Indeed, if the Mongolian attitude toward armed nations combating in Christ’s name has been implacable hostility, toward those of the faith who worshiped peacefully in their midst it has been uniformly tolerant, even favoring. The Nestorians, who brought their creed from Khorassan in the fourth century, had by 500 A.D. bishoprics in Merv, Herat, and Samarcand. The Perait Turkomans as a tribe accepted Christianity, and were unpunished. That the Faith was liberally treated in 781, under the Chinese, is self-acknowledged, on the ancient Nestorian stone of Si-an-fu. Headed by a cross, there is graven in Syrian and Chinese the Imperial decree of 638, ordering a church to be built: it gives an abstract of Christian doctrine, and an account of the “introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta-t’sin in the Middle Kingdom.” In Si-an-fu at this time there were four thousand foreign families, cut off from return by a northern inroad of fanatical Tibetans into Turkestan. Another monument of 830, found near the site of the old Ouighour capital on the Orkhon, and carved in Chinese, Turkish, and Ouighour characters, mentions the Western religion. A strange sect of Hebrews of unknown origin found as well an unpersecuted home at K’ai-feng-fu, where the Mosaic rites could be performed. To this day a remnant survives. The same tolerance for alien faiths marked Tatar rule in Russia. The Khan of Sarai authorized a Greek church and a bishopric in his capital, exempting the monks from his poll-tax. Khan Usbek in 1313 confirmed the privileges of the Church, and punished with death sacrilege against it. Kublai Khan took part regularly in the Easter services, and allowed the Roman missionaries to establish a school in Shang-tu. Indeed, reviewing the whole sweep of Asia’s religious history, one can hardly escape the deduction that if the greatest race of the greatest continent is idolatrous, it is not the fault of the Mongolians. The Nestorian missionaries had an unsurpassed opportunity in the fourth century when their faith was new and burning, and the world was at peace. But stigmatized as heretics after a doctrinal dispute which had been settled by the logic of a street fight, in which Cyril’s Egyptian bravos defeated the Syrian henchmen of the Patriarch of Constantinople, their mother church was driven out of the Roman Empire into Persia, where, cut off from the support of the main trunk of fellow Christians, their organization withered away as a lopped branch. The chief congregations in Iran and Turan were overwhelmed by the Mohammedans, until at length there were left only the dwindling congregations in Mongolia, and such communities as those on the Malabar coast in India.