The Maronites are a Syrian people, forming with in the Christian Church a peculiar half-independent community or sect. Its members live scattered all over Syria; congregations are gathered in Aleppo, Damascus, Nazareth, and the Island of Cyprus; but the proper home of the commu nity is the Lebanon region, from Tripoli in the north, to Tyre and the Lake of Gennesaret in the South. The districts of Kesrawan, n.e. of Beirut, and Bsherre (26 m. s.e. of Tripoli) are inhabited exclusively by Maronites; while in other places Maronites, Greeks, Jacobites, Druses, and others live as neighbors. The total number of the Mar onite inhabitants of Lebanon is somewhat over 200,000, according to the newest reports. They pursue agriculture and cattle-breeding, and succeed well in the cultivation of the silk-worm. Their native tongue has for centuries been the Arabic, but they are of Syrian descent. The liturgy em ployed in their divine service is in Syriac, though only a few understand that language; the read ings from the Gospels, however, are in Arabic.
They like to consider themselves a distinct nation; and they have, indeed, always succeeded in main taining a certain measure of political independence.
They are governed by sheiks, elected from among their own nobility; and to the Ottoman sultan, who appoints a Christian pasha over them, they pay a variable tribute. At the head of their church (the Ecclesia Maronitarum) stands a patriarch, who is elected by themselves and has the title of patriarch of Antioch and all the East. He is elected by a two-thirds' vote of the archbishops and bishops. He resides during summer in the monastery Kanobin, in the Lebanon, and during winter at Bkerki. He receives confirmation from the pope; for from the latter part of the twelfth century there has existed a relationship between the see of Rome and the Maronites. Although this relationship depends more upon an external basis and upon adjustments made from time to time, and though real unity in doctrine or worship has never existed, the claim of later Maronite authors is often to the effect that from apostolic times their church has maintained an undisturbed orthodoxy, essentially that of the Roman Catholic Church. Authors who have written in this strain are Abraham Ecchellensis (q.v.) and Faustus Nairon, in Dissertatio de origine, ine ac religione Maronitarum (Rome, 1679). These writers follow somewhat closely a few Roman Catholic writers, though there have been manifest traces of monothelite tendencies.
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