r
Shimon's alienation from his American friends. In 1840, after Dr.
Grant had passed through the mountains the second time, on his
return to America, the Patriarch was visited by Mr. Ainsworth,
travelling at the expense of the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge and the Royal Geographical Society. The statements of this
gentleman and of his companion, Mr. Rassam, to Mar Shimon, so
resembled those made by the Papists, that the Patriarch suspected
them of being Jesuits in disguise, and they actually left the
mountains without removing that suspicion. Nor was it creditable to
them, that they passed through Oroomiah without even calling on the
American missionaries there.1

1 See _Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians_, pp. 151-154. For Mr.
Ainsworth's account of this visit, see _Travels and Researches in
Asia Minor_, _etc_., vol. i. p. 1, and vol. ii. pp. 243-255. It is
not necessary here to correct the erroneous statements in the
passage referred to.

Had the interference gone no further, not much harm might have
ensued. But Mr. Ainsworth's report induced the Christian Knowledge
and Gospel Propagation Societies, in 1842, to send the Rev. George
Percy Badger as a missionary to the Mountain Nestorians, or rather
to the Patriarch and his clergy in the mountains. This was nine
years after the commencement of the mission to the Nestorians at
Oroomiah, eight years after the republication in England of the
Researches of Messrs. Smith and Dwight among the Nestorians, and a
year after the publication there of Dr. Grant's work, entitled "The
Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes." Nor was there ever a time when the
attention of the English nation was more directed to Western Asia.

How much the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London
actually knew of the American mission, before officially and
strongly commending Mr. Badger to the confidence of the Nestorian
Patriarch, is not known. They make no reference whatever to that
mission, and write as if they looked upon the field as entirely
unoccupied, and open to a mission from the Church of England.

Mr. Badger spent the winter of 1842-43 in Mosul; and, early in the
spring, before the mountain roads were open, and while Dr. Grant and
Mr. Laurie were preparing at Mosul to visit Asheta, he hastened to
the Patriarch, with letters and presents from the dignitaries of the
Church of England. The civil relations of the Patriarch to the
Koords, the Persians, and the Turks were s