One question now comes which might well have come sooner. In the days of the Divided Empire, when Europe and Christendom had two rival heads, how did either bear itself towards the greatest work of all, the special calling of Europe and of Christendom? How did the Cæsars of East and West bear themselves in the Eternal Question of the world’s history? The Persian victories of Heraclius were the last work, the last glories, we might almost say the greatest and noblest glories, of the undivided Empire. The next moment the Eternal Question put on that more fearful and more abiding shape which it still bears in our own day. The two Semitic creeds, the most antagonistic of all creeds simply because they have so much in common, the creed of Rome and the West, the creed of Arabia and the East, stood forth as new badges for each side, badges under which each side drew new life for the eternal struggle. Syria and Egypt, which had little to lose by falling away, fell away, as we have seen, in a moment; Latin Africa, which had much to lose, fought on for sixty years; the Roman strove more manfully for Carthage than the Goth strove for Spain and Septimania. But Africa was lost for ever; the unconquerable lands of northern Spain, the Tzernagora of the West, bred up a line of heroes to win back their own land from the intruder. The Frank, Hammer in hand, crashed the enemy before he crossed the border stream of Loire; and the first king of the new line won a higher glory than that of Frankish king and Roman patrician by ending the short rule of the Mussulman around the temple and the arena of Nîmes and on the tower-crowned hill of Carcassonne. Nor did the New Rome fail in the work; vainly did the last companions of the Prophet strive to win the fulfilment of his promise that the sins of the first believing army that entered the city of the Cæsars should be forgiven. As the Persian had been beaten back in the days of Heraclius, so was the Arab beaten back in the days of his descendants. Again he came; but the strong arm of the Isaurian Leo again saved the New Rome and the whole world of Christendom. The strife of the old days came again in Sicily; again Europe and Africa, again Aryan and Semitic man--Aryan men who spoke the tongue of Greece and Semitic men who ruled where Carthage had twice been--strove, in the cycle of the ages, for the island that was called on to be the meeting-place, the battle-field, of creeds and tongues and nations. Sicily was lost, yet Tauromenion on its height, looking down on the Ebbsfleet of Hellenic Sicily, held out for almost a hundred years; short indeed were the two intervals when the Infidel could boast himself master of the whole of that memorable island. If Tauromenion and Rametta fell at last, the sword of George Maniakês was soon to be sharpening; if Syracuse was won and lost again, the sword of Norman Roger was already sharpening for a deliverance more abiding.