The Seminary was founded, not to polish the manners, refine the taste, or impart accomplishments, but to renovate the character by a permanent inward change. The main dependence for bringing this about was the power of the Holy Ghost--the only power that can impart or maintain spiritual life in man. This dependence was expressed in fervent prayer, offered for years amid discouragement and opposition, and, instead of ceasing when an answer came, only offered by a greater number. It is worthy of note that some of the seasons of greatest revival were preceded by disasters that threatened the very existence of the mission. The principal text book was the word of God; partly, as we shall see, through a providential necessity, but chiefly because it was God's own chosen instrumentality for the salvation of our race; and it was eminently adapted for the education of such a people. The teachers could say, with a beloved co-laborer on Mount Lebanon, "To the Scriptures we give increased attention; they do more to unfold and expand the intellectual powers, and to create careful and honest thinkers, than all the sciences we teach." It is also most efficient in freeing mind and heart from those erroneous views that are opposed to its teachings; and actual trial developed a richness and fulness of practical adaptation to the work that astonished even those who already knew something of its value. Its precepts and instructions were also clothed with power: requirements and counsels which from the missionary had only awakened opposition, coming from the Bible were received as messages from heaven. Said a Nestorian to a missionary who had been speaking to him the words of God, "His words grew very beautiful while we were talking." In reference to every suspicious novelty or distasteful duty, the Bible was the ultimate appeal. The missionary could say to them as Paul did to an early church, "When ye received the word of God, which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of man, but, as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe." Besides, those thus educated were to teach others, and needed to be thoroughly furnished from the divine oracles with the truths they were to impart. It is not strange, then, that in the Seminary the Bible was studied both doctrinally and historically; that they had a system of theology and tables of Scripture chronology; that biblical biography and geography were regular studies; that different portions of Scripture occupied different years; and that, instead of Butler's Analogy and Wayland's Moral Science, were the Epistles to the Romans and Hebrews studied with all the accurate analysis and thoroughness bestowed elsewhere upon the classics. Such teaching would yield good fruit any where, and the good seed found good ground in Persia.