Among the events of history, as the historic mind would ponder them, or the judgments of God, as the Christian mind would interpret them, there are none greater than the two which for some time past I have been attempting to narrate or to contemplate. One is the wandering of the nations on the north of the great inland sea: the other is, the wandering of the nations on its south. Having reached the last year of the eighth century, we may cast a glance back upon both, and unite, if it may be, in a single picture the action upon both of a power which owed its institution only to the greatest fact of all facts concerning our race, the assumption of human nature, the soul and body of man, in His own Person, by the Creator of all things, the Son of God. That power existed only in virtue of certain words uttered and a certain will exercised, during His life upon earth. As the last of His thirty-three years was beginning, He had said to a man: Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. How far did the gates of hell advance upon the Church of God in the four hundred years which elapsed from the death of the great Theodosius? When he closed his eyes in the year 395, the great empire of Augustus in the East and West was still intact. The fifth and the sixth centuries may be said to be filled by the fall of that empire in the West. I have required ten chapters to give even a slight account of the effects produced upon the Christian Church by the wandering of the northern nations to the time of St. Gregory the Great. But the seventh and eighth centuries are filled with the pouring out of the Mohammedan flood upon the Christian people, which had more or less remained after the wandering of the northern nations ended in their settlement. It is another convulsion equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube, and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. The prize, which they had almost reached in the third century, was saved from their grasp until the fifth by a succession of brave and able generals invested with imperial power. But the Teuton could both admire and receive the law and the religion of the empire which he overthrew. Far otherwise was it, when a savage tribe of Arabia, kindled to white heat by a fanatic and false belief, burst upon a despotic empire in which Christian faith and morality were deeply impaired. It needed but the third decade of one emperor’s reign to abrogate the Roman sovereignty held during seven hundred years over Syria and Egypt, and to establish the sway of a false prophet, the