When Clovis arose from the fount he had entered the company of Christian men. There were to be new things in Europe from that time and for ever, because the Gallic sword, which is the chief maker of Europe, had passed into the hands of a man so baptized. The proud heresies of the south were to pass at last, and there was to go out, even into the Germanies, where as yet were no cities nor letters, nor the art of building with stone, that influence from Gaul which has made of those forests an European thing. From this baptistry at Rheims set out a new story for the West. As for the soldiery, these too for the greater part (three thousand of the men of his small army) were baptized when Clovis was baptized; and the new men to be recruited into the host for the new wars were to march henceforward in the Catholic name; and everywhere the peoples in suspicion of their not-Catholic lords, by the Alps as by the Apennines, by the Cevennes as by the Pyrenees, were to look to the north and to the Franks for their sword and for their deliverance. THE BREAKING OF ISLAM (_October_, A.D. 732) When Christendom was Christendom at last, and all seemed bound together under one bond, the Emperor far in the East building his great Church, the Pope ruling in the West from Rome in the name of Christ, unseen lord of all Roman men; when Britain itself, swept by the pagans, was returning to the light of Europe, and when even in the Germanies, or on the edges of them, missionaries had begun to do their work, there had arisen, by that mischance which prevents perfection in any human thing, a new enemy far away in the desert. In the hot sands of which Europe knew nothing, and which were for century upon century a boundary to all Roman things, in an obscure town free from Roman rulers, in a market-place of the Arabs near the Red Sea, there had arisen a man who was to change all. This was Mahomet. Mahomet, acquainted with the Faith, selected from manifold Christian truth what few points seemed good to him, and composed a new heresy alive with equality and the reduction of doctrine to the least compass; rejecting mysteries--save that of immortality. He denied the Incarnation and left the Eucharist aside.