History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science by John William Draper (page 2)

revelation. Paganism leaned for support on the learning of its philosophers, Christianity on the inspiration of its Fathers

The Church thus set herself forth as the depository and arbiter of knowledge; she was ever ready to resort to the civil power to compel obedience to her decisions. She thus took a course which determined her whole future career: she became a stumbling-block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years.

The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation of Christianity from a religion into a political system; and though, in one sense, that system was degraded into an idolatry, in another it had risen into a development of the old Greek mythology. The maxim holds good in the social as well as in the mechanical world, that, when two bodies strike, the form of both is changed. Paganism was modified by Christianity; Christianity by Paganism.

THE TRINITARIAN DISPUTE. In the Trinitarian controversy, which first broke out in Egypt–Egypt, the land of Trinities–the chief point in discussion was to define the position of “the Son.” There lived in Alexandria a presbyter of the name of Arius, a disappointed candidate for the office of bishop. He took the ground that there was a time when, from the very nature of sonship, the Son did not exist, and a time at which he commenced to be, asserting that it is the necessary condition of the filial relation that a father must be older than his son. But this assertion evidently denied the coeternity of the three persons of the Trinity; it suggested a subordination or inequality among them, and indeed implied a time when the Trinity did not exist. Hereupon, the bishop, who had been the successful competitor against Arius, displayed his rhetorical powers in public debates on the question, and, the strife spreading, the Jews and pagans, who formed a very large portion of the population of Alexandria, amused themselves with theatrical representations of the contest on the stage–the point of their burlesques being the equality of age of the Father and his Son.

Such was the violence the controversy at length assumed, that the matter had to be referred to the emperor. At first he looked upon the dispute as altogether frivolous, and perhaps in truth inclined to the assertion of Arius, that in the very nature of the thing a father must be older than his son. So great, however, was the pressure laid upon him, that he was eventually compelled to summon the Council of Nicea, which, to dispose of the conflict, set forth a formulary or creed, and attached to it this anathema: “The Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes those who say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, and that, before he was begotten, he was not, and that he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance or essence, and is created, or changeable, or alterable.” Constantine at once enforced the decision of the council by the civil power.

A few years subsequently the Emperor Theodosius prohibited sacrifices, made the inspection of the entrails of animals a capital offense, and forbade any one entering a temple. He instituted Inquisitors of Faith, and ordained that all who did not accord with the belief of Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, and Peter, the Bishop of Alexandria, should be driven into exile, and deprived of civil rights. Those who presumed to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Jews, he condemned to death. The Greek language was now ceasing to be known in the West, and true learning was becoming extinct.

At this time the bishopric of Alexandria was held by one Theophilus. An ancient temple of Osiris having been given to the Christians of the city for the site of a church, it happened that, in digging the foundation for the new edifice, the obscene symbols of the former worship chanced to be found. These, with more zeal than modesty, Theophilus exhibited in the market-place to public derision. With less forbearance than the Christian party showed when it was insulted in the theatre during the Trinitarian dispute, the pagans resorted to violence, and a riot ensued. They held the Serapion as their headquarters. Such were the disorder and bloodshed that the emperor had to interfere. He dispatched a rescript to Alexandria, enjoining the bishop, Theophilus, to destroy the Serapion; and the great library, which had been collected by the Ptolemies, and had escaped the fire of Julius Caesar, was by that fanatic dispersed.

THE MURDER OF HYPATIA. The bishopric thus held by Theophilus was in due time occupied by his nephew St. Cyril, who had commended himself to the approval of the Alexandrian congregations as a successful and fashionable preacher. It was he who had so much to do with the introduction of the worship of the Virgin Mary. His hold upon the audiences of the giddy city was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day before her academy stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria. They came to listen to her discourses on those questions which man in all ages has asked, but which never yet have been answered: “What am I? Where am I? What can I know?”

Hypatia and Cyril! Philosophy and bigotry. They cannot exist together. So Cyril felt, and on that feeling he acted. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by Cyril’s mob–a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of Peter the Reader. The corpse was cut to pieces, the flesh was scraped from the bones with shells, and the remnants cast into a fire. For this frightful crime Cyril was never called to account. It seemed to be admitted that the end sanctified the means.

So ended Greek philosophy in Alexandria, so came to an untimely close the learning that the Ptolemies had done so much to promote. The “Daughter Library,” that of the Serapion, had been dispersed. The fate of Hypatia was a warning to all who would cultivate profane knowledge. Henceforth there was to be no freedom for human thought. Every one must think as the ecclesiastical authority ordered him, A.D. 414. In Athens itself philosophy awaited its doom. Justinian at length prohibited its teaching, and caused all its schools in that city to be closed.

PELAGIUS. While these events were transpiring in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, the spirit that had produced them was displaying itself in the West. A British monk, who had assumed the name of Pelagius, passed through Western Europe and Northern Africa, teaching that death was not introduced into the world by the sin of Adam; that on the contrary he was necessarily and by nature mortal, and had he not sinned he would nevertheless have died; that the consequences of his sins were confined to himself, and did not affect his posterity. From these premises Pelagius drew certain important theological conclusions.

At Rome, Pelagius had been received with favor; at Carthage, at the instigation of St. Augustine, he was denounced. By a synod, held at Diospolis, he was acquitted of heresy, but, on referring the matter to the Bishop of Rome, Innocent I., he was, on the contrary, condemned. It happened that at this moment Innocent died, and his successor, Zosimus, annulled his judgment and declared the opinions of Pelagius to be orthodox. These contradictory decisions are still often referred to by the opponents of papal infallibility. Things were in this state of confusion, when the wily African bishops, through the influence of Count Valerius, procured from the emperor an edict denouncing Pelagins as a heretic; he and his accomplices were condemned to exile and the forfeiture of their goods. To affirm that death was in the world before the fall of Adam, was a state crime.

CONDEMNATION OF PELAGIUS. It is very instructive to consider the principles on which this strange decision was founded. Since the question was purely philosophical, one might suppose that it would have been discussed on natural principles; instead of that, theological considerations alone were adduced. The attentive reader will have remarked, in Tertullian’s statement of the principles of Christianity, a complete absence of the doctrines of original sin, total depravity, predestination, grace, and atonement. The intention of Christianity, as set forth by him, has nothing in common with the plan of salvation upheld two centuries subsequently. It is to St. Augustine, a Carthaginian, that we are indebted for the precision of our views on these important points.

In deciding whether death had been in the world before the fall of Adam, or whether it was the penalty inflicted on the world for his sin, the course taken was to ascertain whether the views of Pelagius were accordant or discordant not with Nature but with the theological doctrines of St. Augustine. And the result has been such as might be expected. The doctrine declared to be orthodox by ecclesiastical authority is overthrown by the unquestionable discoveries of modern science. Long before a human being had appeared upon earth, millions of individuals–nay, more, thousands of species and even genera–had died; those which remain with us are an insignificant fraction of the vast hosts that have passed away.

A consequence of great importance issued from the decision of the Pelagian controversy. The book of Genesis had been made the basis of Christianity. If, in a theological point of view, to its account of the sin in the garden of Eden, and the transgression and punishment of Adam, so much weight had been attached, it also in a philosophical point of view became the grand authority of Patristic science. Astronomy, geology, geography, anthropology, chronology, and indeed all the various departments of human knowledge, were made to conform to it.

ST. AUGUSTINE. As the doctrines of St. Augustine have had the effect of thus placing theology in antagonism with science, it may be interesting to examine briefly some of the more purely philosophical views of that great man. For this purpose, we may appropriately select portions of his study of the first chapter of Genesis, as contained in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth books of his “Confessions.”

These consist of philosophical discussions, largely interspersed with rhapsodies. He prays that God will give him to understand the Scriptures, and will open their meaning to him; he declares that in them there is nothing superfluous, but that the words have a manifold meaning.

The face of creation testifies that there has been a Creator; but at once arises the question, “How and when did he make heaven and earth? They could not have been made IN heaven and earth, the world could not have been made IN the world, nor could they have been made when there was nothing to make them of.” The solution of this fundamental inquiry St. Augustine finds in saying, “Thou spakest, and they were made.”

But the difficulty does not end here. St. Augustine goes on to remark that the syllables thus uttered by God came forth in succession, and there must have been some created thing to express the words. This created thing must, therefore, have existed before heaven and earth, and yet there could have been no corporeal thing before heaven and earth. It must have been a creature, because the words passed away and came to an end but we know that “the word of the Lord endureth forever.”

Moreover, it is plain that the words thus spoken could not have been spoken successively, but simultaneously, else there would have been time and change– succession in its nature implying time; whereas there was then nothing but eternity and immortality. God knows and says eternally what takes place in time.

CRITICISM OF ST. AUGUSTINE. St. Augustine then defines, not without much mysticism, what is meant by the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning.” He is guided to his conclusion by another scriptural passage: “How wonderful are thy works, O Lord! in wisdom hast thou made them all.” This “wisdom” is “the beginning,” and in that beginning the Lord created the heaven and the earth.

“But,” he adds, “some one may ask, ‘What was God doing before he made the heaven and the earth? for, if at any particular moment he began to employ himself, that means time, not eternity. In eternity nothing transpires–the whole is present.’ ” In answering this question, he cannot forbear one of those touches of rhetoric for which he was so celebrated: “I will not answer this question by saying that he was preparing hell for priers into his mysteries. I say that, before God made heaven and earth, he did not make any thing, for no creature could be made before any creature was made. Time itself is a creature, and hence it could not possibly exist before creation.

“What, then, is time? The past is not, the future is not, the present–who can tell what it is, unless it be that which has no duration between two nonentities? There is no such thing as ‘a long time,’ or ‘a short time,’ for there are no such things as the past and the future. They have no existence, except in the soul.”

The style in which St. Augustine conveyed his ideas is that of a rhapsodical conversation with God. His works are an incoherent dream. That the reader may appreciate this remark, I might copy almost at random any of his paragraphs. The following is from the twelfth book:

“This then, is what I conceive, O my God, when I hear thy Scripture saying, In the beginning God made heaven and earth: and the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was upon the deep, and not mentioning what day thou createdst them; this is what I conceive, that because of the heaven of heavens–that intellectual heaven, whose intelligences know all at once, not in part, not darkly, not through a glass, but as a whole, in manifestation, face to face; not this thing now, and that thing anon; but (as I said) know all at once, without any succession of times; and because of the earth, invisible and without form, without any succession of times, which succession presents ‘this thing now, that thing anon;’ because, where there is no form, there is no distinction of things; it is, then, on account of these two, a primitive formed, and a primitive formless; the one, heaven, but the heaven of heavens; the other, earth, but the earth movable and without form; because of these two do I conceive, did thy Scripture say without mention of days, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. For, forthwith it subjoined what earth it spake of; and also in that the firmament is recorded to be created the second day, and called heaven, it conveys to us of which heaven he before spake, without mention of days.

“Wondrous depth of thy words! whose surface behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; an awfulness of honor, and a trembling of love. The enemies thereof I hate vehemently; O that thou wouldst slay them with thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies to it: for so do I love to have them slain unto themselves, that they may live unto thee.”

As an example of the hermeneutical manner in which St. Augustine unfolded the concealed facts of the Scriptures, I may cite the following from the thirteenth book of the “Confessions;” his object is to show that the doctrine of the Trinity is contained in the Mosaic narrative of the creation:

“Lo, now the Trinity appears unto me in a glass darkly, which is thou my God, because thou, O Father, in him who is the beginning of our wisdom, which is thy wisdom, born of thyself, equal unto thee and coeternal, that is, in thy Son, createdst heaven and earth. Much now have we said of the heaven of heavens, and of the earth invisible and without form, and of the darksome deep, in reference to the wandering instability of its spiritual deformity, unless it had been converted unto him, from whom it had its then degree of life, and by his enlightening became a beauteous life, and the heaven of that heaven, which was afterward set between water and water. And under the name of God, I now held the Father, who made these things; and under the name of the beginning, the Son, in whom he made these things; and believing, as I did, my God as the Trinity, I searched further in his holy words, and lo! thy Spirit moved upon the waters. Behold the Trinity, my God!–Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost Creator of all creation.”

That I might convey to my reader a just impression of the character of St. Augustine’s philosophical writings, I have, in the two quotations here given, substituted for my own translation that of the Rev. Dr. Pusey, as contained in Vol. I. of the “Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church,” published at Oxford, 1840.

Considering the eminent authority which has been attributed to the writings of St. Augustine by the religious world for nearly fifteen centuries, it is proper to speak of them with respect. And indeed it is not necessary to do otherwise. The paragraphs here quoted criticise themselves. No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office– a guide to purity of life–and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the great Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance.

A divine revelation of science admits of no improvement, no change, no advance. It discourages as needless, and indeed as presumptuous, all new discovery, considering it as an unlawful prying into things which it was the intention of God to conceal.

What, then, is that sacred, that revealed science, declared by the Fathers to be the sum of all knowledge?

It likened all phenomena, natural and spiritual, to human acts. It saw in the Almighty, the Eternal, only a gigantic man.

THE PATRISTIC PHILOSOPHY. As to the earth, it affirmed that it is a flat surface, over which the sky is spread like a dome, or, as St. Augustine tells us, is stretched like a skin. In this the sun and moon and stars move, so that they may give light by day and by night to man. The earth was made of matter created by God out of nothing, and, with all the tribes of animals and plants inhabiting it, was finished in six days. Above the sky or firmament is heaven; in the dark and fiery space beneath the earth is hell. The earth is the central and most important body of the universe, all other things being intended for and subservient to it.

As to man, he was made out of the dust of the earth. At first he was alone, but subsequently woman was formed from one of his ribs. He is the greatest and choicest of the works of God. He was placed in a paradise near the banks of the Euphrates, and was very wise and very pure; but, having tasted of the forbidden fruit, and thereby broken the commandment given to him, he was condemned to labor and to death.

The descendants of the first man, undeterred by his punishment, pursued such a career of wickedness that it became necessary to destroy them. A deluge, therefore, flooded the face of the earth, and rose over the tops of the mountains. Having accomplished its purpose, the water was dried up by a wind.

From this catastrophe Noah and his three sons, with their wives, were saved in an ark. Of these sons, Shem remained in Asia and repeopled it. Ham peopled Africa; Japhet, Europe. As the Fathers were not acquainted with the existence of America, they did not provide an ancestor for its people.

Let us listen to what some of these authorities say in support of their assertions. Thus Lactantius, referring to the heretical doctrine of the globular form of the earth, remarks: “Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and the trees on the other side of the earth hang downward, and that men have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask them how they defend these monstrosities, how things do not fall away from the earth on that side, they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend toward the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the centre to the heavens on all sides. Now, I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly, and defend one absurd opinion by another.” On the question of the antipodes, St. Augustine asserts that “it is impossible there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.” Perhaps, however, the most unanswerable argument against the sphericity of the earth was this, that “in the day of judgment, men on the other side of a globe could not see the Lord descending through the air.”

It is unnecessary for me to say any thing respecting the introduction of death into the world, the continual interventions of spiritual agencies in the course of events, the offices of angels and devils, the expected conflagration of the earth, the tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues, the dispersion of mankind, the interpretation of natural phenomena, as eclipses, the rainbow, etc. Above all, I abstain from commenting on the Patristic conceptions of the Almighty; they are too anthropomorphic, and wanting in sublimity.

Perhaps, however, I may quote from Cosmas Indicopleustes the views that were entertained in the sixth century. He wrote a work entitled “Christian Topography,” the chief intent of which was to confute the heretical opinion of the globular form of the earth, and the pagan assertion that there is a temperate zone on the southern side of the torrid. He affirms that, according to the true orthodox system of geography, the earth is a quadrangular plane, extending four hundred days’ journey east and west, and exactly half as much north and south; that it is inclosed by mountains, on which the sky rests; that one on the north side, huger than the others, by intercepting the rays of the sun, produces night; and that the plane of the earth is not set exactly horizontally, but with a little inclination from the north: hence the Euphrates, Tigris, and other rivers, running southward, are rapid; but the Nile, having to run up-hill, has necessarily a very slow current.

The Venerable Bede, writing in the seventh century, tells us that “the creation was accomplished in six days, and that the earth is its centre and its primary object. The heaven is of a fiery and subtile nature, round, and equidistant in every part, as a canopy from the centre of the earth. It turns round every day with ineffable rapidity, only moderated by the resistance of the seven planets, three above the sun–Saturn, Jupiter, Mars– then the sun; three below–Venus, Mercury, the moon. The stars go round in their fixed courses, the northern perform the shortest circle. The highest heaven has its proper limit; it contains the angelic virtues who descend upon earth, assume ethereal bodies, perform human functions, and return. The heaven is tempered with glacial waters, lest it should be set on fire. The inferior heaven is called the firmament, because it separates the superincumbent waters from the waters below. The firmamental waters are lower than the spiritual heaven, higher than all corporeal beings, reserved, some say, for a second deluge; others, more truly, to temper the fire of the fixed stars.”

Was it for this preposterous scheme–this product of ignorance and audacity–that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt.

Of this presumptuous system, the strangest part was its logic, the nature of its proofs. It relied upon miracle-evidence. A fact was supposed to he demonstrated by an astounding illustration of something else! An Arabian writer, referring to this, says: “If a conjurer should say to me, ‘Three are more than ten, and in proof of it I will change this stick into a serpent,’ I might be surprised at his legerdemain, but I certainly should not admit his assertion.” Yet, for more than a thousand years, such was the accepted logic, and all over Europe propositions equally absurd were accepted on equally ridiculous proof.

Since the party that had become dominant in the empire could not furnish works capable of intellectual competition with those of the great pagan authors, and since it was impossible for it to accept a position of inferiority, there arose a political necessity for the discouragement, and even persecution, of profane learning. The persecution of the Platonists under Valentinian was due to that necessity. They were accused of magic, and many of them were put to death. The profession of philosophy had become dangerous–it was a state crime. In its stead there arose a passion for the marvelous, a spirit of superstition. Egypt exchanged the great men, who had made her Museum immortal, for bands of solitary monks and sequestered virgins, with which she was overrun.

CHAPTER III.

CONFLICT RESPECTING THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNITY OF GOD.–THE FIRST OR SOUTHERN REFORMATION.

The Egyptians insist on the introduction of the worship of the Virgin Mary–They are resisted by Nestor, the Patriarch of Constantinople, but eventually, through their influence with the emperor, cause Nestor’s exile and the dispersion of his followers.

Prelude to the Southern Reformation–The Persian attack; its moral effects.

The Arabian Reformation.–Mohammed is brought in contact with the Nestorians–He adopts and extends their principles, rejecting the worship of the Virgin, the doctrine of the Trinity, and every thing in opposition to the unity of God.–He extinguishes idolatry in Arabia, by force, and prepares to make war on the Roman Empire.–His successors conquer Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, and invade France.

As the result of this conflict, the doctrine of the unity of God was established in the greater part of the Roman Empire–The cultivation of science was restored, and Christendom lost many of her most illustrious capitals, as Alexandria, Carthage, and, above all, Jerusalem.

THE policy of the Byzantine court had given to primitive Christianity a paganized form, which it had spread over all the idolatrous populations constituting the empire. There had been an amalgamation of the two parties. Christianity had modified paganism, paganism had modified Christianity. The limits of this adulterated religion were the confines of the Roman Empire. With this great extension there had come to the Christian party political influence and wealth. No insignificant portion of the vast public revenues found their way into the treasuries of the Church. As under such circumstances must ever be the case, there were many competitors for the spoils–men who, under the mask of zeal for the predominant faith, sought only the enjoyment of its emoluments.

ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTES. Under the early emperors, conquest had reached its culmination; the empire was completed; there remained no adequate objects for military life; the days of war-peculation, and the plundering of provinces, were over. For the ambitious, however, another path was open; other objects presented. A successful career in the Church led to results not unworthy of comparison with those that in former days had been attained by a successful career in the army.

The ecclesiastical, and indeed, it may be said, much of the political history of that time, turns on the struggles of the bishops of the three great metropolitan cities–Constantinople, Alexandria, Rome–for supremacy: Constantinople based her claims on the fact that she was the existing imperial city; Alexandria pointed to her commercial and literary position; Rome, to her souvenirs. But the Patriarch of Constantinople labored under the disadvantage that he was too closely under the eye, and, as he found to his cost, too often under the hand, of the emperor. Distance gave security to the episcopates of Alexandria and Rome.

ECCLESIASTICAL DISPUTES. Religious disputations in the East have generally turned on diversities of opinion respecting the nature and attributes of God; in the West, on the relations and life of man. This peculiarity has been strikingly manifested in the transformations that Christianity has undergone in Asia and Europe respectively. Accordingly, at the time of which we are speaking, all the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire exhibited an intellectual anarchy. There were fierce quarrels respecting the Trinity, the essence of God, the position of the Son, the nature of the Holy Spirit, the influences of the Virgin Mary. The triumphant clamor first of one then of another sect was confirmed, sometimes by miracle-proof, sometimes by bloodshed. No attempt was ever made to submit the rival opinions to logical examination. All parties, however, agreed in this, that the imposture of the old classical pagan forms of faith was demonstrated by the facility with which they had been overthrown. The triumphant ecclesiastics proclaimed that the images of the gods had failed to defend themselves when the time of trial came.

Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races, the Semitic have maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains and valleys, islands, and rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness of God.

Political reasons had led the emperors to look with favor on the admixture of Christianity and paganism, and doubtless by this means the bitterness of the rivalry between those antagonists was somewhat abated. The heaven of the popular, the fashionable Christianity was the old Olympus, from which the venerable Greek divinities had been removed. There, on a great white throne, sat God the Father, on his right the Son, and then the blessed Virgin, clad in a golden robe, and “covered with various female adornments;” on the left sat God the Holy Ghost. Surrounding these thrones were hosts of angels with their harps. The vast expanse beyond was filled with tables, seated at which the happy spirits of the just enjoyed a perpetual banquet.

If, satisfied with this picture of happiness, illiterate persons never inquired how the details of such a heaven were carried out, or how much pleasure there could be in the ennui of such an eternally unchanging, unmoving scene, it was not so with the intelligent. As we are soon to see, there were among the higher ecclesiastics those who rejected with sentiments of horror these carnal, these materialistic conceptions, and raised their protesting voices in vindication of the attributes of the Omnipresent, the Almighty God.

EGYPTIAN DOCTRINES. In the paganization of religion, now in all directions taking place, it became the interest of every bishop to procure an adoption of the ideas which, time out of mind, had been current in the community under his charge. The Egyptians had already thus forced on the Church their peculiar Trinitarian views; and now they were resolved that, under the form of the adoration of the Virgin Mary, the worship of Isis should be restored.

THE NESTORIANS. It so happened that Nestor, the Bishop of Antioch, who entertained the philosophical views of Theodore of Mopsuestia, had been called by the Emperor Theodosius the Younger to the Episcopate of Constantinople (A.D. 427). Nestor rejected the base popular anthropomorphism, looking upon it as little better than blasphemous, and pictured to himself an awful eternal Divinity, who pervaded the universe, and had none of the aspects or attributes of man. Nestor was deeply imbued with the doctrines of Aristotle, and attempted to coordinate them with what he considered to be orthodox Christian tenets. Between him and Cyril, the Bishop or Patriarch of Alexandria, a quarrel accordingly arose. Cyril represented the paganizing, Nestor the philosophizing party of the Church. This was that Cyril who had murdered Hypatia. Cyril was determined that the worship of the Virgin as the Mother of God should be recognized, Nestor was determined that it should not. In a sermon delivered in the metropolitan church at Constantinople, he vindicated the attributes of the Eternal, the Almighty God. “And can this God have a mother?” he exclaimed. In other sermons and writings, he set forth with more precision his ideas that the Virgin should be considered not as the Mother of God, but as the mother of the human portion of Christ, that portion being as essentially distinct from the divine as is a temple from its contained deity.

PERSECUTION AND DEATH OF NESTOR. Instigated by the monks of Alexandria, the monks of Constantinople took up arms in behalf of “the Mother of God.” The quarrel rose to such a pitch that the emperor was constrained to summon a council to meet at Ephesus. In the mean time Cyril had given a bribe of many pounds of gold to the chief eunuch of the imperial court, and had thereby obtained the influence of the emperor’s sister. “The holy virgin of the court of heaven thus found an ally of her own sex in the holy virgin of the emperor’s court.” Cyril hastened to the council, attended by a mob of men and women of the baser sort. He at once assumed the presidency, and in the midst of a tumult had the emperor’s rescript read before the Syrian bishops could arrive. A single day served to complete his triumph. All offers of accommodation on the part of Nestor were refused, his explanations were not read, he was condemned unheard. On the arrival of the Syrian ecclesiastics, a meeting of protest was held by them. A riot, with much bloodshed, ensued in the cathedral of St. John. Nestor was abandoned by the court, and eventually exiled to an Egyptian oasis. His persecutors tormented him as long as he lived, by every means in their power, and at his death gave out that “his blasphemous tongue had been devoured by worms, and that from the heats of an Egyptian desert he had escaped only into the hotter torments of hell!”

The overthrow and punishment of Nestor, however, by no means destroyed his opinions. He and his followers, insisting on the plain inference of the last verse of the first chapter of St. Matthew, together with the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth verses of the thirteenth of the same gospel, could never be brought to an acknowledgment of the perpetual virginity of the new queen of heaven. Their philosophical tendencies were soon indicated by their actions. While their leader was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the Euphrates, and established the Chaldean Church. Under their auspices the college of Edessa was founded. From the college of Nisibis issued those doctors who spread Nestor’s tenets through Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, China, Egypt. The Nestorians, of course, adopted the philosophy of Aristotle, and translated the works of that great writer into Syriac and Persian. They also made similar translations of later works, such as those of Pliny. In connection with the Jews they founded the medical college of Djondesabour. Their missionaries disseminated the Nestorian form of Christianity to such an extent over Asia, that its worshipers eventually outnumbered all the European Christians of the Greek and Roman Churches combined. It may be particularly remarked that in Arabia they had a bishop.

THE PERSIAN CAMPAIGN. The dissensions between Constantinople and Alexandria had thus filled all Western Asia with sectaries, ferocious in their contests with each other, and many of them burning with hatred against the imperial power for the persecutions it had inflicted on them. A religious revolution, the consequences of which are felt in our own times, was the result. It affected the whole world.

We shall gain a clear view of this great event, if we consider separately the two acts into which it may be decomposed: 1. The temporary overthrow of Asiatic Christianity by the Persians; 2. The decisive and final reformation under the Arabians.

1. It happened (A.D. 590) that, by one of those revolutions so frequent in Oriental courts, Chosroes, the lawful heir to the Persian throne, was compelled to seek refuge in the Byzantine Empire, and implore the aid of the Emperor Maurice. That aid was cheerfully given. A brief and successful campaign restored Chosroes to the throne of his ancestors.

But the glories of this generous campaign could not preserve Maurice himself. A mutiny broke out in the Roman army, headed by Phocas, a centurion. The statues of the emperor were overthrown. The Patriarch of Constantinople, having declared that he had assured himself of the orthodoxy of Phocas, consecrated him emperor. The unfortunate Maurice was dragged from a sanctuary, in which he had sought refuge; his five sons were beheaded before his eyes, and then he was put to death. His empress was inveigled from the church of St. Sophia, tortured, and with her three young daughters beheaded. The adherents of the massacred family were pursued with ferocious vindictiveness; of some the eyes were blinded, of others the tongues were torn out, or the feet and hands cut off, some were whipped to death, others were burnt.

When the news reached Rome, Pope Gregory received it with exultation, praying that the hands of Phocas might be strengthened against all his enemies. As an equivalent for this subserviency, he was greeted with the title of “Universal Bishop.” The cause of his action, as well as of that of the Patriarch of Constantinople, was doubtless the fact that Maurice was suspected of Magrian tendencies, into which he had been lured by the Persians. The mob of Constantinople had hooted after him in the streets, branding him as a Marcionite, a sect which believed in the Magian doctrine of two conflicting principles.

With very different sentiments Chosroes heard of the murder of his friend. Phocas had sent him the heads of Maurice and his sons. The Persian king turned from the ghastly spectacle with horror, and at once made ready to avenge the wrongs of his benefactor by war.

THE EXPEDITION OF HERACLIUS. The Exarch of Africa, Heraclius, one of the chief officers of the state, also received the shocking tidings with indignation. He was determined that the imperial purple should not be usurped by an obscure centurion of disgusting aspect. “The person of this Phocas was diminutive and deformed; the closeness of his shaggy eyebrows, his red hair, his beardless chin, were in keeping with his cheek, disfigured and discolored by a formidable scar. Ignorant of letters, of laws, and even of arms, he indulged in an ample privilege of lust and drunkenness.” At first Heraclius refused tribute and obedience to him; then, admonished by age and infirmities, he committed the dangerous enterprise of resistance to his son of the same name. A prosperous voyage from Carthage soon brought the younger Heraclius in front of Constantinople. The inconstant clergy, senate, and people of the city joined him, the usurper was seized in his palace and beheaded.

INVASION OF CHOSROES. But the revolution that had taken place in Constantinople did not arrest the movements of the Persian king. His Magian priests had warned him to act independently of the Greeks, whose superstition, they declared, was devoid of all truth and justice. Chosroes, therefore, crossed the Euphrates; his army was received with transport by the Syrian sectaries, insurrections in his favor everywhere breaking out. In succession, Antioch, Caesarea, Damascus fell; Jerusalem itself was taken by storm; the sepulchre of Christ, the churches of Constantine and of Helena were given to the flames; the Savior’s cross was sent as a trophy to Persia; the churches were rifled of their riches; the sacred relics, collected by superstition, were dispersed. Egypt was invaded, conquered, and annexed to the Persian Empire; the Patriarch of Alexandria escaped by flight to Cyprus; the African coast to Tripoli was seized. On the north, Asia Minor was subdued, and for ten years the Persian forces encamped on the shores of the Bosporus, in front of Constantinople.

In his extremity Heraclius begged for peace. “I will never give peace to the Emperor of Rome,” replied the proud Persian, “till he has abjured his crucified God, and embraced the worship of the sun.” After a long delay terms were, however, secured, and the Roman Empire was ransomed at the price of “a thousand talents of gold, a thousand talents of silver, a thousand silk robes, a thousand horses, and a thousand virgins.”

But Heraclius submitted only for a moment. He found means not only to restore his affairs but to retaliate on the Persian Empire. The operations by which he achieved this result were worthy of the most brilliant days of Rome.

INVASION OF CHOSROES Though her military renown was thus recovered, though her territory was regained, there was something that the Roman Empire had irrecoverably lost. Religious faith could never be restored. In face of the world Magianism had insulted Christianity, by profaning her most sacred places–Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary–by burning the sepulchre of Christ, by rifling and destroying the churches, by scattering to the winds priceless relics, by carrying off, with shouts of laughter, the cross.

Miracles had once abounded in Syria, in Egypt, in Asia Minor; there was not a church which had not its long catalogue of them. Very often they were displayed on unimportant occasions and in insignificant cases. In this supreme moment, when such aid was most urgently demanded, not a miracle was worked.

Amazement filled the Christian populations of the East when they witnessed these Persian sacrileges perpetrated with impunity. The heavens should have rolled asunder, the earth should have opened her abysses, the sword of the Almighty should have flashed in the sky, the fate of Sennacherib should have been repeated. But it was not so. In the land of miracles, amazement was followed by consternation–consternation died out in disbelief.

2. But, dreadful as it was, the Persian conquest was but a prelude to the great event, the story of which we have now to relate–the Southern revolt against Christianity. Its issue was the loss of nine-tenths of her geographical possessions–Asia, Africa, and part of Europe.

MOHAMMED. In the summer of 581 of the Christian era, there came to Bozrah, a town on the confines of Syria, south of Damascus, a caravan of camels. It was from Mecca, and was laden with the costly products of South Arabia–Arabia the Happy. The conductor of the caravan, one Abou Taleb, and his nephew, a lad of twelve years, were hospitably received and entertained at the Nestorian convent of the town.

The monks of this convent soon found that their young visitor, Halibi or Mohammed, was the nephew of the guardian of the Caaba, the sacred temple of the Arabs. One of them, by name Bahira, spared no pains to secure his conversion from the idolatry in which he had been brought up. He found the boy not only precociously intelligent, but eagerly desirous of information, especially on matters relating to religion.

In Mohammed’s own country the chief object of Meccan worship was a black meteoric stone, kept in the Caaba, with three hundred and sixty subordinate idols, representing the days of the year, as the year was then counted.

At this time, as we have seen, the Christian Church, through the ambition and wickedness of its clergy, had been brought into a condition of anarchy. Councils had been held on various pretenses, while the real motives were concealed. Too often they were scenes of violence, bribery, corruption. In the West, such were the temptations of riches, luxury, and power, presented by the episcopates, that the election of a bishop was often disgraced by frightful murders. In the East, in consequence of the policy of the court of Constantinople, the Church had been torn in pieces by contentions and schisms. Among a countless host of disputants may be mentioned Arians, Basilidians, Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Gnostics, Jacobites, Marcionites, Marionites, Nestorians, Sabellians, Valentinians. Of these, the Marionites regarded the Trinity as consisting of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Virgin Mary; the Collyridians worshiped the Virgin as a divinity, offering her sacrifices of cakes; the Nestorians, as we have seen, denied that God had “a mother.” They prided themselves on being the inheritors, the possessors of the science of old Greece.

But, though they were irreconcilable in matters of faith, there was one point in which all these sects agreed –ferocious hatred and persecution of each other. Arabia, an unconquered land of liberty, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Desert of Syria, gave them all, as the tide of fortune successively turned, a refuge. It had been so from the old times. Thither, after the Roman conquest of Palestine, vast numbers of Jews escaped; thither, immediately after his conversion, St. Paul tells the Galatians that he retired. The deserts were now filled with Christian anchorites, and among the chief tribes of the Arabs many proselytes had been made. Here and there churches had been built. The Christian princes of Abyssinia, who were Nestorians, held the southern province of Arabia–Yemen–in possession.

By the monk Bahira, in the convent at Bozrah, Mohammed was taught the tenets of the Nestorians; from them the young Arab learned the story of their persecutions. It was these interviews which engendered in him a hatred of the idolatrous practices of the Eastern Church, and indeed of all idolatry; that taught him, in his wonderful career, never to speak of Jesus as the Son of God, but always as “Jesus, the son of Mary.” His untutored but active mind could not fail to be profoundly impressed not only with the religious but also with the philosophical ideas of his instructors, who gloried in being the living representatives of Aristotelian science. His subsequent career shows how completely their religious thoughts had taken possession of him, and repeated acts manifest his affectionate regard for them. His own life was devoted to the expansion and extension of their theological doctrine, and, that once effectually established, his successors energetically adopted and diffused their scientific, their Aristotelian opinions.

As Mohammed grew to manhood, he made other expeditions to Syria. Perhaps, we may suppose, that on these occasions the convent and its hospitable in mates were not forgotten. He had a mysterious reverence for that country. A wealthy Meccan widow Chadizah, had intrusted him with the care of her Syrian trade. She was charmed with his capacity and fidelity, and (since he is said to have been characterized by the possession of singular manly beauty and a most courteous demeanor) charmed with his person. The female heart in all ages and countries is the same. She caused a slave to intimate to him what was passing in her mind, and, for the remaining twenty-four years of her life, Mohammed was her faithful husband. In a land of polygamy, he never insulted her by the presence of a rival. Many years subsequently, in the height of his power, Ayesha, who was one of the most beautiful women in Arabia, said to him: “Was she not old? Did not God give you in me a better wife in her place?” “No, by God!” exclaimed Mohammed, and with a burst of honest gratitude, “there never can be a better. She believed in me when men despised me, she relieved me when I was poor and persecuted by the world.”

His marriage with Chadizah placed him in circumstances of ease, and gave him an opportunity of indulging his inclination to religious meditation. It so happened that her cousin Waraka, who was a Jew, had turned Christian. He was the first to translate the Bible into Arabic. By his conversation Mohammed’s detestation of idolatry was confirmed.

After the example of the Christian anchorites in their hermitages in the desert, Mohammed retired to a grotto in Mount Hera, a few miles from Mecca, giving himself up to meditation and prayer. In this seclusion, contemplating the awful attributes of the Omnipotent and Eternal God, he addressed to his conscience the solemn inquiry, whether he could adopt the dogmas then held in Asiatic Christendom respecting the Trinity, the sonship of Jesus as begotten by the Almighty, the character of Mary as at once a virgin, a mother, and the queen of heaven, without incurring the guilt and the peril of blasphemy.

By his solitary meditations in the grotto Mohammed was drawn to the conclusion that, through the cloud of dogmas and disputations around him, one great truth might be discerned–the unity of God. Leaning against the stem of a palm-tree, he unfolded his views on this subject to his neighbors and friends, and announced to them that he should dedicate his life to the preaching of that truth. Again and again, in his sermons and in the Koran, he declared: “I am nothing but a public preacher…. I preach the oneness of God.” Such was his own conception of his so-called apostleship. Henceforth, to the day of his death, he wore on his finger a seal-ring on which was engraved, “Mohammed, the messenger of God.”

VICTORIES OF MOHAMMED. It is well known among physicians that prolonged fasting and mental anxiety inevitably give rise to hallucination. Perhaps there never has been any religious system introduced by self-denying, earnest men that did not offer examples of supernatural temptations and supernatural commands. Mysterious voices encouraged the Arabian preacher to persist in his determination; shadows of strange forms passed before him. He heard sounds in the air like those of a distant bell. In a nocturnal dream he was carried by Gabriel from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence in succession through the six heavens. Into the seventh the angel feared to intrude and Mohammed alone passed into the dread cloud that forever enshrouds the Almighty. “A shiver thrilled his heart as he felt upon his shoulder the touch of the cold hand of God.”

His public ministrations met with much resistance and little success at first. Expelled from Mecca by the upholders of the prevalent idolatry, he sought refuge in Medina, a town in which there were many Jews and Nestorians; the latter at once became proselytes to his faith. He had already been compelled to send his daughter and others of his disciples to Abyssinia, the king of which was a Nestorian Christian. At the end of six years he had made only fifteen hundred converts. But in three little skirmishes, magnified in subsequent times by the designation of the battles of Beder, of Ohud, and of the Nations, Mohammed discovered that his most convincing argument was his sword. Afterward, with Oriental eloquence, he said, “Paradise will be found in the shadow of the crossing of swords.” By a series of well-conducted military operations, his enemies were completely overthrown. Arabian idolatry was absolutely exterminated; the doctrine he proclaimed, that “there is but one God,” was universally adopted by his countrymen, and his own apostleship accepted

DEATH OF MOHAMMED. Let us pass over his stormy life, and hear what he says when, on the pinnacle of earthly power and glory, he was approaching its close.

Steadfast in his declaration of the unity of God, he departed from Medina on his last pilgrimage to Mecca, at the head of one hundred and fourteen thousand devotees, with camels decorated with garlands of flowers and fluttering streamers. When he approached the holy city, he uttered the solemn invocation: “Here am I in thy service, O God! Thou hast no companion. To thee alone belongeth worship. Thine alone is the kingdom. There is none to share it with thee.”

With his own hand he offered up the camels in sacrifice. He considered that primeval institution to be equally sacred as prayer, and that no reason can be alleged in support of the one which is not equally strong in support of the other.

From the pulpit of the Caaba he reiterated, “O my hearers, I am only a man like yourselves.” They remembered that he had once said to one who approached him with timid steps: “Of what dost thou stand in awe? I am no king. I am nothing but the son of an Arab woman, who ate flesh dried in the sun.”

He returned to Medina to die. In his farewell to his congregation, he said: “Every thing happens according to the will of God, and has its appointed time, which can neither be hastened nor avoided. I return to him who sent me, and my last command to you is, that ye love, honor, and uphold each other, that ye exhort each other to faith and constancy in belief, and to the performance of pious deeds. My life has been for your good, and so will be my death.”

In his dying agony, his head was reclined on the lap of Ayesha. From time to time he had dipped his hand in a vase of water, and moistened his face. At last he ceased, and, gazing steadfastly upward, said, in broken accents: “O God–forgive my sins–be it so. I come.”

Shall we speak of this man with disrespect? His precepts are, at this day, the religious guide of one- third of the human race.

DOCTRINES OF MOHAMMED. In Mohammed, who had already broken away from the ancient idolatrous worship of his native country, preparation had been made for the rejection of those tenets which his Nestorian teachers had communicated to him, inconsistent with reason and conscience. And, though, in the first pages of the Koran, he declares his belief in what was delivered to Moses and Jesus, and his reverence for them personally, his veneration for the Almighty is perpetually displayed. He is horror-stricken at the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, the Worship of Mary as the mother of God, the adoration of images and paintings, in his eyes a base idolatry. He absolutely rejects the Trinity, of which he seems to have entertained the idea that it could not be interpreted otherwise than as presenting three distinct Gods.

His first and ruling idea was simply religious reform–to overthrow Arabian idolatry, and put an end to the wild sectarianism of Christianity. That he proposed to set up a new religion was a calumny invented against him in Constantinople, where he was looked upon with detestation, like that with which in after ages Luther was regarded in Rome.

But, though he rejected with indignation whatever might seem to disparage the doctrine of the unity of God, he was not able to emancipate himself from anthropomorphic conceptions. The God of the Koran is altogether human, both corporeally and mentally, if such expressions may with propriety be used. Very soon, however, the followers of Mohammed divested themselves of these base ideas and rose to nobler ones.

The view here presented of the primitive character of Mohammedanism has long been adopted by many competent authorities. Sir William Jones, following Locke, regards the main point in the divergence of Mohammedanism from Christianity to consist “in denying vehemently the character of our Savior as the Son, and his equality as God with the Father, of whose unity and attributes the Mohammedans entertain and express the most awful ideas.” This opinion has been largely entertained in Italy. Dante regarded Mohammed only as the author of a schism, and saw in Islamism only an Arian sect. In England, Whately views it as a corruption of Christianity. It was an offshoot of Nestorianism, and not until it had overthrown Greek Christianity in many great battles, was spreading rapidly over Asia and Africa, and had become intoxicated with its wonderful successes, did it repudiate its primitive limited intentions, and assert itself to be founded on a separate and distinct revelation.

THE FIRST KHALIF. Mohammed’s life had been almost entirely consumed in the conversion or conquest of his native country. Toward its close, however, he felt himself strong enough to threaten the invasion of Syria and Persia. He had made no provision for the perpetuation of his own dominion, and hence it was not without a struggle that a successor was appointed. At length Abubeker, the father of Ayesha, was selected. He was proclaimed the first khalif, or successor of the Prophet.

There is a very important difference between the spread of Mohammedanism and the spread of Christianity. The latter was never sufficiently strong to over throw and extirpate idolatry in the Roman Empire. As it advanced, there was an amalgamation, a union. The old forms of the one were vivified by the new spirit of the other, and that paganization to which reference has already been made was the result.

THE MOHAMMEDAN HEAVEN. But, in Arabia, Mohammed overthrew and absolutely annihilated the old idolatry. No trace of it is found in the doctrines preached by him and his successors. The black stone that had fallen from heaven–the meteorite of the Caaba–and its encircling idols, passed totally out of view. The essential dogma of the new faith–“There is but one God”–spread without any adulteration. Military successes had, in a worldly sense made the religion of the Koran profitable; and, no matter what dogmas may be, when that is the case, there will be plenty of converts.

As to the popular doctrines of Mohammedanism, I shall here have nothing to say. The reader who is interested in that matter will find an account of them in a review of the Koran in the eleventh chapter of my “History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.” It is enough now to remark that their heaven was arranged in seven stories, and was only a palace of Oriental carnal delight. It was filled with black-eyed concubines and servants. The form of God was, perhaps, more awful than that of paganized Christianity. Anthropomorphism will, however, never be obliterated from the ideas of the unintellectual. Their God, at the best, will never be any thing more than the gigantic shadow of a man–a vast phantom of humanity– like one of those Alpine spectres seen in the midst of the clouds by him who turns his back on the sun.

Abubeker had scarcely seated himself in the khalifate, when he put forth the following proclamation:

In the name of the most merciful God! Abubeker to the rest of the true believers, health and happiness. The mercy and blessing of God be upon you. I praise the most high God. I pray for his prophet Mohammed.

INVASION OF SYRIA. “This is to inform you that I intend to send the true believers into Syria, to take it out of the hands of the infidels. And I would have you know that the fighting for religion is an act of obedience to God.”

On the first encounter, Khaled, the Saracen general, hard pressed, lifted up his hands in the midst of his army and said: “O God! these vile wretches pray with idolatrous expressions and take to themselves another God besides thee, but we acknowledge thy unity and affirm that there is no other God but thee alone. Help us, we beseech thee, for the sake of thy prophet Mohammed, against these idolaters.” On the part of the Saracens the conquest of Syria was conducted with ferocious piety. The belief of the Syrian Christians aroused in their antagonists sentiments of horror and indignation. “I will cleave the skull of any blaspheming idolater who says that the Most Holy God, the Almighty and Eternal, has begotten a son.” The Khalif Omar, who took Jerusalem, commences a letter to Heraclius, the Roman emperor: “In the name of the most merciful God! Praise be to God, the Lord of this and of the other world, who has neither female consort nor son.” The Saracens nicknamed the Christians “Associators,” because they joined Mary and Jesus as partners with the Almighty and Most Holy God.

It was not the intention of the khalif to command his army; that duty was devolved on Abou Obeidah nominally, on Khaled in reality. In a parting review the khalif enjoined on his troops justice, mercy, and the observance of fidelity in their engagements he commanded them to abstain from all frivolous conversation and from wine, and rigorously to observe the hours of prayer; to be kind to the common people among whom they passed, but to show no mercy to their priests.

FALL OF BOZRAH. Eastward of the river Jordan is Bozrah, a strong town where Mohammed had first met his Nestorian Christian instructors. It was one of the Roman forts with which the country was dotted over. Before this place the Saracen army encamped. The garrison was strong, the ramparts were covered with holy crosses and consecrated banners. It might have made a long defense. But its governor, Romanus, betrayed his trust, and stealthily opened its gates to the besiegers. His conduct shows to what a deplorable condition the population of Syria had come. After the surrender, in a speech he made to the people he had betrayed, he said: “I renounce your society, both in this world and that to come. And I deny him that was crucified, and whosoever worships him. And I choose God for my Lord, Islam for my faith, Mecca for my temple, the Moslems for my brethren, Mohammed for my prophet, who was sent to lead us in the right way, and to exalt the true religion in spite of those who join partners with God.” Since the Persian invasion, Asia Minor, Syria, and even Palestine, were full of traitors and apostates, ready to join the Saracens. Romanus was but one of many thousands who had fallen into disbelief through the victories of the Persians.

FALL OF DAMASCUS. From Bozrah it was only seventy miles northward to Damascus, the capital of Syria. Thither, without delay, the Saracen army marched. The city was at once summoned to take its option–conversion, tribute, or the sword. In his palace at Antioch, barely one hundred and fifty miles still farther north, the Emperor Heraclius received tidings of the alarming advance of his assailants. He at once dispatched an army of seventy thousand men. The Saracens were compelled to raise the siege. A battle took place in the plains of Aiznadin, the Roman army was overthrown and dispersed. Khaled reappeared before Damascus with his standard of the black eagle, and after a renewed investment of seventy days Damascus surrendered.

From the Arabian historians of these events we may gather that thus far the Saracen armies were little better than a fanatic mob. Many of the men fought naked. It was not unusual for a warrior to stand forth in front and challenge an antagonist to mortal duel. Nay, more, even the women engaged in the combats. Picturesque narratives have been handed down to us relating the gallant manner in which they acquitted themselves.

FALL OF JERUSALEM. From Damascus the Saracen army advanced northward, guided by the snow-clad peaks of Libanus and the beautiful river Orontes. It captured on its way Baalbec, the capital of the Syrian valley, and Emesa, the chief city of the eastern plain. To resist its further progress, Heraclius collected an army of one hundred and forty thousand men. A battle took place at Yermuck; the right wing of the Saracens was broken, but the soldiers were driven back to the field by the fanatic expostulations of their women. The conflict ended in the complete overthrow of the Roman army. Forty thousand were taken prisoners, and a vast number killed. The whole country now lay open to the victors. The advance of their army had been east of the Jordan. It was clear that, before Asia Minor could be touched, the strong and important cities of Palestine, which was now in their rear, must be secured. There was a difference of opinion among the generals in the field as to whether Caesarea or Jerusalem should be assailed first. The matter was referred to the khalif, who, rightly preferring the moral advantages of the capture of Jerusalem to the military advantages of the capture of Caesarea, ordered the Holy City to be taken, and that at any cost. Close siege was therefore laid to it. The inhabitants, remembering the atrocities inflicted by the Persians, and the indignities that had been offered to the Savior’s sepulchre, prepared now for a vigorous defense. But, after an investment of four months, the Patriarch Sophronius appeared on the wall, asking terms of capitulation. There had been misunderstandings among the generals at the capture of Damascus, followed by a massacre of the fleeing inhabitants. Sophronius, therefore, stipulated that the surrender of Jerusalem should take place in presence of the khalif himself Accordingly, Omar, the khalif, came from Medina for that purpose. He journeyed on a red camel, carrying a bag of corn and one of dates, a wooden dish, and a leathern water-bottle. The Arab conqueror entered the Holy City riding by the side of the Christian patriarch and the transference of the capital of Christianity to the representative of Mohammedanism was effected without tumult or outrage. Having ordered that a mosque should be built on the site of the temple of Solomon, the khalif returned to the tomb of the Prophet at Medina.

Heraclius saw plainly that the disasters which were fast settling on Christianity were due to the dissensions of its conflicting sects; and hence, while he endeavored to defend the empire with his armies, he sedulously tried to compose those differences. With this view he pressed for acceptance the Monothelite doctrine of the nature of Christ. But it was now too late. Aleppo and Antioch were taken. Nothing could prevent the Saracens from overrunning Asia Minor. Heraclius himself had to seek safety in flight. Syria, which had been added by Pompey the Great, the rival of Caesar, to the provinces of Rome, seven hundred years previously– Syria, the birthplace of Christianity, the scene of its most sacred and precious souvenirs, the land from which Heraclius himself had once expelled the Persian intruder–was irretrievably lost. Apostates and traitors had wrought this calamity. We are told that, as the ship which bore him to Constantinople parted from the shore, Heraclius gazed intently on the receding hills, and in the bitterness of anguish exclaimed, “Farewell, Syria, forever farewell!”

It is needless to dwell on the remaining details of the Saracen conquest: how Tripoli and Tyre were betrayed; how Caesarea was captured; how with the trees of Libanus and the sailors of Phoenicia a Saraeen fleet was equipped, which drove the Roman navy into the Hellespont; how Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclades, were ravaged, and the Colossus, which was counted as one of the wonders of the world, sold to a Jew, who loaded nine hundred camels with its brass; how the armies of the khalif advanced to the Black Sea, and even lay in front of Constantinople–all this was as nothing after the fall of Jerusalem.

OVERTHROW OF THE PERSIANS. The fall of Jerusalem! the loss of the metropolis of Christianity! In the ideas of that age the two antagonistic forms of faith had submitted themselves to the ordeal of the judgment of God. Victory had awarded the prize of battle, Jerusalem, to the Mohammedan; and, notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusaders, after much more than a thousand years in his hands it remains to this day. The Byzantine historians are not without excuse for the course they are condemned for taking: “They have wholly neglected the great topic of the ruin of the Eastern Church.” And as for the Western Church, even the debased popes of the middle ages–the ages of the Crusades–could not see without indignation that they were compelled to rest the claims of Rome as the metropolis of Christendom on a false legendary story of a visit of St. Peter to that city; while the true metropolis, the grand, the sacred place of the birth, the life, the death of Christ himself, was in the hands of the infidels! It has not been the Byzantine historians alone who have tried to conceal this great catastrophe. The Christian writers of Europe on all manner of subjects, whether of history, religion, or science, have followed a similar course against their conquering antagonists. It has been their constant practice to hide what they could not depreciate, and depreciate what they could not hide.

INVASION OF EGYPT. I have not space, nor indeed does it comport with the intention of this work, to relate, in such detail as I have given to the fall of Jerusalem, other conquests of the Saracens–conquests which eventually established a Mohammedan empire far exceeding in geographical extent that of Alexander, and even that of Rome. But, devoting a few words to this subject, it may be said that Magianism received a worse blow than that which had been inflicted on Christianity; The fate of Persia was settled at the battle of Cadesia. At the sack of Ctesiphon, the treasury, the royal arms, and an unlimited spoil, fell into the hands of the Saracens. Not without reason do they call the battle of Nehavend the victory of victories.” In one direction they advanced to the Caspian, in the other southward along the Tigris to Persepolis. The Persian king fled for his life over the great Salt Desert, from the columns and statues of that city which had lain in ruins since the night of the riotous banquet of Alexander. One division of the Arabian army forced the Persian monarch over the Oxus. He was assassinated by the Turks. His son was driven into China, and became a captain in the Chinese emperor’s guards. The country beyond the Oxus was reduced. It paid a tribute of two million pieces of gold. While the emperor at Peking was demanding the friendship of the khalif at Medina, the standard of the Prophet was displayed on the banks of the Indus.

Among the generals who had greatly distinguished themselves in the Syrian wars was Amrou, destined to be the conqueror of Egypt; for the khalifs, not content with their victories on the North and East, now turned their eyes to the West, and prepared for the annexation of Africa. As in the former cases, so in this, sectarian treason assisted them. The Saracen army was hailed as the deliverer of the Jacobite Church; the Monophysite Christians of Egypt, that is, they who, in the language of the Athanasian Creed, confounded the substance of the Son, proclaimed, through their leader, Mokaukas, that they desired no communion with the Greeks, either in this world or the next, that they abjured forever the Byzantine tyrant and his synod of Chalcedon. They hastened to pay tribute to the khalif, to repair the roads and bridges, and to supply provisions and intelligence to the invading army.

FALL OF ALEXANDRIA. Memphis, one of the old Pharaonic capitals, soon fell, and Alexandria was invested. The open sea behind gave opportunity to Heraclius to reenforce the garrison continually. On his part, Omar, who was now khalif sent to the succor of the besieging army the veteran troops of Syria. There were many assaults and many sallies. In one Amrou himself was taken prisoner by the besieged, but, through the dexterity of a slave, made his escape. After a siege of fourteen months, and a loss of twenty-three thousand men, the Saracens captured the city. In his dispatch to the Khalif, Amrou enumerated the splendors of the great city of the West “its four thousand palaces, four thousand baths, four hundred theatres, twelve thousand shops for the sale of vegetable food, and forty thousand tributary Jews.”

So fell the second great city of Christendom–the fate of Jerusalem had fallen on Alexandria, the city of Athanasius, and Arius, and Cyril; the city that had imposed Trinitarian ideas and Mariolatry on the Church. In his palace at Constantinople Heraclius received the fatal tidings. He was overwhelmed with grief. It seemed as if his reign was to be disgraced by the downfall of Christianity. He lived scarcely a month after the loss of the town.

But if Alexandria had been essential to Constantinople in the supply of orthodox faith, she was also essential in the supply of daily food. Egypt was the granary of the Byzantines. For this reason two attempts were made by powerful fleets and armies for the recovery of the place, and twice had Amrou to renew his conquest. He saw with what facility these attacks could be made, the place being open to the sea; he saw that there was but one and that a fatal remedy. “By the living God, if this thing be repeated a third time I will make Alexandria as open to anybody as is the house of a prostitute!” He was better than his word, for he forthwith dismantled its fortifications, and made it an untenable place.

FALL OF CARTHAGE. It was not the intention of the khalifs to limit their conquest to Egypt. Othman contemplated the annexation of the entire North-African coast. His general, Abdallah, set out from Memphis with forty thousand men, passed through the desert of Barca, and besieged Tripoli. But, the plague breaking out in his army, he was compelled to retreat to Egypt.

All attempts were now suspended for more than twenty years. Then Akbah forced his way from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean. In front of the Canary Islands he rode his horse into the sea, exclaiming: “Great God! if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of thy holy name, and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other gods than thee.”

These Saracen expeditions had been through the interior of the country, for the Byzantine emperors, controlling for the time the Mediterranean, had retained possession of the cities on the coast. The Khalif Abdalmalek at length resolved on the reduction of Carthage, the most important of those cities, and indeed the capital of North Africa. His general, Hassan, carried it by escalade; but reenforcements from Constantinople, aided by some Sicilian and Gothic troops, compelled him to retreat. The relief was, however, only temporary. Hassan, in the course of a few months renewed his attack. It proved successful, and he delivered Carthage to the flames.

Jerusalem, Alexandria, Carthage, three out of the five great Christian capitals, were lost. The fall of Constantinople was only a question of time. After its fall, Rome alone remained.

In the development of Christianity, Carthage had played no insignificant part. It had given to Europe its Latin form of faith, and some of its greatest theologians. It was the home of St. Augustine.

Never in the history of the world had there been so rapid and extensive a propagation of any religion as Mohammedanism. It was now dominating from the Altai Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, from the centre of Asia to the western verge of Africa.

CONQUEST OF SPAIN. The Khalif Alwalid next authorized the invasion of Europe, the conquest of Andalusia, or the Region of the Evening. Musa, his general, found, as had so often been the case elsewhere, two effective allies sectarianism and treason–the Archbishop of Toledo and Count Julian the Gothic general. Under their lead, in the very crisis of the battle of Xeres, a large portion of the army went over to the invaders; the Spanish king was compelled to flee from the field, and in the pursuit he was drowned in the waters of the Guadalquivir.

With great rapidity Tarik, the lieutenant of Musa, pushed forward from the battle-field to Toledo, and thence northward. On the arrival of Musa the reduction of the Spanish peninsula was completed, and the wreck of the Gothic army driven beyond the Pyrenees into France. Considering the conquest of Spain as only the first step in his victories, he announced his intention of forcing his way into Italy, and preaching the unity of God in the Vatican. Thence he would march to Constantinople, and, having put all end to the Roman Empire and Christianity, would pass into Asia and lay his victorious sword on the footstool of the khalif at Damascus.

But this was not to be. Musa, envious of his lieutenant, Tarik, had treated him with great indignity. The friends of Tarik at the court of the khalif found means of retaliation. An envoy from Damascus arrested Musa in his camp; he was carried before his sovereign, disgraced by a public whipping, and died of a broken heart.

INVASION OF FRANCE. Under other leaders, however, the Saracen conquest of France was attempted. In a preliminary campaign the country from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Loire was secured. Then Abderahman, the Saracen commander, dividing his forces into two columns, with one on the east passed the Rhone, and laid siege to Arles. A Christian army, attempting the relief of the place, was defeated with heavy loss. His western column, equally successful, passed the Dordogne, defeated another Christian army, inflicting on it such dreadful loss that, according to its own fugitives, “God alone could number the slain.” All Central France was now overrun; the banks of the Loire were reached; the churches and monasteries were despoiled of their treasures; and the tutelar saints, who had worked so many miracles when there was no necessity, were found to want the requisite power when it was so greatly needed.

The progress of the invaders was at length stopped by Charles Martel (A.D. 732). Between Tours and Poictiers, a great battle, which lasted seven days, was fought. Abderahman was killed, the Saracens retreated, and soon afterward were compelled to recross the Pyrenees.

The banks of the Loire, therefore, mark the boundary of the Mohammedan advance in Western Europe. Gibbon, in his narrative of these great events, makes this remark: “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire–a repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland.”

INSULT TO ROME. It is not necessary for me to add to this sketch of the military diffusion of Mohammedanism, the operations of the Saracens on the Mediterranean Sea, their conquest of Crete and Sicily, their insult to Rome. It will be found, however, that their presence in Sicily and the south of Italy exerted a marked influence on the intellectual development of Europe.

Their insult to Rome! What could be more humiliating than the circumstances under which it took place (A.D. 846)? An insignificant Saracen expedition entered the Tiber and appeared before the walls of the city. Too weak to force an entrance, it insulted and plundered the precincts, sacrilegiously violating the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. Had the city itself been sacked, the moral effect could not have been greater. From the church of St. Peter its altar of silver was torn away and sent to Africa–St. Peter’s altar, the very emblem of Roman Christianity!

Constantinople had already been besieged by the Saracens more than once; its fall was predestined, and only postponed. Rome had received the direst insult, the greatest loss that could be inflicted upon it; the venerable churches of Asia Minor had passed out of existence; no Christian could set his foot in Jerusalem without permission; the Mosque of Omar stood on the site of the Temple of Solomon. Among the ruins of Alexandria the Mosque of Mercy marked the spot where a Saracen general, satiated with massacre, had, in contemptuous compassion, spared the fugitive relics of the enemies of Mohammed; nothing remained of Carthage but her blackened ruins. The most powerful religious empire that the world had ever seen had suddenly come into existence. It stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chinese Wall, from the shores of the Caspian to those of the Indian Ocean, and yet, in one sense, it had not reached its culmination. The day was to come when it was to expel the successors of the Caesars from their capital, and hold the peninsula of Greece in subjection, to dispute with Christianity the empire of Europe in the very centre of that continent, and in Africa to extend its dogmas and faith across burning deserts and through pestilential forests from the Mediterranean to regions southward far beyond the equinoetial line.

DISSENSIONS OF THE ARABS. But, though Mohammedanism had not reached its culmination, the dominion of the khalifs had. Not the sword of Charles Martel, but the internal dissension of the vast Arabian Empire, was the salvation of Europe. Though the Ommiade Khalifs were popular in Syria, elsewhere they were looked upon as intruders or usurpers; the kindred of the apostle was considered to be the rightful representative of his faith. Three parties, distinguished by their colors, tore the khalifate asunder with their disputes, and disgraced it by their atrocities. The color of the Ommiades was white, that of the Fatimites green, that of the Abassides black; the last represented the party of Abbas, the uncle of Mohammed. The result of these discords was a tripartite division of the Mohammedan Empire in the tenth century into the khalifates of Bagdad, of Cairoan, and of Cordova. Unity in Mohammedan political action was at an end, and Christendom found its safeguard, not in supernatural help, but in the quarrels of the rival potentates. To internal animosities foreign pressures were eventually added and Arabism, which had done so much for the intellectual advancement of the world, came to an end when the Turks and the Berbers attained to power.

The Saracens had become totally regardless of European opposition–they were wholly taken up with their domestic quarrels. Ockley says with truth, in his history: “The Saracens had scarce a deputy lieutenant or general that would not have thought it the greatest affront, and such as ought to stigmatize him with indelible disgrace, if he should have suffered himself to have been insulted by the united forces of all Europe. And if any one asks why the Greeks did not exert themselves more, in order to the extirpation of these insolent invaders, it is a sufficient answer to any person that is acquainted with the characters of those men to say that Amrou kept his residence at Alexandria, and Moawyah at Damascus.”

As to their contempt, this instance may suffice: Nicephorus, the Roman emperor, had sent to the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid a threatening letter, and this was the reply: “In the name of the most merciful God, Haroun-al-Raschid, commander of the faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman dog! I have read thy letter, O thou son of an unbelieving mother. Thou shalt not hear, thou shalt behold my reply!” It was written in letters of blood and fire on the plains of Phrygia.

POLITICAL EFFECT OF POLYGAMY. A nation may recover the confiscation of its provinces, the confiscation of its wealth; it may survive the imposition of enormous war-fines; but it never can recover from that most frightful of all war-acts, the confiscation of its women. When Abou Obeidah sent to Omar news of his capture of Antioch, Omar gently upbraided him that he had not let the troops have the women. “If they want to marry in Syria, let them; and let them have as many female slaves as they have occasion for.” It was the institution of polygamy, based upon the confiscation of the women in the vanquished countries, that secured forever the Mohammedan rule. the children of these unions gloried in their descent from their conquering fathers. No better proof can be given of the efficacy of this policy than that which is furnished by North Africa. The irresistible effect of polygamy in consolidating the new order of things was very striking. In little more than a single generation, the Khalif was informed by his officers that the tribute must cease, for all the children born in that region were Mohammedans, and all spoke Arabic.

MOHAMMEDANISM. Mohammedanism, as left by its founder, was an anthropomorphic religion. Its God was only a gigantic man, its heaven a mansion of carnal pleasures. From these imperfect ideas its more intelligent classes very soon freed themselves, substituting for them others more philosophical, more correct. Eventually they attained to an accordance with those that have been pronounced in our own times by the Vatican Council as orthodox. Thus Al-Gazzali says: “A knowledge of God cannot be obtained by means of the knowledge a man has of himself, or of his own soul. The attributes of God cannot be determined from the attributes of man. His sovereignty and government can neither be compared nor measured.”

CHAPTER IV.

THE RESTORATION OF SCIENCE IN THE SOUTH.

By the influence of the Nestorians and Jews, the Arabians are turned to the cultivation of Science. –They modify their views as to the destiny of man, and obtain true conceptions respecting the structure of the world.–They ascertain the size of the earth, and determine its shape. –Their khalifs collect great libraries, patronize every department of science and literature, establish astronomical observatories.–They develop the mathematical sciences, invent algebra, and improve geometry and trigonometry.–They collect and translate the old Greek mathematical and astronomical works, and adopt the inductive method of Aristotle.–They establish many colleges, and, with the aid of the Nestorians, organize a public-school system.–They introduce the Arabic numerals and arithmetic, and catalogue and give names to the stars.–They lay the foundation of modern astronomy, chemistry, and physics, and introduce great improvements in agriculture and manufactures.

“IN the course of my long life,” said the Khalif Ali, “I have often observed that men are more like the times they live in than they are like their fathers.” This profoundly philosophical remark of the son-in-law of Mohammed is strictly true; for, though the personal, the bodily lineaments of a man may indicate his parentage, the constitution of his mind, and therefore the direction of his thoughts, is determined by the environment in which he lives.

When Amrou, the lieutenant of the Khalif Omar, conquered Egypt, and annexed it to the Saracenic Empire, he found in Alexandria a Greek grammarian, John surnamed Philoponus, or the Labor-lover. Presuming on the friendship which had arisen between them, the Greek solicited as a gift the remnant of the great library– a remnant which war and time and bigotry had spared. Amrou, therefore, sent to the khalif to ascertain his pleasure. “If,” replied the khalif, “the books agree with the Koran, the Word of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree with it, they are pernicious. Let them be destroyed.” Accordingly, they were distributed among the baths of Alexandria, and it is said that six months were barely sufficient to consume them.

Although the fact has been denied, there can be little doubt that Omar gave this order. The khalif was an illiterate man; his environment was an environment of fanaticism and ignorance. Omar’s act was an illustration of Ali’s remark.

THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY BURNT. But it must not be supposed that the books which John the Labor-lover coveted were those which constituted the great library of the Ptolemies, and that of Eumenes, King of Pergamus. Nearly a thousand years had elapsed since Philadelphus began his collection. Julius Caesar had burnt more than half; the Patriarchs of Alexandria had not only permitted but superintended the dispersion of almost all the rest. Orosius expressly states that he saw the empty cases or shelves of the library twenty years after Theophilus, the uncle of St. Cyril, had procured from the Emperor Theodosius a rescript for its destruction. Even had this once noble collection never endured such acts of violence, the mere wear and tear, and perhaps, I may add, the pilfering of a thousand years, would have diminished it sadly. Though John, as the surname he received indicates, might rejoice in a superfluity of occupation, we may be certain that the care of a library of half a million books would transcend even his well-tried powers; and the cost of preserving and supporting it, that had demanded the ample resources of the Ptolemies and the Caesars, was beyond the means of a grammarian. Nor is the time required for its combustion or destruction any indication of the extent of the collection. Of all articles of fuel, parchment is, perhaps, the most wretched. Paper and papyrus do excellently well as kindling-materials, but we may be sure that the bath-men of Alexandria did not resort to parchment so long as they could find any thing else, and of parchment a very large portion of these books was composed.

There can, then, be no more doubt that Omar did order the destruction of this library, under an impression of its uselessness or its irreligious tendency, than that the Crusaders burnt the library of Tripoli, fancifully said to have consisted of three million volumes. The first apartment entered being found to contain nothing but the Koran, all the other books were supposed to be the works of the Arabian impostor, and were consequently committed to the flames. In both cases the story contains some truth and much exaggeration. Bigotry, however, has often distinguished itself by such exploits. The Spaniards burnt in Mexico vast piles of American picture-writings, an irretrievable loss; and Cardinal Ximenes delivered to the flames, in the squares of Granada, eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical authors.

We have seen how engineering talent, stimulated by Alexander’s Persian campaign, led to a wonderful development of pure science under the Ptolemies; a similar effect may be noted as the result of the Saracenic military operations.

The friendship contracted by Amrou, the conqueror of Egypt, with John the Grammarian, indicates how much the Arabian mind was predisposed to liberal ideas. Its step from the idolatry of the Caaba to the monotheism of Mohammed prepared it to expatiate in the wide and pleasing fields of literature and philosophy. There were two influences to which it was continually exposed. They conspired in determining its path. These were–1. That of the Nestorians in Syria; 2. That of the Jews in Egypt.

INFLUENCE OF THE NESTORIANS AND JEWS. In the last chapter I have briefly related the persecution of Nestor and his disciples. They bore testimony to the oneness of God, through many sufferings and martyrdoms. They utterly repudiated an Olympus filled with gods and goddesses. “Away from us a queen of heaven!”

Such being their special views, the Nestorians found no difficulty in affiliating with their Saracen conquerors, by whom they were treated not only with the highest respect, but intrusted with some of the most important offices of the state. Mohammed, in the strongest manner, prohibited his followers from committing any injuries against them. Jesuiabbas, their pontiff, concluded treaties both with the Prophet and with Omar, and subsequently the Khalif Haroun-al-Raschid placed all his public schools under the superintendence of John Masue, a Nestorian.

To the influence of the Nestorians that of the Jews was added. When Christianity displayed a tendency to unite itself with paganism, the conversion of the Jews was arrested; it totally ceased when Trinitarian ideas were introduced. The cities of Syria and Egypt were full of Jews. In Alexandria alone, at the time of its capture by Amrou, there were forty thousand who paid tribute. Centuries of misfortune and persecution had served only to confirm them in their monotheism, and to strengthen that implacable hatred of idolatry which they had cherished ever since the Babylonian captivity. Associated with the Nestorians, they translated into Syriac many Greek and Latin philosophical works, which were retranslated into Arabic. While the Nestorian was occupied with the education of the children of the great Mohammedan families, the Jew found his way into them in the character of a physician.

FATALISM OF THE ARABIANS. Under these influences the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens abated, their manners were polished, their thoughts elevated. They overran the realms of Philosophy and Science as quickly as they had overrun the provinces of the Roman Empire. They abandoned the fallacies of vulgar Mohammedanism, accepting in their stead scientific truth.

In a world devoted to idolatry, the sword of the Saracen had vindicated the majesty of God. The doctrine of fatalism, inculcated by the Koran, had powerfully contributed to that result. “No man can anticipate or postpone his predetermined end. Death will overtake us even in lofty towers. From the beginning God hath settled the place in which each man shall die.” In his figurative language the Arab said: “No man can by flight escape his fate. The Destinies ride their horses by night. . . . Whether asleep in bed or in the storm of battle, the angel of death will find thee.” “I am convinced,” said Ali, to whose wisdom we have already referred–“I am convinced that the affairs of men go by divine decree, and not by our administration.” The Mussulmen are those who submissively resign themselves to the will of God. They reconciled fate and free-will by saying, “The outline is given us, we color the picture of life as we will.” They said that, if we would overcome the laws of Nature, we must not resist, we must balance them against each other.

This dark doctrine prepared its devotees for the accomplishment of great things–things such as the Saracens did accomplish. It converted despair into resignation, and taught men to disdain hope. There was a proverb among them that “Despair is a freeman, Hope is a slave.”

But many of the incidents of war showed plainly that medicines may assuage pain, that skill may close wounds, that those who are incontestably dying may be snatched from the grave. The Jewish physician became a living, an accepted protest against the fatalism of the Koran. By degrees the sternness of predestination was mitigated, and it was admitted that in individual life there is an effect due to free-will; that by his voluntary acts man may within certain limits determine his own course. But, so far as nations are concerned, since they can yield no personal accountability to God, they are placed under the control of immutable law.

In this respect the contrast between the Christian and the Mohammedan nations was very striking: The Christian was convinced of incessant providential interventions; he believed that there was no such thing as law in the government of the world. By prayers and entreaties he might prevail with God to change the current of affairs, or, if that failed, he might succeed with Christ, or perhaps with the Virgin Mary, or through the intercession of the saints, or by the influence of their relics or bones. If his own supplications were unavailing, he might obtain his desire through the intervention of his priest, or through that of the holy men of the Church, and especially if oblations or gifts of money were added. Christendom believed that she could change the course of affairs by influencing the conduct of superior beings. Islam rested in a pious resignation to the unchangeable will of God. The prayer of the Christian was mainly an earnest intercession for benefits hoped for, that of the Saracen a devout expression of gratitude for the past. Both substituted prayer for the ecstatic meditation of India. To the Christian the progress of the world was an exhibition of disconnected impulses, of sudden surprises. To the Mohammedan that progress presented a very different aspect. Every corporeal motion was due to some preceding motion; every thought to some preceding thought; every historical event was the offspring of some preceding event; every human action was the result of some foregone and accomplished action. In the long annals of our race, nothing has ever been abruptly introduced. There has been an orderly, an inevitable sequence from event to event. There is an iron chain of destiny, of which the links are facts; each stands in its preordained place–not one has ever been disturbed, not one has ever been removed. Every man came into the world without his own knowledge, he is to depart from it perhaps against his own wishes. Then let him calmly fold his hands, and expect the issues of fate.

Coincidently with this change of opinion as to the government of individual life, there came a change as respects the mechanical construction of the world. According to the Koran, the earth is a square plane, edged with vast mountains, which serve the double purpose of balancing it in its seat, and of sustaining the dome of the sky. Our devout admiration of the power and wisdom of God should be excited by the spectacle of this vast crystalline brittle expanse, which has been safely set in its position without so much as a crack or any other injury. Above the sky, and resting on it, is heaven, built in seven stories, the uppermost being the habitation of God, who, under the form of a gigantic man, sits on a throne, having on either side winged bulls, like those in the palaces of old Assyrian kings.

THEY MEASURE THE EARTH. These ideas, which indeed are not peculiar to Mohammedanism, but are entertained by all men in a certain stage of their intellectual development as religious revelations, were very quickly exchanged by the more advanced Mohammedans for others scientifically correct. Yet, as has been the case in Christian countries, the advance was not made without resistance on the part of the defenders of revealed truth. Thus when Al-Mamun, having become acquainted with the globular form of the earth, gave orders to his mathematicians and astronomers to measure a degree of a great circle upon it, Takyuddin, one of the most celebrated doctors of divinity of that time, denounced the wicked khalif, declaring that God would assuredly punish him for presumptuously interrupting the devotions of the faithful by encouraging and diffusing a false and atheistical philosophy among them. Al-Mamun, however, persisted. On the shores of the Red Sea, in the plains of Shinar, by the aid of an astrolabe, the elevation of the pole above the horizon was determined at two stations on the same meridian, exactly one degree apart. The distance between the two stations was then measured, and found to be two hundred thousand Hashemite cubits; this gave for the entire circumference of the earth about twenty-four thousand of our miles, a determination not far from the truth. But, since the spherical form could not be positively asserted from one such measurement, the khalif caused another to be made near Cufa in Mesopotamia. His astronomers divided themselves into two parties, and, starting from a given point, each party measured an arc of one degree, the one northward, the other southward. Their result is given in cubits. If the cubit employed was that known as the royal cubit, the length of a degree was ascertained within one-third of a mile of its true value. From these measures the khalif concluded that the globular form was established.

THEIR PASSION FOR SCIENCE. It is remarkable how quickly the ferocious fanaticism of the Saracens was transformed into a passion for intellectual pursuits. At first the Koran was an obstacle to literature and science. Mohammed had extolled it as the grandest of all compositions, and had adduced its unapproachable excellence as a proof of his divine mission. But, in little more than twenty years after his death, the experience that had been acquired in Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt, had produced a striking effect, and Ali the khalif reigning at that time, avowedly encouraged all kinds of literary pursuits. Moawyah, the founder of the Ommiade dynasty, who followed in 661, revolutionized the government. It had been elective, he made it hereditary. He removed its seat from Medina to a more central position at Damascus, and entered on a career of luxury and magnificence. He broke the bonds of a stern fanaticism, and put himself forth as a cultivator and patron of letters. Thirty years had wrought a wonderful change. A Persian satrap who had occasion to pay homage to Omar, the second khalif, found him asleep among the beggars on the steps of the Mosque of Medina; but foreign envoys who had occasion to seek Moawyah, the sixth khalif, were presented to him in a magnificent palace, decorated with exquisite arabesques, and adorned with flower-gardens and fountains.

THEIR LITERATURE. In less than a century after the death of Mohammed, translations of the chief Greek philosophical authors had been made into Arabic; poems such as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” being considered to have an irreligious tendency from their mythological allusions, were rendered into Syriac, to gratify the curiosity of the learned. Almansor, during his khalifate (A.D. 753-775), transferred the seat of government to Bagdad, which he converted into a splendid metropolis; he gave much of his time to the study and promotion of astronomy, and established schools of medicine and law. His grandson, Haroun-al-Raschid (A.D. 786), followed his example, and ordered that to every mosque in his dominions a school should be attached. But the Augustan age of Asiatic learning was during the khalifate of Al-Mamun (A.D. 813-832). He made Bagdad the centre of science, collected great libraries, and surrounded himself with learned men.

The elevated taste thus cultivated continued after the division of the Saracen Empire by internal dissensions into three parts. The Abasside dynasty in Asia, the Fatimite in Egypt, and the Ommiade in Spain, became rivals not merely in politics, but also in letters and science.

THEY ORIGINATE CHEMISTRY. In letters the Saracens embraced every topic that can amuse or edify the mind. In later times, it was their boast that they had produced more poets than all other nations combined. In science their great merit consists in this, that they cultivated it after the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks, not after the manner of the European Greeks. They perceived that it can never be advanced by mere speculation; its only sure progress is by the practical interrogation of Nature. The essential characteristics of their method are experiment and observation. Geometry and the mathematical sciences they looked upon as instruments of reasoning. In their numerous writings on mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, it is interesting to remark that the solution of a problem is always obtained by performing an experiment, or by an instrumental observation. It was this that made them the originators of chemistry, that led them to the invention of all kinds of apparatus for distillation, sublimation, fusion, filtration, etc.; that in astronomy caused them to appeal to divided instruments, as quadrants and astrolabes; in chemistry, to employ the balance, the theory of which they were perfectly familiar with; to construct tables of specific gravities and astronomical tables, as those of Bagdad, Spain, Samarcand; that produced their great improvements in geometry, trigonometry, the invention of algebra, and the adoption of the Indian numeration in arithmetic. Such were the results of their preference of the inductive method of Aristotle, their declining the reveries of Plato.

THEIR GREAT LIBRARIES. For the establishment and extension of the public libraries, books were sedulously collected. Thus the khalif Al-Mamun is reported to have brought into Bagdad hundreds of camel-loads of manuscripts. In a treaty he made with the Greek emperor, Michael III., he stipulated that one of the Constantinople libraries should be given up to him. Among the treasures he thus acquired was the treatise of Ptolemy on the mathematical construction of the heavens. He had it forthwith translated into Arabic, under the title of “Al-magest.” The collections thus acquired sometimes became very large; thus the Fatimite Library at Cairo contained one hundred thousand volumes, elegantly transcribed and bound. Among these, there were six thousand five hundred manuscripts on astronomy and medicine alone. The rules of this library permitted the lending out of books to students resident at Cairo. It also contained two globes, one of massive silver and one of brass; the latter was said to have been constructed by Ptolemy, the former cost three thousand golden crowns. The great library of the Spanish khalifs eventually numbered six hundred thousand volumes; its catalogue alone occupied forty-four. Besides this, there were seventy public libraries in Andalusia. The collections in the possession of individuals were sometimes very extensive. A private doctor refused the invitation of a Sultan of Bokhara because the carriage of his books would have required four hundred camels.

There was in every great library a department for the copying or manufacture of translations. Such manufactures were also often an affair of private enterprise. Honian, a Nestorian physician, had an establishment of the kind at Bagdad (A.D. 850). He issued versions of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, etc. As to original works, it was the custom of the authorities of colleges to require their professors to prepare treatises on prescribed topics. Every khalif had his own historian. Books of romances and tales, such as “The Thousand and One Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” bear testimony to the creative fancy of the Saracens. Besides these, there were works on all kinds of subjects–history, jurisprudence, politics, philosophy, biographies not only of illustrious men, but also of celebrated horses and camels. These were issued without any censorship or restraint, though, in later times, works on theology required a license for publication. Books of reference abounded, geographical, statistical, medical, historical dictionaries, and even abridgments or condensations of them, as the “Encyclopedic Dictionary of all the Sciences, by Mohammed Abu Abdallah. Much pride was taken in the purity and whiteness of the paper, in the skillful intermixture of variously-colored inks, and in the illumination of titles by gilding and other adornments.

The Saracen Empire was dotted all over with colleges. They were established in Mongolia, Tartary, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Fez, Spain. At one extremity of this vast region, which far exceeded the Roman Empire in geographical extent, were the college and astronomical observatory of Samarcand, at the other the Giralda in Spain. Gibbon, referring to this patronage of learning, says: “The same royal prerogative was claimed by the independent emirs of the provinces, and their emulation diffused the taste and the rewards of science from Samarcand and Bokhara to Fez and Cordova. The vizier of a sultan consecrated a sum of two hundred thousand pieces of gold to the foundation of a college at Bagdad, which he endowed with an annual revenue of fifteen thousand dinars. The fruits of instruction were communicated, perhaps, at different times, to six thousand disciples of every degree, from the son of the noble to that of the mechanic; a sufficient allowance was provided for the indigent scholars, and the merit or industry of the professors was repaid with adequate stipends. In every city the productions of Arabic literature were copied and collected, by the curiosity of the studious and the vanity of the rich.” The superintendence of these schools was committed with noble liberality sometimes to Nestorians, sometimes to Jews. It mattered not in what country a man was born, nor what were his religious opinions; his attainment in learning was the only thing to be considered. The great Khalif Al-Mamun had declared that “they are the elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties; that the teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of this world, which, without their aid, would again sink into ignorance and barbarism.”

After the example of the medical college of Cairo, other medical colleges required their students to pass a rigid examination. The candidate then received authority to enter on the practice of his profession. The first medical college established in Europe was that founded by the Saracens at Salerno, in Italy. The first astronomical observatory was that erected by them at Seville, in Spain.

THE ARABIAN SCIENTIFIC MOVEMENT. It would far transcend the limits of this book to give an adequate statement of the results of this imposing scientific movement. The ancient sciences were greatly extended–new ones were brought into existence. The Indian method of arithmetic was introduced, a beautiful invention, which expresses all numbers by ten characters, giving them an absolute value, and a value by position, and furnishing simple rules for the easy performance of all kinds of calculations. Algebra, or universal arithmetic–the method of calculating indeterminate quantities, or investigating the relations that subsist among quantities of all kinds, whether arithmetical or geometrical–was developed from the germ that Diophantus had left. Mohammed Ben Musa furnished the solution of quadratic equations, Omar Ben Ibra him that of cubic equations. The Saracens also gave to trigonometry its modern form, substituting sines for chords, which had been previously used; they elevated it into a separate science. Musa, above mentioned, was the author of a “Treatise on Spherical Trigonometry.” Al-Baghadadi left one on land-surveying, so excellent, that by some it has been declared to be a copy of Euclid’s lost work on that subject.