was that Cyril who had murdered Hypatia.  Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not.  In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople, he vindicated the attributes of the Eternal, the Almighty God.  “And can this God have a mother?” he exclaimed.  In other sermons and writings, he set forth with more precision his ideas that the Virgin should be considered not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human portion of Christ, that portion being as essentially distinct from the divine as is a temple from its contained deity.

Persecution and death of Nestor.  Instigated by the monks of Alexandria, the monks of Constantinople took up arms in behalf of “the Mother of God.”  The quarrel rose to such a pitch that the emperor was constrained to summon a council to meet at Ephesus.  In the mean time Cyril had given a bribe of many pounds of gold to the chief eunuch of the imperial court, and had thereby obtained the influence of the emperor’s sister.  “The holy virgin of the court of heaven thus found an ally of her own sex in the holy virgin of the emperor’s court.”  Cyril hastened to the council, attended by a mob of men and women of the baser sort.  He at once assumed the presidency, and in the midst of a tumult had the emperor’s rescript read before the Syrian bishops could arrive.  A single day served to complete his triumph.  All offers of accommodation on the part of Nestor were refused, his explanations were not read, he was condemned unheard.  On the arrival of the Syrian ecclesiastics, a meeting of protest was held by them.  A riot, with much bloodshed, ensued in the cathedral of St. John.  Nestor was abandoned by the court, and eventually exiled to an Egyptian oasis.  His persecutors tormented him as long as he lived, by every means in their power, and at his death gave out that “his blasphemous tongue had been devoured by worms, and that from the heats of an Egyptian desert he had escaped only into the hotter torments of hell!”

The overthrow and punishment of Nestor, however, by no means destroyed his opinions.  He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same gospel, could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity of the new queen of heaven.  Their philosophical tendencies were soon indicated by their actions.  While their leader was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the Euphrates, and established the Chaldean Church.  Under their auspices the college of Edessa was founded.  From the college of Nisibis issued those doctors who spread Nestor’s tenets through Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, China, Egypt.  The Nestorians, of course, adopted the philosophy of Aristotle, and translated the works of that great writer into Syriac