ABSTRACT
Nobly turning toward the rising sun, instead of disturbing the Roman Empire with further religious controversies on that particular point, the Syrian monks carried on a glorious missionary work, which covered Asia with their bishoprics from Jerusalem to Peking, and from southern India to Turkestan. The great world beckoned, heathenism challenged, and one of the first duties that monks took upon themselves was that of spreading the faith. "The corridors and walls were nobly ornamented and beautifully decorated; roofs and flying eaves with coloured tiles appeared like the five-coloured pheasant on the wing." The Christian monk succeeded not only in keeping the Northern races in the Northern lands, but by adding those territories to Christendom, he both relieved the southlands of that special danger and gave Western Europe a real unity that endured for almost an entire millennium. The missionaries were eventually expelled from the empire by the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shoguns.
