secution, but has not been consumed. The ten plagues of
Egypt have been here repeated several times. It has passed through the
agony of blood, but with a spirit of submission to the will of God who
rules over all the changes of a nation for the good of His own kingdom.
Severe persecutions began in A.D. 325. When Constantine convened the
Nicean council of the 100 delegates from the eastern church, mostly
from Assyria, only eleven of them were free from mutilation in some
form. At the time the Sassanites dynasty ruled over Assyria. Their
patriarch was St. Shumon, son of a painter. No other Assyrian patriarch
was equal to him in piety, integrity, and his heroic spirit of
martyrdom. He was patriarch from 330 to 362 A.D. In that period the
king of Persia was second shafoor of the fire-worshipers. The
fire-worshipers believed in two creative powers, Hurmizd and Ahramon.
Every good thing as virtue, success, long years, praise, truth, purity,
were created by Hurmizd; while wickedness, hate, war, disaster, etc.,
issued from Ahramon, their creator. Shafoor worshiped clean creatures
of Hurmizd, such as sun, moon, and fire. Christianity was strong then,
some of the royal family being Christians. The Christians were
antagonized by the fire-worshipers because they rejected the sun and
moon and de-defiled fire. Other objections were that the Christians
taught that God had become incarnate and come to earth; and also that
they preferred poverty to wealth and did not marry, thus diminishing
the strength of the nation. The emperor issued an edict that those who
would not worship the sun and the moon should pay a large sum of money.
The patriarch answered that "while God is the creator of the sun we can
not substitute the created for the creator. Concerning a fine we have
no money to pay your lord the sum required, as our Lord commanded us
not to lay up our treasures on earth." Then the king commanded that all
Christians be put to death by terrible torture, except the patriarch.
Him he would spare to the last, that he might be moved by the torture
of others and worship the sun. But St. Shumon meantime was urging the
Christians to stand firm in the faith. The king requested that the
patriarch and two chief bishops be brought before him. It had been a
custom to prostrate himself before the king as a token of honor, but on
this occasion he wished to avoid any show of worshiping a creature and
did not prostrate himself before the ruler. The kin