their enterprises against those powers, which success they failed not to attribute to their new religion and the divine assistance thereof. The Roman empire declined apace after Constantine, whose successors were for the generality remarkable for their ill qualities, especially cowardice and cruelty. By Mohammed's time, the western half of the empire was overrun by the Goths; and the eastern so reduced by the Huns on the one side, and the Persians on the other, that it was not in a capacity of stemming the violence of a powerful invasion. The emperor Maurice paid tribute to the Khagân or king of the Huns; and after Phocas had murdered his master, such lamentable havoc there was among the soldiers, that when Heraclius came, not above seven years after, to muster the army, there were only two soldiers left alive, of all those who had borne arms when Phocas first usurped the empire. And though Heraclius was a prince of admirable courage and conduct, and had done what possibly could be done to restore the discipline of the army, and had had great success against the Persians, so as to drive them not only out of his own dominions, but even out of part of their own; yet still the very vitals of the empire seemed to be mortally wounded; that there could no time have happened more fatal to the empire or more favourable to the enterprises of the Arabs, who seem to have been raised up on purpose by GOD, to be a scourge to the Christian church, for not living answerably to that most holy religion which they had received.1 The general luxury and degeneracy of manners into which the Grecians were sunk, also contributed not a little to the enervating their forces, which were still further drained by those two great destroyers, monachism and persecution. The Persians had also been in a declining condition for some time before Mohammed, occasioned chiefly by their intestine broils and dissensions; great part of which arose from the devilish doctrines of Manes and Mazdak. The opinions of the former are tolerably well known: the latter lived in the reign of Khosru Kobâd, and pretended himself a prophet sent from GOD to preach a community of women and possessions, since all men were brothers and descended from the same common parents. This he imagined would put an end to all feuds and quarrels among men, which generally arose on account of one of the two. Kobâd himself embraced the opinions of this impostor, to whom he gave leave, according to his new doctrine, to lie with the queen his wife; which permission Anushirwân, his son, with much difficulty prevailed on Mazdak not to make use of. These sects had certainly been the immediate ruin of the Persian empire, had not Anushirwân, as soon as he succeeded his father, put Mazdek to death with all his followers, and the Manicheans also, restoring the ancient Magian religion.2 In the reign of this prince, deservedly surnamed the Just, Mohammed was born.