Such is the note of Greek-Christian life down to the very hour of the supreme catastrophe which tore from the warlike Heraclius the provinces of Syria and Egypt (632-639), and, engulfing next North Africa, overthrew Christianity forever in the lands in which it had been built up. Heraclius, struggling to save a shaken empire, had early realized, as did Maurice before him, the madness of driving myriads of Nestorians into the arms of Persia; and after his triumph over Chosroes he sought to conciliate both Nestorians and Monophysites by a decree (630) to the effect that, while there were in Christ two natures, there was only one will, as was admitted by the Nestorians. For a time all seemed well, and many Monophysites in the outlying provinces returned to the Church. But in a few years an orthodox zealot, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, reopened the eternal debate, and declared that the new formula was a revival of the Eutychean heresy. In vain Heraclius, striving to save the remnants of the empire, sought to enforce his solution (639) by an ecthesis, or formula, which forbade further debate on the subject. The Catholics decided that there were two wills, though they always coincided; and the doctrine of one will--the "Monothelite" heresy--at length became a ground for the repudiation of the rule of Constans II over Italy, a hundred bishops anathematizing the typus or formula in which he endorsed the ecthesis of his grandfather. Finally, Constantine II (681) accepted the doctrine that in Christ two wills were harmonized, and one more orthodox countersense was added to the definition of the God-Man who never was. The so-called Athanasian creed--really a product of the Latin Church some centuries later than Athanasius--is a parade of the whole series. To this much had Christianity attained after four hundred years of indescribable strife. The one clue through the chaos is the perception that in every stage the dispute logically went back to the original issue of monotheism and polytheism. The church, holding by the Hebrew sacred books as well as its own, was committed doctrinally to the former, but practically to the latter. Every affirmation of "one" tended to imperil the separate divinity of the sacrificed Jesus; and every affirmation of duality gave an opening to the polytheists. The one durable solution was, at each crisis, to make both affirmations, and so baffle at once reason and schismatic fanaticism.