century, while that of Slavonia, undertaken in the tenth, did not terminate, if indeed even then, before the sixteenth century. The conquest of Europe was the result of a prolonged and often desultory warfare, in which, while the advance was slow, Christianity sometimes failed to hold the ground which it had gained. The powerful Churches in Asia, the seats of its great Councils and the capitals of its rule, either died or were swept away; Antioch and Constantinople, once its citadels, became the strongholds of an alien and hostile faith; the mighty Churches of Egypt and Abyssinia dwindled into a condition of immedicable disease, and the flourishing Church of Africa, with its more than six hundred bishoprics, was simply, because ripe for destruction, obliterated by the forces of Islam. Toward the latter half of the tenth century it seemed as if Christianity in Europe was surely following the fate of Buddhism before its disappearance from India. On all sides it was pressed in the deadly grip of Pagan and Moslem alike, while its bishops, and priests, and nobles, oblivious of the danger, were living in sinful self-indulgence. It seemed as if Christendom was being surely blotted out from the geography of the world; and yet as by a miracle it survived, or was preserved, till came the Renaissance, and that marvellous emergence of missionary zeal, which sent Christianity, Reformed and Unreformed, to the very ends of the earth, and which, increasing in every generation since then, was never more abundant nor more fervent than now.[341]