bvious things, should understand such mysteries? Yet they
were taught that on those doctrines the salvation or damnation of the
human race depended. They saw that the clergy had abandoned the guidance
of the individual life of their flocks; that personal virtue or vice
were no longer considered; that sin was not measured by evil works but
by the degrees of heresy. They saw that the ecclesiastical chiefs of
Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria were engaged in a desperate
struggle for supremacy, carrying out their purposes by weapons and in
ways revolting to the conscience of man. What an example when bishops
were concerned in assassinations, poisonings, adulteries, blindings,
riots, treasons, civil war; when patriarchs and primates were
excommunicating and anathematizing one another in their rivalries for
earthly power, bribing eunuchs with gold, and courtesans and royal
females with concessions of episcopal love, and influencing the
decisions of councils asserted to speak with the voice of God by those
base intrigues and sharp practices resorted to by demagogues in their
packed assemblies! Among legions of monks, who carried terror into the
imperial armies and riot into the great cities, arose hideous clamours
for theological dogmas, but never a voice for intellectual liberty or
the outraged rights of man. In such a state of things, what else could
be the result than disgust or indifference? Certainly men could not be
expected, if a time of necessity arose, to give help to a system that
had lost all hold on their hearts.

When, therefore, in the midst of the wrangling of sects, in the
incomprehensible jargon of Arians, Nestorians, Eutychians, Monothelites,
Monophysites, Mariolatrists, and an anarchy of countless disputants,
there sounded through the world, not the miserable voice of the
intriguing majority of a council, but the dread battle-cry, "There is
but one God," enforced by the tempest of Saracen armies, is it
surprising that the hubbub was hushed? Is it surprising that all Asia
and Africa fell away? In better times patriotism is too often made
subordinate to religion; in those times it was altogether dead.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Africa.]

Scarcely was Mohammed buried when his religion manifested its inevitable
destiny of overpassing the bounds of Arabia. The prophet himself had
declared war against the Roman empire, and, at the head of 30,000 men,
advanced toward Damascus, but his purpose was frustrated by il