The battle for religious freedom in Turkey was fought over the mutilated remains of the Armenian renegade, and the Sultan's pledge secured to the Protestant native Christians the full enjoyment of their civil rites, while openly practicing their own religion.1 1 This brief statement is compiled from the _Correspondence relating to Executions in Turkey for Apostasy from Islamism_, published by the British Parliament in 1844, occupying forty folio pages.

The correspondence is highly honorable to the great men who were then controlling the political affairs of Europe, and to a large extent also of Western Asia.
But before this comprehensive meaning of the pledge could be understood, and the benefit of it actually enjoyed by the people of God, they were subjected to more grievous sufferings for their faith than any yet endured.

From 1843 to 1846, there was no long respite from persecution; yet in all this time the spirit of inquiry wonderfully spread, and believers were the more added to the Lord.
In 1843, Priest Vertanes was rudely deposed from office, and thrown into prison.

Finding he could not be induced to sign a paper of recantation, drawn up for him by the Patriarch, he was hurried by the Patriarch's beadles, with great violence, into an open sail-boat, without opportunity to obtain even an outer garment from his house, although it was midwinter, and sent across the sea of Marmora to the monastery of Ahmah, near Nicomedia.
The Foreign Secretary of the Board spent eleven weeks in this mission, in the winter of 1843-44, accompanied by Dr.Joel Hawes, of Hartford.

At that time it was arranged by the mission, in full accordance with the views of their visiting brethren, to discontinue the Greek department, to give distinct names as missions to the Jewish department and to the work among the Armenians, to open a female high school at Constantinople, and to associate Mr.Wood with Mr.Hamlin in the seminary at Bebek.