convenient stations of the empire. The Jesuits themselves deplore the fatal indiscretion of their chief,
who forgot the mildness of the gospel and the policy of his order, to introduce with hasty violence the
liturgy of Rome and the inquisition of Portugal. He condemned the ancient practice of circumcision,
which health, rather than superstition, had first invented in the climate of Æthiopia. A new baptism, a new
ordination, was inflicted on the natives; and they trembled with horror when the most holy of the dead
were torn from their graves, when the most illustrious of the living were excommunicated by a foreign
priest. In the defense of their religion and liberty, the Abyssinians rose in arms, with desperate but unsuccessful
zeal. Five rebellions were extinguished in the blood of the insurgents: two abunas were slain in battle,
whole legions were slaughtered in the field, or suffocated in their caverns; and neither merit, nor rank,
nor sex, could save from an ignominious death the enemies of Rome. But the victorious monarch was
finally subdued by the constancy of the nation, of his mother, of his son, and of his most faithful friends.
Segued listened to the voice of pity, of reason, perhaps of fear: and his edict of liberty of conscience
instantly revealed the tyranny and weakness of the Jesuits. On the death of his father, Basilides expelled
the Latin patriarch, and restored to the wishes of the nation the faith and the discipline of Egypt. The
Monophysite churches resounded with a song of triumph, "that the sheep of Æthiopia were now delivered
from the hyænas of the West;" and the gates of that solitary realm were forever shut against the arts, the
science, and the fanaticism of Europe.