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. INVASION OF EGYPT. I have not space, nor indeed does it comport with the intention of this work, to relate, in such detail as I have given to the fall of Jerusalem, other conquests of the Saracens--conquests which eventually established a Mohammedan empire far exceeding in geographical extent that of Alexander, and even that of Rome. But, devoting a few words to this subject, it may be said that Magianism received a worse blow than that which had been inflicted on Christianity; The fate of Persia was settled at the battle of Cadesia. At the sack of Ctesiphon, the treasury, the royal arms, and an unlimited spoil, fell into the hands of the Saracens. Not without reason do they call the battle of Nehavend the "victory of victories." In one direction they advanced to the Caspian, in the other southward along the Tigris to Persepolis. The Persian king fled for his life over the great Salt Desert, from the columns and statues of that city which had lain in ruins since the night of the riotous banquet of Alexander. One division of the Arabian army forced the Persian monarch over the Oxus. He was assassinated by the Turks. His son was driven into China, and became a captain in the Chinese emperor's guards. The country beyond the Oxus was reduced. It paid a tribute of two million pieces of gold. While the emperor at Peking was demanding the friendship of the khalif at Medina, the standard of the Prophet was displayed on the banks of the Indus.