Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ... 304 CHAPTER XIX. MAR ATHANASIUS MATTHEW. The first native of Malabar that ever received consecration as Metran of Malankarai directly at the hands of the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch was Mar Athanasius Matthew. This Matthew was a student in the old Syrian college at Cottayam, when it was under the charge of the Church Missionary Society, and was one of the deacons selected in 1837, as its most prominent students, to be further trained in the Church Missionary Society's institution at Madras. After some years' study there he was dismissed as unfit for the ministry. Then he proceeded to Mardin in Armenia to visit the patriarch, as well as the churches and convents in that region. He was graciously received by his Holiness, who entertained him under his own roof for seven months.1 It so happened that, at the time of Matthew's arrival, the mind of the patriarch was perplexed in regard to the state of things in Malankarai by some doleful and perhaps not altogether unprejudiced accounts that he had just received from that diocese. It appears that between 1825 and 1842 the Syrian community, or rather the Adullamite section thereof, had addressed the patriarch eleven times, soliciting that a metropolitan should be sent there, and stating that they were as sheep having no shepherd; that the Syrian Church in Malabar was in a state of widowhood; that, being without a duly constituted metropolitan and priests, they were deprived of the benefit of baptism, absolution, mass, and other sacred rites; that they had no morone (holy oils); that a priest ordained a priest and a priest consecrated a metran; that the patriarch should prohibit the priest, Mar Cheppat Dionysius, who wore the sacerdotal habit of metropolitan, from wantonly transgressing the...