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.