to write a history; but in few words to lament our miseries; otherwise, adequately to set forth these things. Thucydides and Sallust would both be mute.” The whole period of two hundred and forty years, between the time when St. Jerome, as a spectator, wrote thus, and the time of the Mohammedan inroad, is expressed in the words which follow. “It is long since we felt that we are offending God, but we do not appease Him. It is by our own sins that the barbarians prevail. It is by our own vices that the Roman army is conquered. And, as if this was not enough for our losses, our civil wars have consumed almost more than the edge of the enemy’s sword. Unhappy we who are so displeasing to God that His wrath breaks forth on us through the fury of savages. The greatness of the reality surpasses language: all words are less than the truth.” For, indeed, the time was come, through the extraordinary wickedness of two hundred years, when the very sanctuaries from which St. Jerome was writing, the sanctuaries of the birth and death of Christ, Bethlehem and Calvary, were to fall, not by a sudden inroad, but a permanent occupation into the hands of His chief enemies. The time was also come when the see of the great confessor whose name we identify with the battle of faith against the world, the see of Athanasius himself, the Pope of the East, the next in hierarchical order to the Universal Pope, was to fall, and to fall for ever, from its high estate. “Almost from the death of Athanasius began the spiritual declension of his see and Church.”—“Pride is not made for man; not for an individual bishop, however great, nor for an episcopal dynasty. Sins against the law of love are punished by the loss of faith. The line of Athanasius was fierce and tyrannical, and it fell into the Monophysite heresy. There it remains to this day. A prerogative of infallibility in doctrine, which it had not, could alone have saved the see of Alexandria from the operation of this law.”(71) During the ten years of Omar’s chalifate the great patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, and the smaller patriarchate of Jerusalem, which contained the places of pilgrimage dear to every Christian heart, visited by the faithful from all lands, not only the birth-place in Bethlehem, not only Nazareth consecrated by the angel’s announcing of that birth, and by the secret life of the divine Boyhood and Manhood, but— The sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world’s ransom, Blessed Mary’s Son.(72)