the western bishops besides. But Agatho, being elected Pope, and moved by the zeal of God, also summoned a holy Council and put under ban the Monothelite heresy. Upon all his narrative the conclusion of Theophanes is: “The Church being thrown into disorder by emperors and impious bishops, Amalek the child of the desert rose up to scourge us, the people of Christ. The Roman army met with a great defeat on the Yarmuk. There followed the capture of Palestine, of Cæsarea, of Jerusalem, then the loss of Egypt, then the captivity of inland and islands, and all Romania; the utter destruction of the Roman force in Phœnicia, the dissolution of all Christian peoples and places, which did not cease till the persecutor of the Church perished miserably in his bath in Sicily.” Thus when the Sixth Council met at Constantinople not only had the emperor Constantine the Bearded declined far from the position held by Justinian, at the time in which he made Rome a garrison city in a servile province, a hundred and thirty years before, but his empire was not half so great as that of his great grandfather Heraclius, after the triumph of the Persian war. Not only were Syria and Egypt, and all Roman land on the side of Persia, and northern Africa as far as Kairowan, lost to the empire, but it had just escaped utter destruction by repelling the fleet of Muawiah after a conflict of several years from the waters of the Bosphorus. And the great and abiding difference to the eastern monarch was that he had lost this vast amount of territory to an enemy who had put the propagation of a different creed, antagonistic in its first principles to the Christian faith, into the hands of a single man. That single man, a chalif, wielding an absolute civil power, appertinent to the prophet’s spiritual authority, had fixed the seat of his dominion in the heart of Rome’s former domain in the East. The Mohammedan now moved upon Constantinople from his basis at Damascus. He had advanced upon Sicily likewise, and had taken Syracuse in 669, and from that time forth southern Italy had to dread his descent upon its coasts. By his union of spiritual and civil power in his person as chalif, he had now the whole Saracen force by land and sea at his command. What were the Avars of the North or the Persians of the East compared to this new enemy, whose war-cry was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet”; whose meaning was, “There is no Christ, and no Mother of God, and no saints and no sacrifice, no kingdom in heaven to be gained by penance and humility. But there is the reign of a prophet on earth; receive his successor and you shall be our equals, refuse him and you, your wives and your children will be the captives of his sword.” These were the wounds struck by the Monothelite heresy on the Christian Church and the eastern empire in the first fifty years which ran from the death of Mohammed.