nd one pointing beyond the
Pyrenees. For a while it seemed that the portentous meteor would
increase to the full, and that all Europe would be enveloped.
Christianity had lost for ever the most interesting countries over which
her influence had once spread, Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land, Asia
Minor, Spain. She was destined, in the end, to lose in the same manner
the metropolis of the East. In exchange for these ancient and
illustrious regions, she fell back on Gaul, Germany, Britain,
Scandinavia. In those savage countries, what were there to be offered as
substitutes for the great capitals, illustrious in ecclesiastical
history, for ever illustrious in the records of the human
race--Carthage, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople? It was
an evil exchange. The labours, intellectual and physical, of which
those cities had once been the scene; the preaching, and penances, and
prayers so lavishly expended in them, had not produced the anticipated,
the asserted result. In theology and morality the people had pursued a
descending course. Patriotism was extinct. They surrendered the state to
preserve their sect; their treason was rewarded by subjugation.

[Sidenote: Reflexions on the course of historic events.]

From these melancholy events we may learn that the principles on which
the moral world is governed are analogous to those which obtain in the
physical. It is not by incessant divine interpositions, which produce
breaches in the continuity of historic action; it is not by miracles and
prodigies that the course of events is determined; but affairs follow
each other in the relation of cause and effect. The maximum development
of early Christianity coincided with the boundaries of the Roman empire;
the ecclesiastical condition depended on the political, and, indeed, was
its direct consequence and issue. The loss of Africa and Asia was, in
like manner, connected with the Arabian movement, though it would have
been easy to prevent that catastrophe, and to preserve those continents
to the faith by the smallest of those innumerable miracles of which
Church history is full, and which were often performed on unimportant
and obscure occasions. But not even one such miracle was vouchsafed,
though an angel might have worthily descended. I know of no event in the
history of our race on which a thoughtful man may more profitably
meditate than on this loss of Africa and Asia. It may remove from his
mind many erroneous