CHRISTIANIZING THE UNTOUCHABLES 437
too deep to fathom. When one weapon of attack failed, he tried another. Fraud took the place of violence; money took the place of arms. He bribed those whom he could not bully, and appealed to the imaginations of men when he could not work upon their fears. And, little by little, he succeeded. First one Church fell, and then another. Dangers and difficulties beset them. Often had he to encounter violent resistence, and often did he beat it down. When the strength of the Syrian Christians was too great for him, he called in the aid of the native princes. The unhappy Archdeacon, weary of resistance and threatened with excommunication, at last made submission to the Roman Prelate. Menezes issued a decree for a synod; and, on the 20th June 1599, the Churches assembled at Diamper. The first session passed quietly over, but not without much secret murmuring. The second, at which the decrees were read, was interrupted at that trying point of the ceremony where, having enunciated the Confession of Faith, the Archbishop renounced and anathematized the Patriarch of Babylon. The discontent of the Syrians here broke out openly; they protested against the necessity of a confession of Faith, and urged that such a confession would imply that they were not Christians before the assembling of the Synod. But Menezes allayed their apprehensions and removed their doubts, by publicly making the confession in the name of himself and the Eastern Churches. One of the Syrian priests, who acted as interpreter, then read the confession in the Malabar language, and the assembled multitude repeated it after him, word for word, on their knees. And so the Syrian Christians bowed their necks to the yoke of Rome.
Resolute to improve the advantages he had gained, Menezes did not suffer himself to subside into inactivity, and to bask in the sunshine of his past triumphs. Whether it was religious zeal or temporal ambition that moved him, he did not relax from his labours; but feeling that it was not enough to place the yoke upon the neck of the Syrian Christians, he endeavoured, by all means, to keep it there. The Churches yielded sullen submission; but there were quick-witted, keen-sighted men among them, who, as the seventeenth century began to dawn upon the world, looked hopefully into the future, feeling assured that they could discern even then unmistakable evidences of the waning glories of the Portuguese in the East. There was hope then for the Syrian churches. The persecutions of Menezes were very grievous—for he separated priests from their wives; excommunicated, on trifling grounds, members of the churches; and destroyed all the old Syriac records which contained proofs of the early purity of their faith.