The Abduction of Avedick [pp. 414-433]

THIE ABDUCTION OF AVEDICK.
to calumniate him if he ceased to be their instrument, and sufficiently strong to overturn him; everywhere present and influential, they were in fact absolute masters of the situation, and
their responsibility before history is as undeniable as their
power. While enduring their yoke Ferriol could not help complaining sometimes. "They all want to pass for ministers here,"
he wrote to Torcy. "They believe themselves better informed
than the ambassadors, and the order of each estate is reversed.
These good fathers, who ought to resort only to the prisons and
tb the Christians established in the country, incessantly visit
dignitaries and obtrude upon everybody with matters of a political kind. When an ambassador wishes to reduce them to the
bounds that seem prescribed to them, they treat him as a man
without religion who sacrifices everything to his ambition."
Certainly, this is the language of truth; everything proves it
so. But well-founded as were these complaints, real as was the
domination of the Jesuits, one cannot be much interested in
this voluntary victim of their encroachments. Not only, indeed,
did Ferriol not try to shake off their heavy tutelage, although at
times it weighed upon his self-love, but still more: forgetting
the character with which he was clothed, and passing from a
brief and honorable independence to a servile devotion, he constituted himself the executor of the vengeance of some of the
missionaries with such implacableness that in combating their
adversaries he seemed to be fighting his own enemies. His hate,
revived and skilfully nurtured by baleful excitation, is now to
follow docilely the direction given it, and to strike pitilessly, to
pursue without abatement, to make disappear, and to overwhelm
long even after his fall, a great Armenian personage whom it is
time to introduce in his turn into this recital, and to make known
to our readers.
Avedick, sprung from the people, and belonging to a poor and
obscure family of Tokat, had been early admitted to the number of the vertabieds, or doctors charged with preserving and
teaching the doctrines of the Armenian Church. Having soon
become bishop, then archbishop, he had distinguished himself
by his firmness, which Ferriol called hardihood, in sustaining
the interests of his co-religionists. The beginning of his long
strife with the French ambassador, in which one shows a worthy
loftiness and the other an extreme violence, goes back much be 27
1874.]
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