It is to be noted that in 610 the Jews at Antioch had an insurrection, and massacred a great number of the most considerable inhabitants. They seized the patriarch Anastasius II., whom we have seen St. Gregory treat with such regard; they frightfully maimed him, dragged him by the feet through his city, and finished by casting him upon a funeral pile. When Jerusalem was captured in 615, the Jews of Palestine bought of the Persians as many Christians as they could get, for the pleasure of strangling them. It is recorded that they murdered seventy thousand in this manner. Eight days before the taking of Jerusalem the fortress monastery of Mar Sabas, 2000 feet above the Dead Sea, then, as now, of the greatest renown, was assaulted by the Arabs. All but fourty-four of the oldest monks had fled, but these remained, and, after its capture, suffered first grievous tortures, and at last martyrdom. When the monks who had fled returned, they found the bodies of their brethren unburied; the abbot Modestus gave them holy burial. He afterwards superintended the diocese of Jerusalem during the absence of the captive patriarch. What Monte Cassino is to Italy, and Mount Athos to Greece, Mar Sabas was then and is now to Palestine. At this time St. John the Almsgiver—the last great patriarch of Alexandria—gave every help to the fugitives from the Persian seizure of the Holy Land. It is a sign of the secular power wielded by the Egyptian patriarch that he ordered the confiscation of the goods of those who used in his city false weights and measures. After he had lovingly received and supported the fugitives from Syria and Palestine, he had, in the next year, 616, to fly himself in order to escape the sword of the Persians. He was on his way with the patrician Nicetas to Constantinople, when, at Rhodes, he had a vision, in consequence of which he said to his companion: “You invite me to the king of this world, but the Lord of heaven comes before you”. He told Nicetas the vision, and left him to go to Amathus in Cyprus, his birthplace. There he made his will in these words: “I thank Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast heard my prayer, and that only one-third of one gold piece remains to me, though at my consecration I found 8000 pounds’ weight of gold in the bishop’s house at Alexandria, not reckoning those countless sums which I have received from the friends of Christ. Therefore, I order that this small remnant be given to Thy servants.” Ten years he sat in the See of Alexandria. George was his successor. But from this time nothing more is known of this Church’s history. Alexandria fell first under the Persians, and then under Amrou, the Mohammedan. The Arabian domination supported Christian errors only, and from that time the Church of St. Athanasius has never lifted its head again, and the land of the Desert Fathers is become the chief seat of the religion which puts an impostor in the place of the Redeemer.