some of my readers were I to pass this subject without notice.
Their first bishop, Frumentius, being ordained about the year 333, and instructed in the religion of the Greeks of the church of Alexandria by St Athanasius, then sitting in the chair of St Mark, it follows that the true religion of the Abyssinians, which they received on their conversion to Christianity, is that of the Greek church; and every rite or ceremony in the Abyssinian church may be found and traced up to its origin in the Greek church while both of them were orthodox.
Frumentius preserved Abyssinia untainted with heresy till the day of his death. We find, from a letter preserved in the works of St Athanasius, that Constantius, the heretical Greek emperor, wished St Athanasius to deliver him up, which that patriarch refused to do: indeed at that time it was not in his power.
Soon after this, Arianism, and a number of other heresies, each in their turn, were brought by the monks from Egypt, and infected the church of Abyssinia. A great part of these heresies, in the beginning, were certainly owing to the difference of the languages in those times, and especially the two words Nature and Person, than which no two words were evermore equivocal in every language in which they have been translated. Either of these words, in our own language, is a sufficient example of what I have said; and in fact we have adopted them from the Latin. If we had adopted the signification of these words in religion from the Greek, and applied the Latin words of Person and Na-ture
