A graphic account of the cruelties of Timour the Tartar, who devastated Armenia at the close of the fourteenth century, has been left us by Thomas of Medzop. The last great calamity which fell upon the mother country happened in 1605, when Shah Abbas forcibly transplanted twelve thousand families to Ispahan in Persia. THE ARMENIAN CHURCH.—It is the oldest of all national churches. Their legends claim that our Lord corresponded with King Abgarus of Edessa or Ur, and that the apostles Thaddæus and Bartholomew preached the Gospel to them. But the historical founder of the Armenian church was St. Gregory “The Illuminator,”[68] an Arsacid prince, related to King Tiridates (Dertad), who was consecrated Bishop of Armenia, at Cæsarea, in 302 A. D. The Armenian church is Episcopal in polity, and closely resembles the Greek in outward forms. Misled by imperfect reports of the Council of Chalcedon, 451, which they were not able to attend on account of Persian persecutions, the Armenian bishops annulled its decrees in 536, thus gaining the credit of being Eutychians, which led to their gradual separation from the orthodox church, much to the satisfaction of the Persian ruler Chosroes. This estrangement was doubtless political as much as doctrinal, on account of the attempts at ecclesiastical supremacy by the churches of Constantinople and Rome. As far as her ecclesiastical writers are concerned, and her beautiful liturgy, the Armenian church is in general orthodox. Her heresy, in common with that of the rest of Christendom, is one of life rather than of doctrine. A schism in the Armenian church was brought about in the sixteenth century by Jesuit missionaries, who succeeded in detaching the community of Catholic Armenians from the mother church, of which the Catholicos at Etchmiadzin is recognized as the supreme head. All Armenians—except perhaps the Catholic, whose allegiance has been transferred of course to Rome—still cherish a passionate attachment for the venerable church of their ancestors, to which they owe their identity as a people after the terrible vicissitudes of so many centuries. It is true that Armenians who have come under European influence, especially French, have to some extent become sceptical and indifferent to religion. But even such men still profess at least an outward loyalty, as a matter of sentiment, and because they believe the formal preservation of the Armenian church to be the condition of national union in the future as it has been in the past. It is, indeed, almost a political necessity, as the Ottoman Empire is now constituted.