MENDÆANS, MENDAITES, MENDAI IJAHI, OR DISCIPLES OF ST. JOHN, THAT IS, THE BAPTIST.
From twenty to twenty-five thousand families of this sect still remain, chiefly in the neighborhood of Bassora, a city between Arabia and Persia, on the extremity of the desert of Irac. They are sometimes called _Christians of St. John_—a name which they probably received from the Turks, and to which they contentedly submit for the sake of the toleration it affords them; but they are better known in ecclesiastical history as _Hemero_ (or every day) _Baptists_, from their frequent washings.
The followers of Ludovic Muggleton, a journeyman tailor, who, with his companion Reeves, set up for great prophets, in the time of Cromwell. They pretended to absolve or condemn whom they pleased, and gave out that they were the two last witnesses spoken of in the Revelation, who were to appear previous to the final destruction of the world. They affirmed that there was no devil at all without the body of man or woman; that the devil is man’s spirit of unclean reason and cursed imagination; that the ministry in this world, whether prophetical or ministerial, is all a lie, and abomination to the Lord; with a variety of other vain and inconsistent tenets.
Muggleton died in 1697, and on his gravestone is this inscription:—
“Whilst mausoleums and large inscriptions give Might, splendor, and, past death, make potents live, It is enough briefly to write thy name: Succeeding times by that will read thy fame; Thy deeds, thy acts, around the world resound; No foreign soil where Muggleton’s not found.”
The raven plume of oblivion hath long ago waved over this prophet’s grave.
From a very interesting work recently published by Asahel Grant, M. D., a medical missionary to the Nestorians, we copy the following account:—
“The passage of the Tigris transferred me from Mesopotamia into Assyria, and I stood upon the ruins of Nineveh, ‘that great city,’ where the prophet Jonah proclaimed the dread message of Jehovah to so many repenting thousands whose deep humiliation averted for a time the impending ruin. But when her proud monarchs had scourged idolatrous Israel and carried the ten tribes into captivity, and raised their hands against Judah and the holy city, the inspired strains of the eloquent Nahum, clothed in terrible sublimity as they were, met their full accomplishment in the utter desolation of one of the largest cities on which the sun ever shone. ‘Nineveh is laid waste! who will bemoan her? She is empty, and void, and waste; her nobles dwell in the dust; her people are scattered upon the mountains, and no man gathereth them.’