[Sidenote: St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew in India.]
There is an ancient tradition that St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew laid the foundations of the CHURCH IN INDIA, but very little is known of its early history. Pantaenus is said to have been sent as a missionary from Alexandria to India towards the end of the second century, though it is a matter in dispute whether by India in this case we are to understand the country now known under that name, or Ethiopia, or Arabia Felix.
There are still Christians in India who reverence St. Thomas as their founder, and use a liturgy which goes by his name. Nestorianism spread to India in the fifth century.
The Church is believed to have been planted in CHINA by St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, and the Chinese are mentioned by Arnobius in the fourth century amongst those nations which had received the Gospel. It does not seem, however, that Christianity existed for any length of time in this country.
[2] In speaking of the Greek Church of the present day, we usually understand the whole body of orthodox Eastern Christians, and not merely those dwelling in Greece itself.
[Sidenote: Arianism prepares the way for Mahometanism.]
The various heresies, and especially the heresy of Arius, which had so widely troubled the peace of the Eastern Church, though they were not suffered by God's Mercy to cause a lasting schism, yet left behind them a certain weakness resulting in the decay of many of the Churches of the East, and finally in their overthrow by the false faith of the impostor Mahomet. The present state of the Churches of Ephesus, Sardis, and Laodicea, if viewed in the light shed upon it by the prophetic Epistles of St. John the Divine, may serve to show us how God withdraws His Blessing from a Church no less surely than from an individual Christian, when His Grace is obstinately rejected and despised.
The false prophet Mahomet was born A.D. 569, of the chief family in the Arabian tribe of the Koreish; but it was not till after he had amassed a large fortune, partly by diligence in trade { 89} and partly by a wealthy marriage, that, at the age of forty, A.D. 609, he declared himself to be a prophet. [Sidenote: and claim to be a prophet and reformer.] This announcement was at first confined to the members of his own immediate family, till, at the end of four years, Mahomet proclaimed that he had a mission from God to reform the state of religion in his native city, Mecca, and to put down the idolatry which prevailed there. [Sidenote: Flight to Medina.] The opposition which the false prophet encountered from his fellow-citizens did not hinder him from making many converts to the religion he was beginning to invent for himself and for them, until at length (A.D. 622) an insurrection, caused by the preaching and success of Mahomet, obliged him to fly for his life from Mecca, and take refuge at Yatreb or Medina[1].