The peculiar value of the Armenian literature is not realized as it should be, by European and American scholars; the language is well worth learning for what it can give the student. Not alone is the original work that comes from the first Christian nation specially valuable for its bearing on primitive Christianity, but the Armenian scholars translated great numbers of works from other languages, and these translations are preserved in Armenian monasteries when the originals have been irretrievably lost in the wars, and burnings, and devastations of other countries. Six hundred volumes of this old literature are known to exist now, two hundred in Europe, and four hundred in different places in Armenia. THE ARMENIAN CHURCH. The first thing to remember about this is, that it is an independent and separate body as much as the Greek or the Roman Catholic church, and older than either of them. I often hear such expressions as "the Armenian Catholic Church," and many people think it simply a "branch" of the great Eastern or Greek Church. It would be just as sensible to consider the Greek a branch of the Armenian Church. Each of them represents a form of church organization and body of doctrine which best satisfied the representatives of certain races or nations; the advantage of the Greek was that that race--or at least its speech and thought--happened to be dominant in the Roman Empire at the time when Christianity won the battle, and so had the official backing of the empire, and was able to outgrow and crush down the others. It was not any truer, any more the real Church of Christ, than the Syrian or African or Armenian; it was not the earliest, for the very first Christian churches sprang from the Jews; it was not even the earliest great national church body, for the Armenian church has that distinction. It had the most soldiers back of it to put down its opponents, that is all. I have already told the story of the foundation of the Armenian church by St. Gregory and Tiridates. That church has its own head--the Catholicos or Pontiff, who is no more a subordinate of either the Pope or the Greek Patriarch than the Grand Llama is, or Dr. Parkhurst--and its own self-subsistent being.