So lived and so died the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., “Roman emperor and Christian prince”(117) from 642 to 668, in the times when the chalifs of Mohammed, Omar, Osman, Ali, and Muawiah carved the Saracen realm out of the empire which Heraclius had possessed, and out of the kingdom of the “Great King,” whom Heraclius, when bearing the standard of the cross had brought low. If Heraclius treated Syria and Egypt as Constans treated Rome and Italy, is not the wonder diminished that in the ten years of Omar the structure of Roman power which had lasted seven centuries was overthrown, and those provinces had received a Mohammedan instead of a Byzantine master? Muawiah at Damascus cherished the Syria which at Antioch the lord on the Bosphorus had ground down with taxes. The Rome also which Constans, when he had been welcomed as its emperor, left stripped of its last ornaments was regarded with veneration by the farthest isle of the West, which it was winning at once to civilised and to Christian life. An English authority tells us that five years after the visit of Constans, Pope Vitalian, in the twelfth year of his pontificate, on the 26th March, 668, consecrated a monk of Tarsus, then living at Rome, learned both in secular and divine literature, speaking both Greek and Latin, of holy life, and venerable in age, being sixty-six years old. Thus Theodore was sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was received in his passage through France by the Archbishop of Arles, and the bishop of Paris. He reached his see in the following year, 669, and sat in it full twenty-one years.(118) St. Bede’s account of him says that he went over the whole island, wheresoever there were English, was received by all most cordially, and obeyed, when he gave them a right order of life, and the canonical celebration of Easter, which he spread abroad. St. Bede adds that he was the first among the archbishops whom the whole Church of the English consented to obey. His friend Adrian, who had recommended him to the Pope, and accompanied him from Rome, attended him in England: they had a large number of disciples, whom they instructed not only in theology, but in music, astronomy, and arithmetic. St. Bede wrote forty years after the death of Theodore, and says, “Even at this day there survive persons taught by them, who know the Greek and Latin languages as well as their own. Nor from the time the English came to Britain were there ever happier times, since, possessing kings most valiant and at the same time Christian, they were a terror to all barbarous nations; and the vows of all men tended to the joys of the heavenly kingdom but newly revealed to them; and all who wished to be instructed in the sacred lessons had masters ready to teach them.”