I have selected this as a type--probably the most beautiful type--of many similar legends that were long current in the Orient. Indeed, not a few of them retain their old-time popularity not only in the East but in the West as well. This is particularly true respecting the legend of Abgar. But what will appear more remarkable to readers of our critical and skeptical age, is that in every century of the Church, from the third to the nineteenth, there have been eminent scholars who have maintained the authenticity of the correspondence between King Abgar and Our Lord. Among them it suffices to mention such distinguished authorities as Tillemont in the seventeenth century, Assemani in the eighteenth and Rinck, Cave, and Cureton in the nineteenth. It was because of the belief in the genuineness of the letter of Our Lord to King Abgar that it was during the Middle Ages regarded as a panacea for disease and as an amulet or talisman against all kinds of dangers--“against lightning and hail and perils by sea and land, by day and by night, and in dark places.”[302] It was doubtless because of this widespread belief in the phylacteric efficiency of this letter that the custom prevailed in England as late as the last century, and traces of it still exist to-day, for people to hang up a copy of the letter in their homes.[303] Interesting, however, as is the correspondence in question, it is now pronounced by the general consensus of scholars to be apocryphal and must, therefore, be relegated to the limbo of many similar fictions with which the mythopœic East has in every age supplied the credulous and wonder-loving West. But fascinating as one may find the myths and legends of Edessa, they must prove but secondary to its long and eventful history. For, in the days of its glory it ranked with Nisibis, Damascus, and Antioch as one of the four great cities of Syria. As a center of trade it was the rival of Palmyra which was then the great emporium of western Asia. Through it passed the highly-prized products of India and China on their way to the marts of Egypt and Rome.[304] As a literary center, it was, as a recent writer observes, “admirably situated between the Greek world and the Oriental world. Communicating on the one hand with Antioch, on which it depended and on the other with Persia, Greater Armenia, and even with India, the capital of Osrhoene was well placed to profit both by the culture of Greece and the powerful originality of the barbarous countries of the East. It was, as it were, the confluence in which the ideas of two worlds became intimately blended and where the various nationalities of its inhabitants as well as the diversity of religious beliefs brought there by strangers and merchants tended to give the city a physiognomy not unlike that of Alexandria.”[305]