bitterest enemy of the Christian faith, over the very city which contained the sepulchre of Christ. “The law had gone forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” and thither all Christian nations sent a host of pilgrims to kindle anew their faith and love before the shrine which had held for a day the source of all that life, the Body of the God-man. Now that shrine, with all the memorial places of the Divine Life upon earth, fell into hands whose work it was to set up instead of the Christ, a man of turbulent passions and unmeasured ambition: instead of the Christian home, the denial of all Christian morality: instead of a Virgin Mother placed at the head of her sex, and unfolding from age to age the worth and dignity of woman, the dishonoured captives of a brigand warfare. All this took place within ten years after the death of Mohammed, and by the end of the reign of Heraclius, when the greatest triumph ever won by a Roman emperor over the rival Persian monarchy was followed by the most ignominious defeat from a troop of Arabian robbers, and the permanent abandonment of Roman territory. During the sixty following years, not only had Antioch and Alexandria, as well as Jerusalem, become Mohammedan, but the last fortress of Christian power in the East, the impregnable city of Constantine, trembled repeatedly at the approach of Saracen hosts, being rescued rather by its matchless position, its strong walls, and the invention of the Greek fire, than by the superior valour of its defenders. At the end of that seventh century, the whole northern coast of Africa had passed away from Roman to Saracenic rule: from the Christian faith to its Mohammedan antagonist. In ten years more, the Saracen banner crossed over the straits of Gibraltar, and the Church of Spain fell under its domination. At this time the eastern empire, diminished as it had been, passed through severe revolutions. It seemed that from intestine dissension and the despotism of one crowned adventurer after another, the remnant of the eastern realm, which during seventy years could hardly maintain itself against Saracen aggression, was coming of itself to an end. In this uttermost extremity at Constantinople, a soldier had risen from the ranks to be a trusted general, and when the empire received him for its chief, a long prepared attack by the chalif on his capital was beaten back successfully by Leo III. In the time of the chalif Walid, who reigned from 705 to 715, the Arabian flag floated over the walls of Samarcand: its conquest had stretched to the foot of the Himalayas. His governor in Africa, Musa, had carried the bounds of his empire to the Atlantic ocean. The single city of Ceuta owned still the Byzantine sway. And the Christian count, Julian, for a private wrong, betrayed to the Saracen the city entrusted to his charge. Musa added almost all Spain to the Saracen domain. Constantinople had been besieged in 668, and saved