186 HISTORY OF THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH
and service of the Church, and remained as a teacher at Nisibis, where his learning and sanctity soon won him wide fame in the melet. Time passed; the Narses-Elisha schism came to an end; Paul the Patriarch was elected, and died; and now all turned to the converted Magian, the man of wisdom, experience and holiness, to come forth from his retirement and heal the wounds of the Church.
Aba accepted the call; a deed which was, for him, an act of the highest self-sacrifice, for he cannot have been ignorant of the fate to which he was exposing himself by so doing. To one born in "the melet" the patriarchate might present itself as a prize; for it was the highest position open to him — it carried with it wealth, consideration, power. To the convert the case was absolutely changed; to him — an apostate in the eyes of every Magian — to be patriarch was to be a conspicuous apostate, whose daily duty it would be to stand between Christians and Magian oppression, and to invoke the protection of the hukumet for the former against the latter. His very existence was an outrage and a provocation to all good Zoroastrians; and his occupation the balking of their desires. The fate of the last patriarch who had been a convert, Babowai, was an example of what his own would probably be. Aba, who had given up a career for his faith's sake, can hardly be accused of the ambition that takes no count of danger. When he accepted consecration, it can only have been in obedience to what he felt to be the solemn call of duty to God and man; and with the full knowledge that the duty would have to be fulfilled at the constant risk and, in all probability, at the ultimate cost of his life.
The state of the Church when Mar Aba assumed the government might have been the despair of a
