nth century; and in the eighth and ninth they were strong in India.
Even in the eleventh century the "Nestorian worship retained a great
hold over many parts of Asia, between the Euphrates and the Gobi
desert." Into the later and fragmentary history of these missions it
is not here the place to enter. Let it only be remembered that the
labours of "those Nestorian missionaries who preached and baptized
under the shadow of the wall of China, and on the shores of the Yellow
Sea, the Caspian, and the Indian Ocean" [11] were made possible by the
diplomatic and military triumphs which radiated from Constantinople in
the sixth century, and by the Christian zeal of orthodox emperors and
patriarchs.

[Sidenote: Nestorianism in Persia.]

Meanwhile in Persia the Monophysites contended for supremacy with the
Nestorians, and organised themselves with considerable skill. But the
Nestorians, who founded schools and developed a Christology on lines
different from those on which European thought was {99} proceeding,
became still more rigid in their rejection of the Catholic teaching.
Maraba the catholicos (540-52) and Thomas of Edessa, his pupil, seem to
have drawn very near to orthodoxy; but the controversy of the Three
Chapters widened the breach. Council after council, theologian,
catholicos, monastery, bishop, alike denounced Justinian; and they had
the support of the pagan philosophers whom he had expelled from the
schools of Athens.

In Persia monasticism and the life of hermits--though the introduction
of either is difficult if not impossible to trace[12]--flourished and
developed on lines of their own. For a long time there was no
distinction between monastic and secular life: it was only gradually
that an organised monasticism grew up out of the coenobitic life for
men and for women. But from the sixth century onward the organisation
of monasticism gave strength to the Church, and enabled it for some
time to resist the Muhammadan invasion. The Church, mapped out into
dioceses and well served by numerous clergy, and having its own canon
law, its own liturgical forms, and its own theology, was able for long,
in spite of the absence of all state support and in spite often of
state persecution, to survive in some appearance of strength till the
Muhammadan invasion. The Mussulman conquest, when once it was
achieved, gave something like security to the Nestorians. Though there
was a time of persecution in the ninth centur