ighly honorable to the great men who were then
controlling the political affairs of Europe, and to a large extent
also of Western Asia.

But before this comprehensive meaning of the pledge could be
understood, and the benefit of it actually enjoyed by the people of
God, they were subjected to more grievous sufferings for their faith
than any yet endured. From 1843 to 1846, there was no long respite
from persecution; yet in all this time the spirit of inquiry
wonderfully spread, and believers were the more added to the Lord.

In 1843, Priest Vertanes was rudely deposed from office, and thrown
into prison. Finding he could not be induced to sign a paper of
recantation, drawn up for him by the Patriarch, he was hurried by
the Patriarch's beadles, with great violence, into an open
sail-boat, without opportunity to obtain even an outer garment from
his house, although it was midwinter, and sent across the sea of
Marmora to the monastery of Ahmah, near Nicomedia.

The Foreign Secretary of the Board spent eleven weeks in this
mission, in the winter of 1843-44, accompanied by Dr. Joel Hawes, of
Hartford. At that time it was arranged by the mission, in full
accordance with the views of their visiting brethren, to discontinue
the Greek department, to give distinct names as missions to the
Jewish department and to the work among the Armenians, to open a
female high school at Constantinople, and to associate Mr. Wood with
Mr. Hamlin in the seminary at Bebek. It was also decided, that
Messrs. Riggs and Ladd, turning from the Greeks to the Armenians,
should acquire the use of the languages spoken by the latter people;
that Mr. Calhoun should be authorized to visit Syria, with a view to
an opening for him in connection with the projected seminary on
Mount Lebanon; that Mr. Temple, then too old to learn either the
Armenian or Turkish languages, ought to be authorized, in view of
the discontinuance of the Greek department, to return to the
churches whose faithful messenger he had been so long; and that the
native Armenian agency should be put upon a footing on which it
would be more likely to be sustained ultimately by the people.

There was reason afterwards to believe, that it would have been
better for Mr. Temple to remain in Turkey, in the exercise of his
eminently apostolic influence upon his brother missionaries and the
native Protestant community, Greek and Armenian. Yet his own opinion
was in favor of the course he pursued.