Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 3 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773Bruce, James
History
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 3 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773
Bruce, James
Egypt -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- History; Natural history -- Ethiopia; Nile River
Not to trouble the reader further with these uninteresting particulars
and distinctions, I shall only add, that the Jesuits, in the account
they give of the heresies, ignorance, and obstinacy of the Abyssinian
clergy, have not misrepresented them, in the imputations made against
them, either in point of faith or of morals. Whether, this being the
case, the mission they undertook of themselves into that country, gave
them authority to destroy the many with a view to convert the few, is a
question to be resolved hereafter; I believe it did not; and that the
tares and the wheat should have been suffered to grow together till a
hand of more authority, guided by unerring judgment, pulled them, with
that portion of safety he had pre-ordained for both.
The Protestant writers again unfairly triumph over their adversaries,
the Catholics, by asking, Why all that noise about the two natures in
Christ? It is plain, say they, from passages in the Haimanout Abou, and
their other tracts upon orthodox belief, that they acknowledge that
Christ was perfect God and perfect man, of a rational soul and human
flesh subsisting, and that all the confessions of unity, co-equality,
and inferiority, are there expressed in the clearest manner as received
in the Greek church. What necessity was there for more; and what need
of disputing upon these points already so fully settled?
This, I beg leave to say, is unfair; for though it is true that, at the
time of collecting the Haimanout Abou, and at the time St Athanasius,
St Cyril, and St Chrysostom wrote, the explanation of these points was
uniform in favour of orthodoxy, and that while access could easily
be had to Jerusalem or Alexandria, then Greek and Christian cities,
difficulties, if any arose, were easily resolved; yet, at the time
the Jesuits came, those books were very rare in the country, and the
contents of them so far from being understood, that they were applied
to the support of the grossest heresies, from the misinterpretation of
the ignorant monks of these latter times. That the Abyssinians _had
been_ orthodox availed nothing: they _were then_ become as ignorant of
the doctrines of St Athanasius and St Cyril, as if those fathers had
never wrote; and it is their religion at this period which the Jesuits
condemn, not that of the church of Alexandria, when in its purity under
the first patriarchs; and, to complete all their misfortunes, no access
to Jerusalem is any longer open to them, and very rarely communication
with Cairo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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