But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and the interests of the officiating priest. Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which insisted that all other Gods were impostors. Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare. Mahomet died in 632. Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire. Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century. Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife and highway robbery.