§ 184.9. =Missions among the Eastern Churches.=--In A.D. 1815 the Church Missionary Society founded a missionary emporium in the island of Malta, as a tract depôt for the evangelizing the East; and in A.D. 1846 the Malta Protestant College was erected for training native missionaries, teachers, physicians, etc., for work in the various oriental countries. In the Ionian islands, in Constantinople, and in Greece, British and American missionaries began operations in A.D. 1819 by erecting schools and circulating the scriptures. At first the orthodox clergy were favourable, but as the work progressed they became actively hostile, and only two mission schools in Syra and Athens were allowed to continue. In Syria the Americans made Beyrout their head quarters in A.D. 1824, but the work was interrupted by the Turco-Egyptian conflicts. Subsequently, however, it flourished more and more, and, before the Syrian massacre of A.D. 1860 (§ 207, 2), there were nine prosperous stations in Syria. The founding of the Jerusalem bishopric in A.D. 1841, and the issuing of the Hatti-Humayun in A.D. 1856 (§ 207, 2), induced the Church Missionary Society to make more vigorous efforts which, however, were afterwards abandoned for want of success. Down to the outbreak of the persecution of Syrian Christians in A.D. 1860, this society had five flourishing stations. From A.D. 1831 the Americans had wrought zealously and successfully among the Armenians in Constantinople and neighbourhood, but in A.D. 1845 the Armenian patriarch excited a violent persecution which threatened the utter overthrow of the work. The British ambassador, Sir Stratford de Redcliffe, however, insisted upon the Porte recognising the rights of the Protestant Armenians as an independent religious denomination, and since then the missions have prospered. Among the Nestorians in Turkey and Persia the Americans, with Dr. Grant at their head, began operations in A.D. 1834; but through Jesuit intrigues the suspicions of the Kurds and Turks were excited, and in A.D. 1843 and 1846 a war of extermination was waged against the mountain Nestorians, which annihilated the Protestant missions among them. Operations, however, have been recommenced with encouraging success. Among the deeply degraded Copts in Egypt, and extending from them into Abyssinia, the Moravians had been working without any apparent result from A.D. 1752 to A.D. 1783. In A.D. 1826 the Church Missionary Society, under German missionaries trained at Basel (Gobat, Irenberg, Krapf [Krapff], etc.), took up the work, till it was stopped by the government in A.D. 1837. In A.D. 1855 the Basel missionaries began again to work in Abyssinia with the approval of King Theodore. This state of things soon changed. Theodore’s ambition was to conquer Egypt and overthrow Islam. But when in A.D. 1863 this scheme only called forth threats from