes of working are necessarily
in opposition. The one is practically a proselytising
agency, and labours to build up a Presbyterian Church
in Persia; the other purposes to " bring back an ancient
church into the way of truth, and so prepare it for its