That religion was founded, as we have already seen, in the literal interpretation of Holy Scripture, of which Theodore was the principal teacher. The doctrine, in which it formally consisted, is known by the name of Nestorianism: it lay in the ascription of a human as well as a Divine Personality to our Lord; and it showed itself in denying the title of "Mother of God," or θεοτόκος, to the Blessed Mary. As to our Lord's Personality, the question of language came into the controversy, which always serves to perplex a subject and make a dispute seem a matter of words. The native Syrians made a distinction between the word "Person," and "Prosopon," which stands for it in Greek; they allowed that there was one Prosopon or Parsopa, as they called it, and they heldthat there were two Persons. If it is asked what they meant by _parsopa_, the answer seems to be, that they took the word merely in the sense of _character_ or _aspect_, a sense familiar to the Greek _prosopon_, and quite irrelevant as a guarantee of their orthodoxy. It follows moreover that, since the _aspect_ of a thing is its impression upon the beholder, the personality to which they ascribed unity must have laid in our Lord's manhood, and not in His Divine Nature. But it is hardly worth while pursuing the heresy to its limits. Next, as to the phrase "Mother of God," they rejected it as unscriptural; they maintained that St. Mary was Mother of the humanity of Christ, not of the Word, and they fortified themselves by the Nicene Creed, in which no such title is ascribed to her. 11. Whatever might be the obscurity or the plausibility of their original dogma, there is nothing obscure or attractive in the developments, whether of doctrine or of practice, in which it issued. The first act of the exiles of Edessa, on their obtaining power in the Chaldean communion, was to abolish the celibacy of the clergy, or, in Gibbon's forcible words, to allow "the public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and even the patriarch himself." Barsumas, the great instrument of the change of religion, was the first to set an example of the new usage, and is even said by a Nestorian writer to have married a nun.[295:1] He passed a Canon at Councils, held at Seleucia and elsewhere, that bishops and priests might marry, and might renew their wives as often as they lost them. The Catholicus who followed Acacius went so far as to extend the benefit of the Canon to Monks, that is, to destroy the Monastic order; and his two successors availed themselves of this liberty, and are recorded to have been fathers. A restriction, however, was afterwards placed upon the Catholicus, and upon the Episcopal order. 12.