freed the Jacobite church entirely from the oppression of the Orthodox,
and thereby assured its continuance. The church, however, never attained
any greater development, but on the contrary continued to lose adherents
from century to century. While Jacob of Edessa is said to have ordained
some 100,000 priests and deacons for his fellow-believers, in the 16th
century the Jacobites of Syria were estimated at only 50,000 families.

The Monophysite church of Egypt had a like fate. At the time of the
separation of the churches the Greeks here had remained faithful to
Orthodoxy, the Copts to Monophysitism. Here too the Arab conquest (641)
put an end to the oppression of the native Christians by the Greek
minority; but this did not afford the Coptic church any possibility of
vigorous development. It succumbed to the ceaseless alternation of
tolerance and persecution which characterized the Arab rule in Egypt,
and the mass of the Coptic people became unfaithful to the Church. At
the time of the conquest of the country by the Turks (1517) the Coptic
church seems already to have fallen to the low condition in which the
19th century found it. Though at the time of the Arab conquest the Copts
were reckoned at six millions, in 1820 the Coptic Christians numbered
only about one hundred thousand, and it is improbable that their number
can have been much greater at the close of the middle ages. Only in
Abyssinia the daughter church of the Coptic church succeeded in keeping
the whole people in the Christian faith. This fact, however, is the sole
outcome of the history of a thousand years; a poor result, if measured
by the standard of the rich history of the Western world, yet large
enough not to exclude the hope of a new development.

II. THE WEST, (a) _The Early Middle Ages. The Catholic Church as
influenced by the Foundation of the Teutonic States._--While the Eastern
Church was stereotyping those peculiar characteristics which made her a
thing apart, the Church of the West was brought face to face with the
greatest revolution that Europe has ever experienced. At the end of the
6th century all the provinces of the Empire had become independent
kingdoms, in which conquerors of Germanic race formed the dominant
nationality. The remnants of the Empire showed an uncommonly tough
vitality. It is true that the Teutonic states succeeded everywhere in
establishing themselves; but only in England and in the erstwhile Roman
Germany did the Ro