Page 21 - New English Book L

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enthusiastically embracing the religion of the “holy” Tsar
of All Russians!

Five big and ostentatious missions -Americans,
Anglicans, French, Germans and Russians- with their
colleges, Press backed up by rich religious societies,
Consuls and Ambassadors, were endeavouring to convert
about one hundred thousand Assyro-Chaldeans from
Nestorian heresy unto one or another of the five heresies.

However, the Russian Mission soon outstripped the
others, and it was this mission, which in 1915 pushed or
forced the Assyrians of Persia, as well as the mountaineer
tribes of Kurdistan, who had then immigrated into the
plains of Salmas and Urmia, to take up arms against their
respective Governments. The result was that half of his
people perished in the war and the rest expelled from their
native lands.

The great question, which for a long time had been
working its solution in the mind of this priest, was now
approaching its climax. Was Christianity, with all its
multitudinous shapes and colours, and with its unauthentic,
spurious and corrupted Scriptures, the true Religion of
God? In the summer of 1900 he retired to his small villa
in the middle of vineyards near the celebrated fountain
of Cháli Boulaghi in Digala, and there for a month spent
his time in prayer and meditation, reading over and over
the Scriptures in their original texts. The crisis ended in
a formal resignation sent in to the Uniate Archbishop of
Urmia, in which he frankly explained to Mar (Mgr.) Touma
Audu the reasons for abandoning his sacerdotal functions.
All attempts made by the ecclesiastical authorities to
withdraw his decision were of no avail. There was no
personal quarrel or dispute between Father Benjamin and
his superiors; it was all question of conscience.

For several months, Mr. Dawud,as he was now