To mount Wechné he also sent his own son David, and with him all his brothers; and, so far from being murdered, we shall find them mostly alive attending an extraordinary festival made for their sakes by Facilidas’s grandson; an accident so rare, that it seems Providence had permitted it in favour and vindication of truth and innocence, and to stamp the lie upon the patriarch’s scandalous aspersions. The third falsehood is, that Facilidas turned Mahometan, and got doctors from Mocha to instruct him in the Koran. We have already seen what gave rise to this, if it indeed had any foundation at all; but it is a well-known fact, that, though he governed the church, during a whole reign, mildly and judiciously, without any mark of bigotry, never were two princes better affected to the Alexandrian church than Facilidas and his son; and never were two that had better reason, having both seen the disorders that other religions had occasioned. We see throughout all this piece of the patriarchs, a self-sufficient mind, gratifying itself by disgorging its passion and malice. If Alphonso Mendes had no regard, as it seems indeed he had not; if he had no reverence to higher powers, such as scripture had taught him to have; if he was too enlightened, or too infatuated, to take our Saviour’s precepts for his rule, and, shaking the dust of Abyssinia from his feet, remit them to a Judge who will, at his own time, separate good from evil, still he should have had, at least, a brotherly love and charity for those unfortunate people who were to fall into Facilidas’s hands; and we cannot reasonably suppose but that the constant butcheries committed by the Turks afterwards upon the Catholic priests, wild enough to enter at Masuah and Suakem, were the fruits of the calumnious, intemperate libel of the patriarch. After the death of the last missionary, Bernard Nogeyra, no intelligence arrived of what was doing in Abyssinia, excepting from the Dutch settlements of Batavia, where Abyssinian factors, or merchants, had arrived; and where the industrious Mr Ludolf, very much engaged in the history of this country, and who spared no pains, maintained a correspondence, and thence he was informed that Facilidas had died after a long and prosperous reign, and had left his kingdom in peace to his son. This intelligence alarmed the zeal of two great champions of the Jesuits; the one M. le Grande, late secretary to the French embassy to Portugal; and the other M. Piques, a member of the Sorbonne, a very confused, dull disputant upon the difference of religion.