That this same spirit is reflected in the social life of the people is something one would naturally expect, in view of the important influence of the church over the entire life of the people. As the father of the Alan princess replied when requested to give the hand of his daughter to Artasches, "From whence shall brave Artasches give thousands upon thousands and ten thousands upon tens of thousands unto the Alans in return for the maiden?" so to-day the first question that is asked when the hand of a young Armenian girl is requested in marriage is "What can he give for his bride?" The practice of wife purchase has only changed in that the required riches are given to the bride instead of to the father of the bride. Occasionally a young man is pressed to the point of mortgaging property in order to obtain the necessary funds, and it has been known that in many such cases the young bride found her treasure gone shortly after her marriage, her master having taken it to pay off his mortgage. So parents arrange for the marriage of their children, the young wife is delivered up to her husband as the obedient and submissive servant, children are baptized after they have scarcely opened their eyes, and church ceremonies are conducted much as they have been for generations.
The self-sufficiency of the Armenian people has been indicated in the repeated failures of missionary religions and foreign cultures to alter appreciably the native folkways and mores. In spite of political subordination to Islam, the Gregorian church has held tenaciously to its ideals and has successfully maintained its independence. The distinctive social tradition,--which includes the political and the religious traditions,--has remained intact in the face of recurrent invasion, vassalage, and persecution. The Armenian will not be assimilated. Death is preferable to the loss of those intangible realities that make the people a distinctive group. When Haic, the patriarchal progenitor of the race, was invited to "soften his hard pride," and to return to the kingdom of the god Bel, the alternative, war, was chosen. In the year 450, when the Persian fire-worshippers invited the Armenians to change their faith, the answer again was war. The reply to the decision of Chalcedon illustrates the same spirit. Likewise through the centuries of the immediate past the ever recurring answer to the Turk has been war. Powerless to assimilate the Armenian people, the Turk has had to annihilate or be annihilated. The self-sufficiency of the people thus reveals itself in the will to maintain the distinctive social tradition, regardless of cost or sacrifice.