stly requested to give direction,
Forner became troubled, and with a view to obtaining advice, hurried to
Burton. Both Burton and his wife listened to the tale with breathless
interest. Mrs. Burton naturally wanted to sweep the whole sect
straightway into the Roman Church, and it is said that she offered to be
sponsor herself to 2,000 of them. In any circumstances, she distributed
large numbers of crucifixes and rosaries. Burton, who regarded
nine-tenths of the doctrines of her church as a tangle of error, was
nevertheless much struck with the story. He had long been seeking for a
perfect religion, and he wondered whether these people had not found it.
Here in this city of Damascus, where Our Lord had appeared to St. Paul,
a similar apparition had again been seen--this time by a company of
earnest seekers after truth. He determined to investigate. So disguised
as a Shazli, he attended their meetings and listened while Forner
imparted the principal dogmas of the Catholic faith. His common
sense soon told him that the so-called miraculous sights were merely
hallucinations, the outcome of heated and hysterical imagination. He
sympathised with the Shazlis in that like himself they were seekers
after truth, and there, as far as he was concerned, the matter would
have ended had the scenes been in any other country. But in Syria
religious freedom was unknown, and the cruel Wali Rashid Pasha was only
too delighted to have an opportunity to use his power. He crushed where
he could not controvert. Twelve of the leading Shazlis--the martyrs, as
they were called--were seized and imprisoned. Forner died suddenly; as
some think, by poison. This threw Burton, who hated oppression in all
its forms, into a towering rage, and he straightway flung the whole
of his weight into the cause of the Shazlis. Persecution gave
them holiness. He wrote to Lord Granville that there were at least
twenty-five thousand Christians longing secretly for baptism, and he
suggested methods by which they might be protected. He also recommended
the Government to press upon the Porte many other reforms. Both Burton
and his wife henceforward openly protected the Shazlis, and in fact
made themselves, to use the words of a member of the English Government,
"Emperor and Empress of Damascus."

That Rashid Pasha and his crawling myrmidons were rascals of the first
water and that the Shazlis were infamously treated is very evident.
It is also clear that Burton was more