For nearly a generation after the separation of the Protestants took place there was more or less hostile feeling between the two bodies, although the number of the evangelicals rapidly increased. The spirit of inquiry was abroad among the Armenians and nothing could satisfy it but the truth. Travelers into the interior and visitors to Constantinople from the interior carried this spirit into the most remote sections of the country. The anathemas which had been communicated to the churches of the inland towns and cities had stirred up many questions and aroused alert minds to seek the cause. On the whole, the evangelical movement was most materially helped by these rude and bungling endeavors to suppress it by brute force. Wherever missionaries went they were met by a group of men, naturally among the most enlightened in all the community, who sought aid in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and who were eager to receive literature explaining evangelical truth. Mission stations all over the country rapidly multiplied, and the number of Protestant churches increased. In 1860 forty Protestant churches had been organized, mostly among the Armenians, and twenty-two stations at which missionaries resided were in full operation. At nearly all of these stations, schools for boys and, in cases not a few, schools for girls, had been opened and these were well patronized. The printing-press was moved from Malta to Smyrna in 1833. The press always has been and is still one of the most active and effectual agents for reform in the empire. During the first forty years of the work, from five to ten million pages of Christian literature were issued from the press each year, in five different languages. In no part of the Turkish empire has the work of the missionary been more difficult than in Syria. Owing to papal supremacy there, which called to its service both Turkish and French political aid in its endeavor to thwart the missionaries and the evangelicals, no separate church of native Christians was organized until 1848 at Beirut, two years after the formation of the Evangelical Armenian Church at Constantinople. There was in that field no intellectually and morally dominant race to receive and extend the gospel as there was in Asia Minor and the greater part of the Turkish empire, while the races occupying Syria were for the most part hostile to each other and always mutually suspicious.