shment, has been totally
extinguished. The arts, which had been taught by Carthage and Rome, were
involved in a cloud of ignorance; the doctrine of Cyprian and Augustin
was no longer studied. Five hundred episcopal churches were overturned
by the hostile fury of the Donatists, the Vandals, and the Moors.
The zeal and numbers of the clergy declined; and the people, without
discipline, or knowledge, or hope, submissively sunk under the yoke
of the Arabian prophet Within fifty years after the expulsion of the
Greeks, a lieutenant of Africa informed the caliph that the tribute of
the infidels was abolished by their conversion; and, though he sought to
disguise his fraud and rebellion, his specious pretence was drawn from
the rapid and extensive progress of the Mahometan faith. In the
next age, an extraordinary mission of five bishops was detached from
Alexandria to Cairoan. They were ordained by the Jacobite patriarch
to cherish and revive the dying embers of Christianity: but the
interposition of a foreign prelate, a stranger to the Latins, an enemy
to the Catholics, supposes the decay and dissolution of the African
hierarchy. It was no longer the time when the successor of St. Cyprian,
at the head of a numerous synod, could maintain an equal contest
with the ambition of the Roman pontiff. In the eleventh century, the
unfortunate priest who was seated on the ruins of Carthage implored the
arms and the protection of the Vatican; and he bitterly complains that
his naked body had been scourged by the Saracens, and that his authority
was disputed by the four suffragans, the tottering pillars of his
throne. Two epistles of Gregory the Seventh are destined to soothe the
distress of the Catholics and the pride of a Moorish prince. The pope
assures the sultan that they both worship the same God, and may hope to
meet in the bosom of Abraham; but the complaint that three bishops could
no longer be found to consecrate a brother, announces the speedy and
inevitable ruin of the episcopal order. The Christians of Africa and
Spain had long since submitted to the practice of circumcision and
the legal abstinence from wine and pork; and the name of _Mozarabe_
(adoptive Arabs) was applied to their civil or religious conformity.
About the middle of the twelfth century, the worship of Christ and the
succession of pastors were abolished along the coast of Barbary, and in
the kingdoms of Cordova and Seville, of Valencia and Grenada. The throne
o