It was the Assyrians, or Chaldeans, who as a nation adopted speedily the tenets of the new faith. Doubtless after the demolition of Assyria, and then of Babylonia, the worship of Bel and Ishtar, the ancient gods, had fallen into abeyance or even total desuetude, and the remnants of the old nation seized upon the new religion to satisfy the spiritual need that every people experiences. Their prelates and dignitaries soon became a very important part of the Christian organisation, and it is interesting to note the sympathy of the Persian Sasanian kings for this new religion, and the success Christian effort met among the Persians. This ancient and highly civilised people, whose character contains a great deal of the speculative, has always been ready to consider the claims of new Deistic theories, and has, in Muhammadan times, found an outlet for its speculative tendency in the adoption of Shiism, which it has made a purely Persian section of Islam. The early Christians looked, perhaps with a warranted hope, upon the field of Persia, for here were no feats of iconoclasm to perform--no Diana, no Jove, no Venus, disputed with Christ the right to men’s adoration. In Persia they found a tolerance broad as her mighty plains, a dualist theory that provided only for principles of good and evil, as sharply defined as her barren hills, a splendid isolation of thought far above the turmoil of degraded passion that then represented the pantheistic doctrines of the Greeks, Romans, and Assyrians themselves. High ideals, spiritual aims of an altitude unknown to the Western materialists, found themselves in singular harmony with the ascetic idea of early Christianity. [Sidenote: THE CHALDEANS IN PERSIA] We must understand that of all places, near and remote, it was Persia and the Zoroastrian people, the Perso-Aryans, and probably the Medes--or races inhabiting modern Kurdistan--that welcomed Jesus Christ’s doctrines, and hailed their purifying influences with the delight of the neophyte to whom the master’s knowledge is revealed. So we are told by a Chaldean bishop, writing in A.D. 400, that Yezdijird I., king of Persia, was a merciful and good ruler, just and kindly.[35] And so after, it was the known sympathy and support of the Persians that gained for the new Church the name of “The Persian Party.” This name was given after Nestorius himself, excommunicated from the Byzantine Church, had found asylum under Yezdijird, and the support given by this king was extended also by his son Firuz (A.D. 459–484), who took under his protection later dissenters from the Western Church.