of Europe. About the same time the tempest of Mohammedanism arose in Arabia to sweep over some of the fairest provinces of the Eastern branch of the empire, tearing them off limb by limb, and leaving only a truncated torso to represent the dominion of the Cæsars.
This happened in the seventh century, just after the last of the Latin Fathers, Gregory, had laid the foundations of mediæval theology. But the two invasions—the Teutonic in the West and the Arabian in the East—were very different in character. They agreed in one lamentable feature. In both cases a more barbarous race came to wreck and destroy an ancient civilisation. They also agreed in one redeeming characteristic. Each, appearing as the besom of destruction, was really an instrument of judgment on an age already perishing in its own corruption. While the Germans brought physical and moral health from their remote forests to the effete city-life of Italy, the Arabs came with the simplicity of the desert to castigate the effeminacy of Oriental luxury—until in a very short time they themselves fell victims to the same fatal narcotic. But there was this radical difference between the two immigrations. The Goths were Christians, and as they settled down among the conquered peoples, intermingling with them, if the unfortunate accident of their Arianism had not stood in the way they would have fraternised from the first with the churches of their adopted land. But the Arabs appeared as missionaries of a new religion, who held themselves aloof from the peoples they subdued in proud scorn—except in the one significant fact, that they wedded the wives and daughters of their victims. Liberal and lenient at first towards all who submitted to their yoke, they soon made it apparent that Jews and especially Christians were only allowed to practise the rites of their faiths under sufferance, and that with increasingly galling restrictions. From the seventh century onwards right down to our own day the chief factor of Church politics in the East has been its relation to Mohammedanism.
11
