We left the emperor Heraclius carrying back the true Cross in triumph to Jerusalem from its captivity under the Persian fire-worshipper, whose empire he had wounded to death. This was in the year 629, in the pontificate of Honorius, and in that act the emperor seated at Byzantium, on the throne of Constantine, at the head of the empire which was the proper creation of Constantine, seemed to have made himself the champion of the faith which is embodied in the Cross. Had Heraclius then died it would have been with a halo not only of human but of Christian glory surrounding his head. But he survived during twelve years in which his inertness, considered by some to be unexplained, suffered the eastern empire to undergo irreparable losses. These, moreover, came from a foe of whose mere existence he was indeed conscious, but of whom he had no fear at the time of that triumphal entry into Jerusalem. An obscure Arabian raider was striving to gain a mastery among some savage tribes in that little known peninsula. The lord of the golden city, seated as queen of Europe and Asia on broad-flowing Hellespont, would [pg 102] hardly deign to cast his eyes upon an incursion of southern robbers, made on an empire which for three hundred years had been watching war-clouds big with tempests from the north, or matching itself with difficulty against the restored Sassanid kingdom. This at last was beaten down. Might not Constantinople hail in security the return of an emperor who had conquered Persia? But we, looking back over the ages, may think that the act of Heraclius replacing the Cross in the Holy City and in the church which Constantine had built over the sepulchre of Christ may be called with much truth the last act of the real Cæsarean empire, inasmuch as during the twelve succeeding years it lost for ever its greatest provinces to the very foe whose advent as a conqueror Heraclius had not even suspected.
We have now to follow briefly one of the greatest revolutions which has ever occurred in human affairs. It is a revolution which not merely sets up one kingdom instead of another, or alters the persons of individual rulers; but which changes human society to its very depths, provides a different standard of morals, and, so far as it succeeds, but only so far, reverses the course of Christian civilisation, and undoes in certain countries the greatest conquests which the Christian Church had obtained for the good of the human race. Not States only are changed, but fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters: in fine, Græco-Roman heathenism has disappeared, but instead of it arises a religion borne on the shoulders of a temporal rule, and a legislation compared with which in certain respects [pg 103] that old heathenism was pure and benignant. The revolution reaches in fact man's belief in the nature of God Himself: and a change of belief in the nature of God involves a change in all His relations to His moral creatures, and in their relations to each other. The creature in all action reproduces what it holds concerning the Creator. The religion of self-sacrifice springs from a God who sacrifices Himself: the religion of self-indulgence from a God from whose worship sacrifice has been expunged.
It50 appears that even before the triumphal entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem with the recovered cross he had met in the Persian campaigns, in 622 or 623, with a certain bishop named Cyrus, then holding the see of Phasis, in Armenia. But Cyrus himself had for years before been in communication with Sergius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople, the guide and inspirer of the emperor. Sergius had held the see of the capital since the year 610, in which the accession of Heraclius took place. It had been all along his dream to reconcile the various monophysite sects which troubled his master's empire. In the political point of view such a reconciliation could not but appear very important. In Egypt alone the Monophysites numbered about six millions, against three hundred thousand orthodox.51 How deeply their national feeling was mixed up with their heresy is shown by the name of Melchites or Royalists, which they gave to their opponents. The patriarch Sergius and the [pg 104] emperor Heraclius fell upon the device of gaining the heretical party, not only in Egypt, but in the Eastern empire generally, to at least an outward union with the orthodox by introducing the formula “One Operation” as a theological expression for the acts of our Lord. St. John of Damascus52 describes in his treatise on heresies the 99th as that of the Monothelites “who derived their origin from Cyrus of Alexandria, and their strength from Sergius of Constantinople. These men maintained two Natures in Christ, and one Person, but assert one Will and one Operation, by which they destroy the duality of natures, and strongly adhere to the doctrines of Apollinarius.” Now Sergius, uniting great ability and strong character to his position as bishop of the capital city and minister of the Emperor Heraclius, dominated his mind. Heraclius exerted himself greatly to disseminate the formulary of these two patriarchs. His purpose was that of drawing together his own distracted empire. This purpose of Heraclius is carried back so far at least as the year 628. Nay, at the beginning of his campaign against the Persians he recommended it. How much more when by the peace of the year 628 he recovered the provinces which had been taken from him.53 It would seem that the faltering of Heraclius in the faith, which he was willing to subject to a deceptive compromise the doctrine of the incarnation itself, was coincident in time with the opening of the Mohammedan era, the hegira or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, which marks his assumption of the claim to propagate [pg 105] by force a conquering religion. That claim was in a few years to cost Heraclius the half of his empire. It is certain that about the year 630 he promoted Cyrus to be patriarch of Alexandria. He also put a certain Athanasius of like doctrine into the see of Antioch, and thus three patriarchal sees at once were in favour of the heresy. And Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius commending it as a wonderful mode of restoring unity to the Church in the East.
Cyrus drew up nine heads of doctrine, by which he thought that he had reconciled the Theodosians and other powerful sects in Egypt. His announcement was received with exceeding joy by Sergius at Constantinople. Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius describing the action of Cyrus in these words: “Certain dogmatic heads were agreed upon between the two sides, in consequence of which those who but yesterday were parted into divisions and acknowledged the wicked Dioscorus and Severus as their ancestors, were united to the one most holy Catholic Church, and all the people of Alexandria, beloved by Christ, and besides this we may say all Egypt and Thebais and Libya, and the other dioceses of the Egyptian province, became one flock of Christ our true God. They who were until then to be seen an innumerable multitude of divided heresies, now, by the good pleasure of God and the zeal well-pleasing to Him of the most holy prelate of Alexandria, have all become one, with one voice and unity of spirit, confessing the true doctrines of the Church.”54
[pg 106]Such was the picture set before Pope Honorius by the patriarch Sergius, then in the height of his credit as bishop of the imperial city and prime minister of the emperor, in the year 633, when Abu Bekr was elected the first of the chalifs to carry on the power of Mohammed, who had died a few months before. A few years after this supposed reunion of all, these same Egyptians welcomed submission to Omar, the second chalif and successor of Abu Bekr, as lord of Egypt, who would, as they thought, be more favourable to them than Heraclius.
And the successor of St. Peter was deceived into believing that the picture drawn by Sergius was a true statement.
But before the union described in such terms by Sergius had been completed, a man had come to Alexandria, who was to protest in the face of the whole world against this compromise to which the Catholic faith was being subjected. This was Sophronius, a monk of high repute, to whom the patriarch Cyrus showed the articles of union, while they were as yet unpublished. Sophronius threw himself at the patriarch's feet, and conjured him most earnestly not to announce them from the pulpit, as they manifestly expressed the heresy of Apollinaris. Sophronius did not succeed with Cyrus, but carried a letter from him to Sergius at Constantinople, to whom it would seem that Cyrus directed him as the chief supporter and exponent of the doctrine which Sophronius rejected.
All that Sophronius was able to obtain from Sergius was that both expressions concerning the action of our [pg 107] Lord, as God-man, that is, the One Operation, or the Two Operations, should be equally avoided. Sophronius on his return to Jerusalem, was elected patriarch, and as such, presently issued his synodical letter. This is almost the most important document55 in the whole Monothelite struggle: a great theological treatise, which embraces the Trinity and the Incarnation, and fully sets forth the doctrine of the Two Operations in Christ. Copies of it were sent to all the patriarchs. The copy sent to Sergius has come down to us among the acts of the 7th session of the 6th council. Out of the copy in the acts I will here quote some few of the very words in which the great champion of the faith states the doctrine. It is that which St. Leo defined at the Council of Chalcedon, for which Pope S. Martin offered his life in sacrifice, for which the Popes preceding and following him suffered trials and persecutions without end, which four successive patriarchs of Constantinople endeavoured to overthrow, and for their incessant quarrels over which, three eastern patriarchates, with their bishoprics, were delivered over as a prey to the hordes of the false prophet.
Sophronius56 addressing his colleagues began with regretting that he was advanced to the pontifical throne from a very humble state against his will. Begging his fathers and brethren to support him, he [pg 108] noted that it was an apostolic custom throughout the world that they who were thus advanced, should attest their faith to the colleagues preceding them. After this introduction, Sophronius threw his words into the form of a creed, in which the first part dwelt upon the Trinity. He then, at greater length, set forth his belief in the Incarnation. How God the Son, taking pity upon the fall of man, by His own will, and the will of His Father, and the divine good pleasure of the Spirit, being of the infinite nature, incapable of circumscription and of local passage, entered the virginal womb, resplendent in its purity, of Mary the holy, the God-minded, the free from every contamination of body, of soul, and of mind;57 the fleshless took flesh, the formless, in His divine substance, took our form; the eternal God becomes in truth man. He, who is in the bosom of the eternal Father is bosomed in a mother's womb. He who is without time receives a beginning in time. Then, passing to the point in question, he went on: Christ is One and Two, One in Person, Two in Natures and their natural attributes. On this account, One and the same Christ and Son, and Only-begotten is found undivided in both natures. He worked physically the works of each nature according to the essential quality or natural property which belonged to each. This He could not have done, had He possessed, as One only Person, so One only Nature, not compounded. For then, the One and [pg 109] the Same would not have completely done the works of each Nature. For when has Godhead without body worked naturally the works of the body? or, when has a body without Godhead worked works which substantially belong to the Godhead? But Emmanuel, being One, and in this Oneness both, that is, God and Man, did, in truth, the works of each Nature; being One and the Same, as God He did the divine, as Man the human works. Being One and the Same, He works and He speaks the divine and the human.58 Not one wrought miracles, and another did human works, and suffered pains, as Nestorius meant, but one and the same Christ and Son wrought the divine and the human according to each, as St. Cyril taught. In each of the Two Natures He had the two powers unmingled, but undivided. As He is eternal God, He wrought the miracles; as He was Man in the last times, He wrought the inferior and human works.
The answer to the Synodical letter of Sophronius, made by Sergius at Constantinople, was not to receive it, but to draw up his own Ecthesis, and prevail on the emperor Heraclius to stamp it with the imperial signature, and proclaim it as the faith of his empire. Before the Ecthesis was brought to Rome in December, 638, Pope Honorius had died in the preceding October. Sophronius had commissioned the chief bishop of his patriarchate, Stephen of Dor, as we have already seen, [pg 110] to carry his appeal to Honorius, in the See of Peter. And now it is time to turn to those events which were in the meanwhile happening in the eastern empire.
In the three hundred years from Constantine to his twenty-second successor, Heraclius, the empire which he had set up in the fairest city of the world had developed into a double despotism. It is difficult to say whether that despotism pressed more severely on the religious or on the civil well-being of its subjects. As to each, it is requisite to say something. The gravity of the events which took place within ten years demands it; while in their permanent effect that gravity most of all consists. The immediate result was most rapid and unexpected, yet a long train of action during the three hundred years preceding had led straight up to it, and a period of four times three hundred years has since witnessed its evolution.
Let us take first this pressure of despotism on religion. In speaking of Constantine I noted that there were in him two very distinct periods of his rule after he became a Christian. The first precedes his acquisition of the whole empire in 323; the second follows in the fourteen years from that time to his death. But in this second period the change, which dates from the moment at which he becomes sole emperor, is yet gradual. At the first General Council, in 325, the calling of which is agreed to by the Pope and the eastern patriarchs, but springs from himself, he acknowledges both in word and conduct that the Christian Church is the kingdom of Christ, and that its government lies in the hands of those [pg 111] who receive a divine consecration thereto from Christ. They are the witnesses of His doctrine, which they maintain and promulgate in virtue of that consecration. Upon this doctrine their judgment is final. Constantine never in thought submitted to any power but the Catholic Church. The thought of warring sects was abhorrent equally to the soldier, the conqueror, and the legislator. Yet before his reign closed, at the age of sixty-three, he had been seduced in his conduct from this high tone of action by the counsels of the Court bishop, Eusebius; he had restored Arius and persecuted Athanasius. He had selected the bishops who were to attend local councils, while he stretched the powers of such local councils beyond their competence. He had in fact advanced with his imperial sword into the Church's Council Chamber, and claimed to be a judge of her doctrine. And his kingdom was forthwith divided59 among three sons, none of whom as rulers at all represented their fathers majesty, while one, Constantius, became after not many years the sole ruler, and as such propagated the heresy of the day, and practised encroachment on the doctrinal independence of the Church. Constantius was cut off in his forty-fourth year, receiving clinical baptism from the hands of an Arian on his death-bed. [pg 112] In twenty years after his death the imperial power passes through two new families, and when a third is called in to support a falling empire, Theodosius has fifteen years given to him in which to save the empire from imminent destruction and the eastern Church from heresy. The victory of that Arian heresy during fifty years had so deranged that eastern episcopate, that no one but a saint and champion of the faith, such as St. Basil,60 could venture to describe its condition. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the eastern empire passed through fifteen successors to Heraclius, and in that succession there are ten changes of family. One daughter of an emperor, who was himself a successful insurgent, conferred the empire twice, both times on the most worthless of men, as much marked for their civil misgovernment as for persecution of the Church. But with every step in the succession it may be noted that the original independence of the Church, as recognised by Constantine and by his successors down to the Emperor Leo I. in a long series of imperial laws,61 fell more and more into the background. Each general who by slaughtering his predecessor mounted the eastern throne assumed at once the bearing of the lord of the world: with the purple boots he put on the imperial pride. The Roman Primacy was indeed acknowledged by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and no [pg 113] less by the Emperor Marcian, the husband of the Theodosian heiress. But twenty-five years after that Council the western Emperor was abolished. From that moment the sole Roman Emperor was seated at Byzantium. At once an eastern schism was set up by the Bishop of the Capital. Rome was in the possession of Teuton Arians, who impaired the freedom of the Papal election, and made the imperial confirmation of it a custom. And when at last an honest general, who had entered the army as an Illyrian peasant, and risen from the ranks to the throne, had discountenanced the schism, condemned four successive bishops of his own capital, and acknowledged in amplest terms that the Pope's power was supreme, and also that it consisted in descent from St. Peter, the eastern emperor forbore, indeed, to deny the Primacy, but his endeavour was to control its action by making the spiritual subject to the civil power. This was the outcome of Justinian's long reign from 527, to 565. And the fatal conquest of Italy and Rome, making the one to be a captive province, and the other to be the garrisoned city, but not even the capital of a captive province, aided Justinian in acts to undo the reverence which in words he testified to the successor of St. Peter. In eighty-five years, from 553 to 638, the occupant of the eastern throne had advanced from holding a Council at Constantinople without the Pope's consent, to presenting at Rome a doctrinal decree for his signature. A few years afterwards, when the Pope called a Council, and condemned the decrees of two emperors as heresy, and three successive bishops of Constantinople as the [pg 114] heretics who supported it, the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., tried the Pope as guilty of high treason before the Senate of Byzantium, and crowned him with martyrdom in exile. Step from Pope Vigilius a captive guarded at Constantinople in 553, to Pope Martin sentenced there as a traitor in 655, and dying in the Crimea a martyr. That step will mark the advance of eastern despotism and the peril of the Church's independence.
But it may be said that from the time Nestorius is deposed as guilty of heresy made by himself from the see of the capital in 431, to the publication of the imperial Ecthesis as a rule of faith in 638, the eastern patriarchates have been swaying backwards and forwards between the two opposing heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches: Syria is the parent of one: Egypt of the other. Through these two centuries the bishop of Byzantium has pursued under the emperor's never-failing patronage a uniform course of self-aggrandisement. In this he was greatly helped by the extinction of the western emperor, when his master at Constantinople became the sole representative of the Roman name—that Christian king and Roman prince to whose honour so many Popes from Felix III. onward so vainly appealed. That very prince became step by step their most dangerous enemy. The first act immediately upon the extinction of the western emperor—who was the natural defender of the Holy See—was that a Byzantine bishop, Acacius, set himself up as the leader of the whole eastern episcopate. Pope Gelasius told the bishop of the day that he had no rank in the episcopate [pg 115] except that he was bishop of the capital: that a royal residence could not make an apostolic See. The new family of Justinian, ascending the eastern throne, was compelled by the internal state of the east, to acknowledge the Roman Primacy. Justinian never broke from that acknowledgment, but he termed his own bishop ecumenical patriarch in his laws: and every Byzantine bishop clung to the title given by an absolute sovereign. In the time of Pope Gregory the Great, a hundred years after the decree of Pope Gelasius, recording the pre-eminent rank and order of the three original Petrine Sees, of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, the Byzantine bishop is allowed to be a patriarch, Alexandria and Antioch have fallen under him. They themselves have been throughout all the intervening time the seats of violent party spirit, the spirit of the two conflicting heresies, striving for masterdom, disturbing succession in the sees, and ready by any obsequious act to get on their side the bishop of the capital, who dispenses the smiles of the emperor. Against all primitive order that bishop is found to consecrate his subordinate patriarchs at Alexandria and Antioch: to put down one and to raise another. When his usurpation was fresh and still incomplete, the patriarch Theophilus could persecute St. Chrysostom for the wrong done to Alexandria; but the patriarch Cyrus, made for his subserviency to Heraclius and Sergius to sit in the seat of St. Athanasius, addresses Sergius as “My Lord,62 the thrice-blessed Father of [pg 116] fathers, the ecumenical patriarch, Sergius, the least of his servants,” and his acts are as humble as his words.
It is clear that the eastern patriarchal system had fallen from intrinsic corruption before the joint operation of Byzantine despotism and the ambition of the bishop of the capital, who bought every accession to his own power and influence by acting in ecclesiastical matters as the instrument of the imperial will. This fall was complete before the events which mark the last ten years of the reign of Heraclius as a time of unequalled and irretrievable disaster both to the Church and to the State.
Yet something must still be added to portray that civil condition of the State which led on to this disaster. In all this time the city of the emperor's residence had been exhausting of their wealth—by the terrible severity of the imperial taxation—the provinces subject to it. Egypt and Syria lived under a perpetual oppression no less than Italy and Rome. Every distinction, every favour, which Antioch, when Queen of the east, may have brought to Syria, had long migrated to the banks of the Bosphorus. All the national feeling of Egypt was aggrieved by the ruler who treated the dower of Cleopatra—the imperial gem of Augustus—as a storehouse to be plundered at pleasure. And the national spirit was intensified to fever heat by the hatred of Byzantium on the part of the Eutychean population, forming the vast majority in the whole country.
Thus the wide eastern empire instead of worshipping in union of heart and gladness of spirit that transcendent [pg 117] mystery in which is throned the grandeur and the mercy of the Christian dispensation, instead of falling in prostrate adoration before that vision of condescending love which the angels desire to look into, broke itself into endless conflicts in disputing about it, until the mystery of grace became a rancorous jarring of ambitious rivals. During more than 200 years this suicidal conflict was engaged in ruining the resources of a vast dominion, which in the hands of a Constantine or a Theodosius, with the spirit of a St. Leo to guide them, would have been impregnable to every enemy. Had emperor and people been faithful to the Council of Chalcedon, and to the authority which they admitted to be based on a divine promise made to St. Peter, neither the disunited hordes of the North, nor the far inferior savages of the South, nor even the impact of the great Sassanide empire would have availed to overcome the Roman power. This last and greatest enemy Heraclius had subdued. He went forth in the name of the Crucified One whom Chosroes had called upon him to disavow, and won the fight. Yet even as he was carrying back the Cross and entering the Holy City in triumph, Heraclius had become a traitor to him whom he was professing to honour. He had already conceived, under an evil influence and by the inspiration of the patriarch at his right hand, a compromise of doctrine which he thought would induce the rebellious Egyptian people to return to his allegiance. He hoped also that the same compromise would exorcise the Nestorian spirit at Antioch. They who did not agree were to be drawn into an appearance of agreement [pg 118] by an ambiguous formula. And the See of the Apostle Peter, last and greatest witness of the true doctrine, was to be forced into accepting the deceit, and ratifying it for the old truth by submitting to an imperial decree, which, independent of the heresy contained in it, was a violation of the Church's liberty.
The fifty years which run from 628 to 678 contain the various acts of one prolonged attempt by the Byzantine emperors to enforce their religious despotism on the Pope in the shape of the Monothelite heresy. The two standard-bearers of the heresy are two patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria. Precisely at this time the Mohammedan power appears upon the scene. While Heraclius is brooding over the compromise of Sergius for reuniting an empire dislocated by heresy, Mohammed is purposing the foundation of an empire resting on material force. While Heraclius is assuming the right to define the doctrine of the Church in virtue of his imperial power, Mohammed is constructing a claim to prophetic rank from which imperial power itself shall emanate. The Mohammedan claim is the exact antithesis of the Byzantine usurpation: the rise of a false prophet punishes the attempt among Christians to rule the spiritual by the civil power.
Upon the death of Mohammed in 632, his companions took counsel together and elected Abu Bekr to carry on the dominion based upon religion which Mohammed had invented. They gave him the title of “Chalif of God's Apostle”. As the vicar of the new prophet, he was to exert the absolute power which belonged to the [pg 119] prophet's office, and of which the civil sovereignty was an offshoot. This power was rooted in the belief that Mohammed had been sent by God. The quality therefore of every act exercised by the first chalif, and by every successor, depended on the truth of such a mission.
By the choice of Abu Bekr, father of Aischa, the favourite wife of Mohammed, it was resolved that the succession to the chalifate should be elective, not hereditary. The most stirring principle of the new power was that everyone who died for its extension, which was called the Holy War, should pass at once to paradise. Paradise had been drawn by Mohammed after his own sensual imagination to suit the taste of a most sensual people. The empire sought by Mohammed and his followers was to be imposed by force. Abu Bekr stirred up the sons of the desert to this Holy War, proclaiming that he who fought for God's cause should have 700 good works counted for each step, 700 honours allotted to him, and 700 sins forgiven.
Abu Bekr held the chalifate but two years, dying in 634 at the age of 63 years. But at the very time of his death the pearl of Syria, Damascus, fell into the hands of his generals, Amrou and Khaled. From Medina the city of the prophet, and the seat of the chalif, he had sent forth three armies. Moseilama, a prophet who competed with Mohammed, was destroyed, the discontented tribes in Arabia itself were reduced to obedience. The Persian provinces on the Euphrates were attacked. The Roman empire itself was summoned to accept the new religion, or to become tributary.
[pg 120]Upon the death of Abu Bekr, the chief associates of Mohammed around him proclaimed Omar as chalif, and entitled him Chalif, and Prince of the Faithful. In the ten years of his chalifate, from 634 to 644, Omar made the Mohammedan empire. He had exerted great influence over Mohammed himself; he had been most powerful with Abu Bekr, who pointed him out for a successor. The man who had been of violent temper and bloody battles, now sedulously practised the administration of justice. He gave much, and used little for himself. He wore a patched dress, and fed on barley bread and water; he prayed and preached, and ate and slept upon the steps of the mosque among the pilgrims. There he received the messengers of kings. The severe chalif, a sworn foe to all effeminacy, strove to train a rude host to war. Arts he proscribed, even those of house and ship-building. When the great city of Modain, or Ctesiphon, was taken, he commanded the library of the Persian kings to be thrown into the Tigris. When some of his soldiers had put on silken garments which they had looted in Syria, he rubbed their faces in the mud and tore their garments in pieces. Such was the man under whom half-armed nomad tribes broke the armies of Heraclius, and took one after another the cities of Syria.
But on the side of the emperor were divided counsels, distrust, rankling enmities; Nestorian and Eutychean heretics hating each other, and still more the sovereign under whom they should have fought as well for a common country as for a common faith. The fate of Syria was [pg 121] decided in a terrible battle on the banks of the Hieromax, or Yarmuk. There, the Saracen generals, Obeidah and Khaled, “The sword of God,” utterly defeated the Greek army of 80,000 men.63 Obeidah wrote to the chalif Omar: “In the name of the most merciful God, I must make thee to know that I encamped on the Yarmuk, and Manuel was near us with a force such as the Moslem never had a greater. But God struck down that host, and gave us the victory out of His overflowing grace and goodness. God has given to 4030 Moslim the honour of martyrdom. All that fled into the desert and mountains we have put down; have beset all roads and passes; God has made us lords of their lands and riches and children. Written after the victory from Damaskus where I am, and await thy command for the division of the booty. Farewell, and the blessing and grace of God be over thee and all Moslim.”
After this, city upon city surrendered in affright. In the winter of 636, Obeidah lay before Jerusalem, from which Heraclius took away the Holy Cross with himself to Constantinople. At Antioch, in his dismay, he asked the question why those miserable half naked barbarians, the Arabs, not to be compared with the Romans in armour, or art of war, beat them in the field. A veteran answered him that the wrath of God was on the Romans, who despised His commands, were guilty of every excess, allowed themselves intolerable oppression and violence.
We do not read that Heraclius made an attempt to [pg 122] relieve Jerusalem, which yet was besieged during a year. Obeidah wrote to the patriarch and the inhabitants: “Salutation and blessing to all those who walk in the right way. We invite you to confess that there is only one God, and Mohammed is His Prophet. If you will not make this confession, then resolve to make your city tributary to the chalif. If you delay to do this, I will set my people upon you, who all love death more than you love wine and swine flesh. Hope not that I will draw away hence, until, if God please, I have killed all your warriors, and made slaves of your children.”
The patriarch Sophronius negotiated without hope of earthly aid, and Obeidah, to save the Holy City, the cradle of prophets, from being desecrated by blood-shedding, yielded to the Christian wish that the chalif in person should be asked to receive the keys of the city, and regulate the conditions of surrender. And in 637 Chalif Omar came from Medina. As the Commander of the Faithful entered the city, he rode on a camel, clothed like the poorest Bedouin, and carrying on the same rough beast a sack of dates, rice, and bruised wheat or maize, also a water-skin, and a large wooden platter, on which he took his food with his companions. The terms of capitulation which he granted to the patriarch remained for long a standard to the Moslem in the like cases. First of all was the poll tax imposed by the Koran. The inhabitants to be protected and secured in life and property; their churches not to be pulled down, nor used by any but themselves. The Christians duly to pay tribute; to build no new churches [pg 123] either in the city or country; not to prevent Moslim by night or day from entering the churches. Their doors to be always open to travellers. The Christian to whom a traveller comes, shall entertain him three days gratis. Christians shall say nothing against the Koran. Shall prevent no one becoming Moslem. Shall show honour to Moslim. Shall not wear garments, or shoes, or turbans, like theirs. Shall not divide their hair like them. Shall not bear surnames like them. Shall not ride on saddles. Shall bear no arms, nor Arabic writing on their seals, nor give away wine, nor sell it. They shall wear the same kind of dress everywhere, and that with a girdle. They may have no slave who has served a Moslem. No crosses on the churches; nor ring bells, but only strike them.
The chalif Omar caused himself to be led into all the holy places in the garb of a pilgrim by the patriarch Sophronius, even to the church of the Resurrection. There he placed himself on the floor, and the patriarch was most anxious lest he should practise his own acts of devotion there. With breaking heart the patriarch quoted to those around him the words of Daniel, “The abomination of desolation in the temple”.
Twelve hundred and fifty years have borne witness to the truth of that sorrowful word, and still, “the desolation continues even to the end,”64 and the soldier of the false prophet keeps order among Christians before the sepulchre of their Lord.
Hardly could the chalif Omar be induced to put off [pg 124] his rough garment long enough for it to be washed, and to take another. But when the time of Moslem prayer came, he would not say it in the church, lest the Moslim should seize a church in which their chalif had prayed, but he went to the steps of the eastern portion of Constantine's church and prayed there. He resolved to build a mosque on the spot where Jacob had seen in vision the ladder, or on which the temple of Solomon stood. He gave a hand himself to sweep away the rubbish from it. The structure, built in haste, disappeared suddenly. Theophanes relates that Omar was much confused at the disappearance of his new mosque. Some Jewish teachers came to him and said that the structure would only remain if the cross on Mount Calvary, not that on the Mount of Olives, were removed. Omar did what these men suggested. Some of his fanatics, in spite of the compact, broke all the public crosses, destroyed holy images, attacked various churches and chapels. He gave a special writing to protect the church at Bethlehem wherein he had prayed, but the Moslim afterwards took possession of this church and of the portico at Jerusalem, and made them mosques.
Omar returned to Medina. His armies received command to take Ctesiphon, Aleppo, Antioch. In the summer of 638, Heraclius retired from Antioch to Constantinople, and as he left, says Abulfeda, cried out, “Farewell, Syria, farewell for ever”. When Antioch in August, 638, surrendered, Mesopotamia as well as Syria fell into the hands of Omar, and all [pg 125] Roman land up to the Taurus belonged to the chalif, no imperial force could meet him any longer in the field. Egypt and Persia were open to him.
It was the year when Heraclius published the Ecthesis at Rome. In three years more came the doom of Egypt. Amrou was one of the most valiant and able among the generals of Omar. He asked for leave to attack Egypt, and meanwhile marched to its borders. When the chalif's answer came, he first passed the borders, and then opened it. He found written, “If this letter reaches thee before thou treadest the soil of Egypt, go back; if thou art already on it, go forward”. Amrou went on. Battles he fought, especially at Babylon, near Cairo. But the Copts throughout helped him, and the Greek forces were beaten.65 Amrou had travelled as a merchant in Egypt, and knew the dispositions of its inhabitants, and that the vast majority were so fervent in the Eutychean heresy that they were inclined to look with favour on the new Mohammedan unity of the Godhead, rather than to defend their country against the Saracenic invasion for the good of the hated Melchites, and their emperor at Constantinople. Omar sent Amrou a reinforcement of 12,000 men, and the Copts, being monophysites, made peace with the Arabs, and promised the tribute of a moderate poll tax of two drachmas, from which old men, women, and children, were exempt. There are said to have been six millions to pay this tax.
To Mukankas, a Copt, the governor under Heraclius, [pg 126] his spies reported the life of the Arabs in the camp of Amrou. “We were among men to whom death is dearer than life; who trouble themselves little about earthly greatness or worldly enjoyments. They sit on the ground, and eat kneeling; their commander is in no way distinguished from the rest. Especially they do not distinguish between great and little, nor between masters and slaves. When the time of prayer comes, no one remains behind. Each washes himself and prays with the deepest devotion.” To the reproaches of Heraclius his governor, Mukankas, answered: “It is true the foe is not near so numerous as we are, but one Mussulman outweighs a hundred of us. They yearn after martyrdom, since it leads to paradise, but we hang upon life and its joys, and fear death.” The Copts in general accepted the terms made by Mukankas; the Greeks did not. At length Amrou, after four engagements, in which the Copts assisted him with provisions and the building of bridges, advanced upon Alexandria, whither the Greeks had retired.
Alexandria is said to have been besieged during fourteen months, and to have cost the lives of 23,000 Arabs. It was never cut off by sea from assistance. The Arabs had neither besieging engines nor a fleet. But Heraclius, who was dying of dropsy, instead of sending a fleet to save the last hold which he had upon Egypt, sent a bishop to make terms with Amrou for his retirement. “Bishop,” said the Saracen leader, “do you see that obelisk? When you have swallowed it I will retire from Alexandria.” The city fell in 640, and since Omar had [pg 127] the library of the Persian monarchs at Ctesiphon thrown into the Tigris, there is no reason to doubt the fact recorded that he fed the 4000 baths of Alexandria during six months with the treasures of Greek literature. An uninterrupted peace since the destruction of the Serapeium, 240 years before, had allowed that city in the world which was most devoted to literature and the richest in commerce ample time to collect the greatest of libraries. The double destruction suits exactly the character given to Chalif Omar by Arab historians.
Amrou was not allowed, by Omar's prudence, to live as governor of Egypt at Alexandria. Fostat—that is, the Tent—where he had dwelt during his siege of Babylon, developed from being the seat of his government to the present Cairo. But to the west Amrou extended the Saracen dominion over Barca and Tripolis.
Omar reigned ten years, a Chalif at whose words of rebuke his strongest commanders quailed, and he ruled a kingdom which he stretched in these ten years from Tripolis to the Indus; from the Caspian Sea to the Cataracts of the Nile. He destroyed the Sassanide empire; and the sword of Mohammed, wielded by his second chalif, cut in two the empire of Heraclius. With the loss of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the successor of Constantine was reduced to shelter himself behind the walls of Byzantium from the Saracen host, which perpetually plundered his provinces from the Bosphorus to Mount Taurus. During the Roman dominion of many hundred years that vast territory had been in climate, as Herodotus a thousand years before [pg 128] had said of it, the garden of the earth. It had, further, been studded with cities rich in monuments of Greek civilisation. Afterwards these came to be ruled by bishops, many of whom descended from the preaching of St. Peter and St. Paul. Now all this territory lived in anguish at the thought of Moslem incursion. Only the invention of the Greek fire, kept a secret, saved Byzantium itself from suffering in the latter half of the seventh century the doom which fell upon it in the fifteenth.
Chalif Omar had pressed his captive provinces with heavy tributes. A Christian artisan, who was made to pay four drachmas a day for taxes in Kufa, journeyed to Medina to plead for remission before Omar in person. It was refused. He followed the chalif to the Mosque, and dealt him, as he prayed, a deadly blow. Omar died, having named, when mortally wounded, the six eldest companions of the prophet to choose his successor.
Heraclius died at Constantinople in 641. The chalif Omar reigned from the death of Abu Bekr, in August, 634, to November, 644. Before him had died the most cruel of Arabian commanders, Khaled.66 He who buried alive captive enemies murmured on his sick-bed, “I have been in so many battles, and received so many wounds, that there is scarcely a whole place in my body; and now I must die on a bed as an ass dies on his straw”. Jezdeberg, the last of the Sassanide princes, was hopelessly beaten, and in 651 closed, under Mussulman extinction, the dynasty which since 226 had renewed the battle of Persia for empire with its old rival Rome. The [pg 129] great city of Madain or Ctesiphon was destroyed, and Mohammed, the chalif's governor in Persia planted Kufa as a military city on the right bank of the Euphrates, three days journey from Bagdad. Omar learnt that his governor Mohammed had built himself a stately palace over against the chief mosque at Kufa. This he had adorned with a magnificent gateway taken from the palace of Chosroes at Ctesiphon. In wrath Omar wrote: “the kings of Persia have gone down from their palaces to hell: the Prophet rose from the dust of the earth to heaven. I have ordered the bearer of these lines to burn down thy palace at once, lest thou miss the way of the Prophet for that of the corrupt Persian.” The palace was burnt. Omar knew how to destroy, and they record of his ten years that thirty-six thousand cities, villages, or castles were taken and wasted, and fourteen thousand Christian churches burnt or changed into mosques. History, I believe, has not recorded how many thousand Christian women were delivered over as a prey to the Arabian savages, to whom he promised paradise as a reward for dying in battle against the unbelievers. This was the Mohammedan martyrdom. Omar sought to impress a holy character upon the savage deeds which the hordes marshalled by him to victory or martyrdom practised without scruple. In setting up the colossal kingdom which he founded during the ten years of his chalifate he covered the earth with heaps of slain in the name of the most merciful God. He is said to have established judges in the chief cities of his empire, who should administer justice according to the written or [pg 130] traditional precepts of Mohammed. He had great care for the security of all the lands subject to him. “If,” he said, “a shepherd on the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris have one of his sheep stolen, I fear that I shall one day have to give an account for it.”67 He is praised by Mussulmen for his great qualities as sovereign. But he cared less to spread Islam from Arabia over all the world than to enrich Arabia at the cost of all the world. Foreign nations were to be put in chains, but not ennobled and bettered. They were to encounter not preachers, but tax-gatherers. His rulers might inflict any oppressions on those who were not Mussulmen, provided they sent the fruits of their oppression to him at Medina. At the same time he fed on barley bread, and had but one cloak for the summer and another for the winter, both well darned. But let us turn to his family life. Little of it is known, but that he had seven marriages—three in Mecca, four after the exit to Medina, one of them being with a daughter of Ali—and that he had two slave concubines who bore him children. Two other wives he tried to get. A daughter of Otba refused him because he kept his wives jealously shut up. But Asma, a daughter of Abu Bekr, disliked the barley bread and camel's flesh of his household. He sought her in vain by the help of Aischa. Not obtaining her, he turned to Amm Kolthum, a daughter of Ali and Fatima, and granddaughter of Mohammed. Ali said to him, “My daughter is too young to marry”. Omar would not believe it, upon which Ali sent his daughter to him [pg 131] in a single vestment. Omar drew back her veil, and wished to draw her to him. But she escaped, and fled to her father, and told him of Omar's conduct. Ali then said to him, “If thou wert not chalif, I would tear out thine eyes”. But Omar sought her again before comrades of the highest rank, grounding his proposal on what Mohammed had once said: “Every relationship and connection ceases at the Day of Judgment, except one contracted with me”. Ali went home, and said to his daughter: “Go back to Omar”. She rejoined: “Wilt thou send me again to this old voluptuary?” Ali replied, “He is thy husband”.68
But though in the last years of Omar Ali became his father-in-law, no friendly relation seems ever to have existed between them. Ali had been the first in all Mohammed's battles; by Omar he was made neither commander nor governor. But in Mussulman remembrance Omar stands as the greatest of their rulers, because of the vast power and extension to which under him Islam attained.
Let us see what Omar in his chalifate did to Constantine's empire and the Christian faith.
When in 610 Heraclius was drawn from his father's governorship of Northern Africa to end the cruelties of Phocas, the great mass of the eastern empire still stood, threatened indeed by Avar Chagans on the north, and by the restless Persian empire on the east. But the whole coast of Northern Africa, Egypt and Syria, the realm from Antioch to the end of the Euxine on the [pg 132] east, and to Stamboul on the west, as well as the great country south of the Danube, stretching from the Euxine to the Adriatic and down to the south of the Morea, each of which last would make by itself a noble monarchy, remained intact, and if the eastern despot held his head a little lower than Justinian's head had been held, it needed still but a Constantine or a Theodosius to breathe conquering force as well as maintaining power into that vast body which still called itself Roman. Instead of a true life and a royal will directing that life it had nothing but Greek arts wielded by Oriental despotism. In ten years the sons of the desert, half clothed and fed on barley bread, invoking the God of Mohammed, discomfited the disciplined hosts of the Lord of the world, and carried into dishonour and apostacy the women and children of great provinces. Egypt since the battle of Actium had been the most carefully-guarded province of Augustus and the emperors who came after him. It ceased at once and for ever to be Roman. Not only was there a change in the civil power, but its six millions of Monophysites preferred the crescent under Amrou, as Omar's lieutenant, to the cross enthroned with Heraclius at Constantinople. Antioch ceased to be Roman, and with it Syria and Mesopotamia. Beyond these the vast regions of Persia fell into the hands of Omar, and were ruled for the present from an Arab city Medina, unknown till then beyond Arabian limits. The outposts of Omar were at Mount Taurus, looking thence with desire over the vast historic region sprinkled with stately cities up to the banks of the Bosphorus. [pg 133] These immense regions were lost suddenly but they were also lost permanently. In ten years they were forfeited by possessors who had held them for seven hundred, and after twelve centuries and a half they remain in the hands of the false religion which took them by force and keeps them against recovery by Christians.
Wonderful besides the suddenness of the stroke was the inadequacy of the instrument to the effect produced, the blindness of the time before the coming revolution. Neither St. Gregory among the saints one generation only before it came, nor Heraclius returning a conqueror over the Great King within ten years of the Saracenic catastrophe, anticipated that there were southern hordes extreme in ignorance, devoid of art, and without political sense or experience, but lying in the hand of Providence to take possession of lands with ancient culture and a thousand years of civilised history. St. Gregory indeed had witnessed himself such ruin, and followed two centuries of such disasters, which had stripped Italy of her crown of cities, that he thought the world itself was coming to an end. But the establishment of a great southern empire, founded by vagrant tribes till then known only as robbers, never presented itself to his mind. That they would go forth and conquer with a new war-cry, directed especially against the Cross of Christ, was as little in his thoughts.
By the year of Omar's death there was a new empire ruled by a man from an unknown Arabian town, in the name of a man who had died twelve years before, and claimed to be a prophet, the special herald of one God. [pg 134] In the belief thus set up, it was no other than this God who had invested not the prophet only, but the chalifs who came after him with supreme power, not civil only, but religious, and supreme simply because it was religious, and exercised in the name of this new God. And the empire so set up included already the vast dominions of the Great King, and fully one half of the empire which Justinian had left.
But greater yet was the difference which separated this empire from all that had preceded it. Omar ruled with absolute power as chalif of Mohammed, whose right to power of any kind, civil or religious, lay only in his office of prophet. The Roman emperor ruled because he was lord of a subject-confederacy of nations, which the Roman arm and the Roman mind had, bit by bit, subdued and wrought together, and which, when so constituted, had been deposited entire by secular warranty in his single hand. But Mohammed ruled, and after him the chalifs, because he was “the Apostle of God,” by a divine commission, whole and entire, from which civil and religious authority equally emanated, but in which the religious was the root of the civil. Such was the power which the companions of Mohammed in the first election of Abu Bekr, launched upon the world, and which, as second chalif, Omar received. And in the spirit of this, he ruled the huge empire of conquest, which stretched from the African Tripolis to the end of Persia, and from the southernmost point of Egypt to the Cilician Taurus, engulphing Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. No portion of this power did [pg 135] Omar wield without assuming to represent the person who made himself, or was made by others, his followers, the last and highest of the prophets; who was willing indeed to acknowledge Jesus, the Son of Mary, in the number of prophets, but only on the condition that the prophetical list was closed in himself, that it pointed to himself, and was crowned in himself. The Mohammedan war-cry, to die for which was to be a martyr, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,” was at once the denial of the Christian Trinity, and of Christ's Redeemership. All those who bore it, fought for it, died for it, proclaimed an absolute hostility to the Christian faith, and a definite substitution of another faith for it, and another person on whom that faith rested. This was the empire personified in Omar; and this, in the ten years from 634 to 644, seized upon the southern half of what had been the inheritance bequeathed by Constantine to his successors. The new realm was ruled by Omar with singleness of purpose and unbending resolution to make the Mohammedan standard victorious over the cross, to dethrone Christ for Mohammed.
Was the blow to the empire equally a blow to the Church? The severance of provinces so vast, so populous, so rich in natural productions, from Heraclius, was in itself depriving the lord of the world of legs and arms; but more dangerous than any material privation was the setting up an empire with a definite creed, in which religious conquest was by far the most powerful ingredient. The war-cry, “There is no God but God, [pg 136] and Mohammed is his prophet,” meant the earth and all that is in it, its fruits, and above all, its women, belong entirely to the followers of Mohammed. They who do not either become his, or pay tribute to him, have no rights. Their children become slaves, their wives and daughters captive. These begin to be the absolute possession of the Mohammedan conqueror; if he dies in battle, rewards of martyrdom, so won, for his successors: if he lives, adornments of his life, which he pleases God by accepting.
As to the treatment of Christian countries, Omar, in the capture of Jerusalem, had supplied a rule and standard which for the present was followed at least in profession. Christians were not treated as idolaters: they were taken into covenant. We are told that the tribute was so moderate that the first Egyptians and Syrians who accepted it, thought that they had made a favourable transfer of themselves from Byzantine to Mohammedan lordship.69 The Byzantine had perpetually interfered with their religious convictions, and domineered over their ecclesiastical appointments. Mohammedans, in the disdain of superior power resting on their exclusive possession of truth, kept entirely aloof. Once their own lordship established and acknowledged, they allowed their subjects a certain freedom of action within the lines of Omar's covenant. It is probable that they began by so doing, nor is it easy to account for the rapid and continued submission of provinces, such as Syria and Egypt, without the willingness of [pg 137] their inhabitants to accept the change be taken into account. But it is certain that the Christian religion drooped more and more under the shadow of Mohammedan domination.
Antioch fell under it in 637. From that time forth, the so-called patriarch began often to live at Byzantium. The patriarchate, which, down to the heresies of the third and fourth centuries, had probably, in Christian population, in learning, in the distinction which its bishops enjoyed each in their own city, been the most flourishing portion of the Church, began to decline. The deposition of St. Eustathius, in 330, cost its capital a schism of nearly a hundred years. The partisanship of its patriarch with its countryman, Nestorius, prejudiced both its rank and its unity. What proportion of its once eleven provinces and 161 bishops belonged to it at the time of the Mohammedan invasion might be difficult to ascertain. But how great and wide its circuit was is shown by the instance of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, which, though an undistinguished see, contained in it no less than eight hundred parishes,70 and was under Hierapolis, as seat of the Metropolitan.
After 638, the Antiochene patriarch never more lifted his diminished head as the holder of one of the three great Petrine Sees, whom St. Innocent I. and St. Gregory I. had acknowledged with themselves as representatives of St. Peter.
In all this, we behold the consummation of a fearful history, and I will take the words of one who witnessed the [pg 138] northern wandering of the nations to illustrate, rather perhaps, to account for, the much more terrible wandering of the nations in the south. It was more than two hundred and forty years before this new kingdom arose that St. Jerome, from his solitude at Bethlehem, addressed a friend. It was in the year immediately succeeding the death of the great Theodosius. His rapid view of the generation which had just passed will inspire many thoughts. He is consoling the bishop, Heliodorus, for the loss of his nephew, the priest, Nepotian, a dear friend of his own: “and why,” he says, “am I trying to heal a wound which time and thought, as I believe, have already soothed? Why do I not rather bring before you the miseries of royalty so near to us? Our time has such calamities that it were well not so much to mourn one on whom this light has ceased to shine as to congratulate the escape from such misfortunes. Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, in the midst of preparing for the enemy's onset, and rushing to the fight, dies in the village of Mopsis, and, in great sorrow, left his empire a prey to his foe. Julian, betrayer of his own life, and slaughterer of an army that was Christian, acknowledged in Media the power of that Christ whom he had first denied in Gaul. Striving to extend the Roman frontiers, he lost what they had already gained. Jovian had but a taste of imperial power, and died suffocated by charcoal fumes: an instance to all men of what human dominion is. Valentinian laid waste his own native land, and, [pg 139] leaving it unavenged, broke a blood-vessel and died. His brother, Valens, in the war with the Goths, was defeated in Thrace, and found a tomb on the spot of his death. Gratian, betrayed by his own army, and not received by the cities which he approached, suffered the mockery of enemies: and thy walls, O Lyons, bear the impression of the blood-stained hand. The young Valentinian, scarcely beyond boyhood, after flight, after banishment, after recovering the empire with great blood-shedding, was slain near the city, guilty of his brother's death: and his lifeless body suffered the ignominy of the halter. Then there was Procopius, and Maximus, and Eugenius, who, when they were in power, struck their opponents with terror. All stood captives before their conquerors: and suffered that utmost misery of those once powerful: to be reduced to slavery, and then slaughtered.
“Some one may say, this is the lot of kings, and lightnings strike high summits. Pass to private ranks, and only within the last two years. Let us take but the different ends of three lately Consuls. Abundantius is in poverty and exile at Pityuns. The head of Ruffinus was carried on a pike to Constantinople; his right hand was cut off, and, to mark his insatiable greed, taken begging from door to door. Timavius, hurled suddenly from the loftiest ranks, thinks it an escape to live nameless at Assa. It is not the calamities of the miserable which I relate, but the frailty of man's condition. It strikes with horror to follow out the ruins of our times. It is [pg 140] more than twenty years since Roman blood is shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. In Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias, Goth and Sarmatian, Quade, Alan, and Hun, Vandals and Marcomans, waste, drag away, and plunder. How many matrons, how many consecrated virgins, how many free and noble persons, have fallen a prey to these brutes! Bishops captured; priests and the various ranks of clergy slain; churches ruined; horses stabled at Christ's altars; relics of martyrs dug up. Mourning and death in every shape on all sides. The Roman world falls in pieces, but our stiff neck is not bent. What spirit, think you, have Corinthians, Athenians, Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, and all Greece, in the gripe of barbarians? I have named few cities which were not formerly strong powers. The East seemed free from these scourges: bad tidings only terrified it. When lo! last year, from the farthest heights of Caucasus, wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us. They overran at once great provinces. How many monasteries were captured! How many rivers changed into human blood! Antioch was besieged, and the cities which the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, Euphrates traverse. Crowds of captives carried away. Arabia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Egypt, trembling with fright. Had I a hundred tongues and mouths, and a voice of iron, I could not enumerate all the tortures suffered. I did not propose to write a history; [pg 141] but in few words to lament our miseries; otherwise, adequately to set forth these things. Thucydides and Sallust would both be mute.” The whole period of two hundred and forty years, between the time when St. Jerome, as a spectator, wrote thus, and the time of the Mohammedan inroad, is expressed in the words which follow. “It is long since we felt that we are offending God, but we do not appease Him. It is by our own sins that the barbarians prevail. It is by our own vices that the Roman army is conquered. And, as if this was not enough for our losses, our civil wars have consumed almost more than the edge of the enemy's sword. Unhappy we who are so displeasing to God that His wrath breaks forth on us through the fury of savages. The greatness of the reality surpasses language: all words are less than the truth.”
For, indeed, the time was come, through the extraordinary wickedness of two hundred years, when the very sanctuaries from which St. Jerome was writing, the sanctuaries of the birth and death of Christ, Bethlehem and Calvary, were to fall, not by a sudden inroad, but a permanent occupation into the hands of His chief enemies. The time was also come when the see of the great confessor whose name we identify with the battle of faith against the world, the see of Athanasius himself, the Pope of the East, the next in hierarchical order to the Universal Pope, was to fall, and to fall for ever, from its high estate. “Almost from the death of Athanasius began the spiritual declension of his see and Church.”—“Pride [pg 142] is not made for man; not for an individual bishop, however great, nor for an episcopal dynasty. Sins against the law of love are punished by the loss of faith. The line of Athanasius was fierce and tyrannical, and it fell into the Monophysite heresy. There it remains to this day. A prerogative of infallibility in doctrine, which it had not, could alone have saved the see of Alexandria from the operation of this law.”71
During the ten years of Omar's chalifate the great patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, and the smaller patriarchate of Jerusalem, which contained the places of pilgrimage dear to every Christian heart, visited by the faithful from all lands, not only the birth-place in Bethlehem, not only Nazareth consecrated by the angel's announcing of that birth, and by the secret life of the divine Boyhood and Manhood, but—