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                                    20enthusiastically 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 multitudinousshapes andcolours, andwithitsunauthentic, 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 toMar(Mgr.)Touma Audu the reasonsfor abandoning hissacerdotal 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
                                
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