These down-trodden slaves were the first converts to Islam in Spain. The remnants of the heathen population of which we find mention as late as A.D. 693, [389] probably followed their example. Many of the Christian nobles, also, whether from genuine conviction or from other motives, embraced the new creed. [390] Many converts were won, too, from the lower and middle classes, who may well have embraced Islam, not merely outwardly, but from genuine conviction, turning to it from a religion whose ministers had left them ill-instructed and uncared for, and busied with worldly ambitions had plundered and oppressed their flocks. [391] Having once become Muslims, these Spanish converts showed themselves zealous adherents of their adopted faith, and they and their children joined themselves to the Puritan party of the rigid Muhammadan theologians as against the careless and luxurious life of the Arab aristocracy. [392] At the time of the Muhammadan conquest the old Gothic virtues are said by Christian historians to have declined and given place to effeminacy and corruption, so that the Muhammadan rule appeared to them to be a punishment sent from God on those who had gone astray into the paths of vice; [393] but such a statement is too frequent a commonplace of the ecclesiastical historian to be accepted in the absence of contemporary evidence. [394] But certainly as time went on, matters do not seem to have mended themselves; and when Christian bishops took part in the revels of the Muhammadan court, when episcopal sees were put up to auction and persons suspected to be atheists appointed as shepherds of the faithful, and these in their turn bestowed the office of the priesthood on low and unworthy persons, [395] we may well suppose that it was not only in the province of Elvira [396] that Christians turned from a religion, the corrupt lives of whose ministers had brought it into discredit, [397] and sought a more congenial atmosphere for the moral and spiritual life in the pale of Islam. Had ecclesiastical writers cared to chronicle them, Spain would doubtless be found to offer instances of many a man leaving the Christian Church like Bodo, a deacon at the French court in the reign of Louis the Pious, who in A.D. 838 became a Jew, in order that (as he said), forsaking his sinful life, he might “abide steadfast in the law of the Lord.” [398]