The decision of the council of Ephesus caused many difficulties in the church; and the friends of Nestorius carried his doctrines through all the Oriental provinces, and established numerous congregations, professing an invincible opposition to the decrees of the Ephesian council. Nestorianism spread rapidly over the East, and was embraced by a large number of the oriental bishops. Barsumas, bishop of Nisibis, labored with great zeal and activity to procure for the Nestorians a solid and permanent footing in Persia; and his success was so remarkable that his fame extended throughout the East. He established a school at Nisibis, which became very famous, and from which issued those Nestorian doctors who, in that and the following centuries, spread abroad their tenets through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, and China.
The Nestorian church is Episcopal in its government, like all the other Oriental churches. Its doctrines, also, are, in general, the same with those of those churches, and they receive and repeat, in their public worship, the Nicene creed. Their _distinguishing_ doctrines appear to be, their believing that Mary was not the mother of Jesus Christ, _as God_, but only _as man_, and that there are, consequently, _two persons_, as well as _two natures_, in the Son of God. This notion was looked upon in the earlier ages of the church as a most momentous error; but it has in later times been considered more as an error of words than of doctrine; and that the error of Nestorius was in the words he employed to express his meaning, rather than in the doctrine itself. While the Nestorians believe that Christ had _two natures_ and _two persons_, they say “that these natures and persons are so closely and intimately united that they have but one _aspect_.” “Now, the word _barsopa_, by which they express this _aspect_, is precisely of the same signification with the Greek word προσωπον, which signifies _a person_; and hence it is evident that they attached to the word _aspect_ the same idea that we attach to the word _person_, and that they understood, by the word _person_, precisely what we understand by the term _nature_.”
The Nestorians, of all the Christian churches of the East, have been the most careful and successful in avoiding a multitude of superstitious opinions and practices, which have infected the Romish and many Eastern churches.