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.