that matter, the hierarchy did no better. The hierocracy established in Spain under the Visigoths served so to emasculate or paralyse the race that after an undisturbed life of three hundred years it fell in a day before a handful of Moslem filibusters from North Africa. There is reason to believe, finally, that the intellectual as well as the political abjection of the Christian mass in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa made multitudes ready material for Islam, even as sectarian hatreds made others welcome the conqueror, and resent only his toleration of their opponents. Christian faith availed so little to make head against the new faith which assailed it, that we must infer a partial paralysis on the Christian side as a result of Moslem success. Success was the theological proof of divine aid; and many calamities, such as earthquakes, had previously seemed to tell of divine wrath against the Christian world. Such arguments shook multitudes. Numbers apostatized at once; and when the Moslem rule was established from Jerusalem to Carthage, the Christian Church, tolerated only to be humiliated, dwindled to insignificance on its former soil. In the African provinces it absolutely disappeared; in the others it became incapable of moving either Arab or Frank to respect. Nestorian Christianity, already settled in Persia, was specially tolerated by the Saracens, as it had been by the Persians, because of its enmity to Christian Byzantium; but though it continued to subsist it was by toleration and not through strength. The Nestorian clergy and laity throve somewhat as Jews had done in Rome; but they made no headway against Islam, and some of the Asiatic States where they had been numerous fell away wholly to Mohammedanism. Thus was given once more the historic proof that any religion may in time be destroyed or degraded by brute force, provided only that the brute force be persistent, and efficiently applied.