The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails. When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496, the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians, Mazdaists, and Manichæans as adherents of a single “Persian” religion,[461] just as the population of the Western Roman provinces were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ. Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although on political grounds it practised an astounding toleration--John Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph--Judaism, Mazdaism, and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa--the home of Augustine--the entire population fell away to Islam at once. Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 628 a relative of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in Java.