Читать книгу Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III - Allies Thomas William - Страница 5

We left the emperor Heraclius carrying back the true Cross in triumph to Jerusalem from its captivity under the Persian fire-worshipper, whose empire he had wounded to death. This was in the year 629, in the pontificate of Honorius, and in that act the emperor seated at Byzantium, on the throne of Constantine, at the head of the empire which was the proper creation of Constantine, seemed to have made himself the champion of the faith which is embodied in the Cross. Had Heraclius then died it would have been with a halo not only of human but of Christian glory surrounding his head. But he survived during twelve years in which his inertness, considered by some to be unexplained, suffered the eastern empire to undergo irreparable losses. These, moreover, came from a foe of whose mere existence he was indeed conscious, but of whom he had no fear at the time of that triumphal entry into Jerusalem. An obscure Arabian raider was striving to gain a mastery among some savage tribes in that little known peninsula. The lord of the golden city, seated as queen of Europe and Asia on broad-flowing Hellespont, would hardly deign to cast his eyes upon an incursion of southern robbers, made on an empire which for three hundred years had been watching war-clouds big with tempests from the north, or matching itself with difficulty against the restored Sassanid kingdom. This at last was beaten down. Might not Constantinople hail in security the return of an emperor who had conquered Persia? But we, looking back over the ages, may think that the act of Heraclius replacing the Cross in the Holy City and in the church which Constantine had built over the sepulchre of Christ may be called with much truth the last act of the real Cæsarean empire, inasmuch as during the twelve succeeding years it lost for ever its greatest provinces to the very foe whose advent as a conqueror Heraclius had not even suspected.

We have now to follow briefly one of the greatest revolutions which has ever occurred in human affairs. It is a revolution which not merely sets up one kingdom instead of another, or alters the persons of individual rulers; but which changes human society to its very depths, provides a different standard of morals, and, so far as it succeeds, but only so far, reverses the course of Christian civilisation, and undoes in certain countries the greatest conquests which the Christian Church had obtained for the good of the human race. Not States only are changed, but fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters: in fine, Græco-Roman heathenism has disappeared, but instead of it arises a religion borne on the shoulders of a temporal rule, and a legislation compared with which in certain respects that old heathenism was pure and benignant. The revolution reaches in fact man's belief in the nature of God Himself: and a change of belief in the nature of God involves a change in all His relations to His moral creatures, and in their relations to each other. The creature in all action reproduces what it holds concerning the Creator. The religion of self-sacrifice springs from a God who sacrifices Himself: the religion of self-indulgence from a God from whose worship sacrifice has been expunged.

It appears that even before the triumphal entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem with the recovered cross he had met in the Persian campaigns, in 622 or 623, with a certain bishop named Cyrus, then holding the see of Phasis, in Armenia. But Cyrus himself had for years before been in communication with Sergius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople, the guide and inspirer of the emperor. Sergius had held the see of the capital since the year 610, in which the accession of Heraclius took place. It had been all along his dream to reconcile the various monophysite sects which troubled his master's empire. In the political point of view such a reconciliation could not but appear very important. In Egypt alone the Monophysites numbered about six millions, against three hundred thousand orthodox. How deeply their national feeling was mixed up with their heresy is shown by the name of Melchites or Royalists, which they gave to their opponents. The patriarch Sergius and the emperor Heraclius fell upon the device of gaining the heretical party, not only in Egypt, but in the Eastern empire generally, to at least an outward union with the orthodox by introducing the formula “One Operation” as a theological expression for the acts of our Lord. St. John of Damascus describes in his treatise on heresies the 99th as that of the Monothelites “who derived their origin from Cyrus of Alexandria, and their strength from Sergius of Constantinople. These men maintained two Natures in Christ, and one Person, but assert one Will and one Operation, by which they destroy the duality of natures, and strongly adhere to the doctrines of Apollinarius.” Now Sergius, uniting great ability and strong character to his position as bishop of the capital city and minister of the Emperor Heraclius, dominated his mind. Heraclius exerted himself greatly to disseminate the formulary of these two patriarchs. His purpose was that of drawing together his own distracted empire. This purpose of Heraclius is carried back so far at least as the year 628. Nay, at the beginning of his campaign against the Persians he recommended it. How much more when by the peace of the year 628 he recovered the provinces which had been taken from him. It would seem that the faltering of Heraclius in the faith, which he was willing to subject to a deceptive compromise the doctrine of the incarnation itself, was coincident in time with the opening of the Mohammedan era, the hegira or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, which marks his assumption of the claim to propagate by force a conquering religion. That claim was in a few years to cost Heraclius the half of his empire. It is certain that about the year 630 he promoted Cyrus to be patriarch of Alexandria. He also put a certain Athanasius of like doctrine into the see of Antioch, and thus three patriarchal sees at once were in favour of the heresy. And Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius commending it as a wonderful mode of restoring unity to the Church in the East.

Cyrus drew up nine heads of doctrine, by which he thought that he had reconciled the Theodosians and other powerful sects in Egypt. His announcement was received with exceeding joy by Sergius at Constantinople. Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius describing the action of Cyrus in these words: “Certain dogmatic heads were agreed upon between the two sides, in consequence of which those who but yesterday were parted into divisions and acknowledged the wicked Dioscorus and Severus as their ancestors, were united to the one most holy Catholic Church, and all the people of Alexandria, beloved by Christ, and besides this we may say all Egypt and Thebais and Libya, and the other dioceses of the Egyptian province, became one flock of Christ our true God. They who were until then to be seen an innumerable multitude of divided heresies, now, by the good pleasure of God and the zeal well-pleasing to Him of the most holy prelate of Alexandria, have all become one, with one voice and unity of spirit, confessing the true doctrines of the Church.”

Such was the picture set before Pope Honorius by the patriarch Sergius, then in the height of his credit as bishop of the imperial city and prime minister of the emperor, in the year 633, when Abu Bekr was elected the first of the chalifs to carry on the power of Mohammed, who had died a few months before. A few years after this supposed reunion of all, these same Egyptians welcomed submission to Omar, the second chalif and successor of Abu Bekr, as lord of Egypt, who would, as they thought, be more favourable to them than Heraclius.

And the successor of St. Peter was deceived into believing that the picture drawn by Sergius was a true statement.

But before the union described in such terms by Sergius had been completed, a man had come to Alexandria, who was to protest in the face of the whole world against this compromise to which the Catholic faith was being subjected. This was Sophronius, a monk of high repute, to whom the patriarch Cyrus showed the articles of union, while they were as yet unpublished. Sophronius threw himself at the patriarch's feet, and conjured him most earnestly not to announce them from the pulpit, as they manifestly expressed the heresy of Apollinaris. Sophronius did not succeed with Cyrus, but carried a letter from him to Sergius at Constantinople, to whom it would seem that Cyrus directed him as the chief supporter and exponent of the doctrine which Sophronius rejected.

All that Sophronius was able to obtain from Sergius was that both expressions concerning the action of our Lord, as God-man, that is, the One Operation, or the Two Operations, should be equally avoided. Sophronius on his return to Jerusalem, was elected patriarch, and as such, presently issued his synodical letter. This is almost the most important document in the whole Monothelite struggle: a great theological treatise, which embraces the Trinity and the Incarnation, and fully sets forth the doctrine of the Two Operations in Christ. Copies of it were sent to all the patriarchs. The copy sent to Sergius has come down to us among the acts of the 7th session of the 6th council. Out of the copy in the acts I will here quote some few of the very words in which the great champion of the faith states the doctrine. It is that which St. Leo defined at the Council of Chalcedon, for which Pope S. Martin offered his life in sacrifice, for which the Popes preceding and following him suffered trials and persecutions without end, which four successive patriarchs of Constantinople endeavoured to overthrow, and for their incessant quarrels over which, three eastern patriarchates, with their bishoprics, were delivered over as a prey to the hordes of the false prophet.

Sophronius addressing his colleagues began with regretting that he was advanced to the pontifical throne from a very humble state against his will. Begging his fathers and brethren to support him, he noted that it was an apostolic custom throughout the world that they who were thus advanced, should attest their faith to the colleagues preceding them. After this introduction, Sophronius threw his words into the form of a creed, in which the first part dwelt upon the Trinity. He then, at greater length, set forth his belief in the Incarnation. How God the Son, taking pity upon the fall of man, by His own will, and the will of His Father, and the divine good pleasure of the Spirit, being of the infinite nature, incapable of circumscription and of local passage, entered the virginal womb, resplendent in its purity, of Mary the holy, the God-minded, the free from every contamination of body, of soul, and of mind; the fleshless took flesh, the formless, in His divine substance, took our form; the eternal God becomes in truth man. He, who is in the bosom of the eternal Father is bosomed in a mother's womb. He who is without time receives a beginning in time. Then, passing to the point in question, he went on: Christ is One and Two, One in Person, Two in Natures and their natural attributes. On this account, One and the same Christ and Son, and Only-begotten is found undivided in both natures. He worked physically the works of each nature according to the essential quality or natural property which belonged to each. This He could not have done, had He possessed, as One only Person, so One only Nature, not compounded. For then, the One and the Same would not have completely done the works of each Nature. For when has Godhead without body worked naturally the works of the body? or, when has a body without Godhead worked works which substantially belong to the Godhead? But Emmanuel, being One, and in this Oneness both, that is, God and Man, did, in truth, the works of each Nature; being One and the Same, as God He did the divine, as Man the human works. Being One and the Same, He works and He speaks the divine and the human. Not one wrought miracles, and another did human works, and suffered pains, as Nestorius meant, but one and the same Christ and Son wrought the divine and the human according to each, as St. Cyril taught. In each of the Two Natures He had the two powers unmingled, but undivided. As He is eternal God, He wrought the miracles; as He was Man in the last times, He wrought the inferior and human works.

The answer to the Synodical letter of Sophronius, made by Sergius at Constantinople, was not to receive it, but to draw up his own Ecthesis, and prevail on the emperor Heraclius to stamp it with the imperial signature, and proclaim it as the faith of his empire. Before the Ecthesis was brought to Rome in December, 638, Pope Honorius had died in the preceding October. Sophronius had commissioned the chief bishop of his patriarchate, Stephen of Dor, as we have already seen, to carry his appeal to Honorius, in the See of Peter. And now it is time to turn to those events which were in the meanwhile happening in the eastern empire.

In the three hundred years from Constantine to his twenty-second successor, Heraclius, the empire which he had set up in the fairest city of the world had developed into a double despotism. It is difficult to say whether that despotism pressed more severely on the religious or on the civil well-being of its subjects. As to each, it is requisite to say something. The gravity of the events which took place within ten years demands it; while in their permanent effect that gravity most of all consists. The immediate result was most rapid and unexpected, yet a long train of action during the three hundred years preceding had led straight up to it, and a period of four times three hundred years has since witnessed its evolution.

Let us take first this pressure of despotism on religion. In speaking of Constantine I noted that there were in him two very distinct periods of his rule after he became a Christian. The first precedes his acquisition of the whole empire in 323; the second follows in the fourteen years from that time to his death. But in this second period the change, which dates from the moment at which he becomes sole emperor, is yet gradual. At the first General Council, in 325, the calling of which is agreed to by the Pope and the eastern patriarchs, but springs from himself, he acknowledges both in word and conduct that the Christian Church is the kingdom of Christ, and that its government lies in the hands of those who receive a divine consecration thereto from Christ. They are the witnesses of His doctrine, which they maintain and promulgate in virtue of that consecration. Upon this doctrine their judgment is final. Constantine never in thought submitted to any power but the Catholic Church. The thought of warring sects was abhorrent equally to the soldier, the conqueror, and the legislator. Yet before his reign closed, at the age of sixty-three, he had been seduced in his conduct from this high tone of action by the counsels of the Court bishop, Eusebius; he had restored Arius and persecuted Athanasius. He had selected the bishops who were to attend local councils, while he stretched the powers of such local councils beyond their competence. He had in fact advanced with his imperial sword into the Church's Council Chamber, and claimed to be a judge of her doctrine. And his kingdom was forthwith divided among three sons, none of whom as rulers at all represented their fathers majesty, while one, Constantius, became after not many years the sole ruler, and as such propagated the heresy of the day, and practised encroachment on the doctrinal independence of the Church. Constantius was cut off in his forty-fourth year, receiving clinical baptism from the hands of an Arian on his death-bed. In twenty years after his death the imperial power passes through two new families, and when a third is called in to support a falling empire, Theodosius has fifteen years given to him in which to save the empire from imminent destruction and the eastern Church from heresy. The victory of that Arian heresy during fifty years had so deranged that eastern episcopate, that no one but a saint and champion of the faith, such as St. Basil, could venture to describe its condition. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the eastern empire passed through fifteen successors to Heraclius, and in that succession there are ten changes of family. One daughter of an emperor, who was himself a successful insurgent, conferred the empire twice, both times on the most worthless of men, as much marked for their civil misgovernment as for persecution of the Church. But with every step in the succession it may be noted that the original independence of the Church, as recognised by Constantine and by his successors down to the Emperor Leo I. in a long series of imperial laws, fell more and more into the background. Each general who by slaughtering his predecessor mounted the eastern throne assumed at once the bearing of the lord of the world: with the purple boots he put on the imperial pride. The Roman Primacy was indeed acknowledged by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and no less by the Emperor Marcian, the husband of the Theodosian heiress. But twenty-five years after that Council the western Emperor was abolished. From that moment the sole Roman Emperor was seated at Byzantium. At once an eastern schism was set up by the Bishop of the Capital. Rome was in the possession of Teuton Arians, who impaired the freedom of the Papal election, and made the imperial confirmation of it a custom. And when at last an honest general, who had entered the army as an Illyrian peasant, and risen from the ranks to the throne, had discountenanced the schism, condemned four successive bishops of his own capital, and acknowledged in amplest terms that the Pope's power was supreme, and also that it consisted in descent from St. Peter, the eastern emperor forbore, indeed, to deny the Primacy, but his endeavour was to control its action by making the spiritual subject to the civil power. This was the outcome of Justinian's long reign from 527, to 565. And the fatal conquest of Italy and Rome, making the one to be a captive province, and the other to be the garrisoned city, but not even the capital of a captive province, aided Justinian in acts to undo the reverence which in words he testified to the successor of St. Peter. In eighty-five years, from 553 to 638, the occupant of the eastern throne had advanced from holding a Council at Constantinople without the Pope's consent, to presenting at Rome a doctrinal decree for his signature. A few years afterwards, when the Pope called a Council, and condemned the decrees of two emperors as heresy, and three successive bishops of Constantinople as the heretics who supported it, the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., tried the Pope as guilty of high treason before the Senate of Byzantium, and crowned him with martyrdom in exile. Step from Pope Vigilius a captive guarded at Constantinople in 553, to Pope Martin sentenced there as a traitor in 655, and dying in the Crimea a martyr. That step will mark the advance of eastern despotism and the peril of the Church's independence.

But it may be said that from the time Nestorius is deposed as guilty of heresy made by himself from the see of the capital in 431, to the publication of the imperial Ecthesis as a rule of faith in 638, the eastern patriarchates have been swaying backwards and forwards between the two opposing heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches: Syria is the parent of one: Egypt of the other. Through these two centuries the bishop of Byzantium has pursued under the emperor's never-failing patronage a uniform course of self-aggrandisement. In this he was greatly helped by the extinction of the western emperor, when his master at Constantinople became the sole representative of the Roman name – that Christian king and Roman prince to whose honour so many Popes from Felix III. onward so vainly appealed. That very prince became step by step their most dangerous enemy. The first act immediately upon the extinction of the western emperor – who was the natural defender of the Holy See – was that a Byzantine bishop, Acacius, set himself up as the leader of the whole eastern episcopate. Pope Gelasius told the bishop of the day that he had no rank in the episcopate except that he was bishop of the capital: that a royal residence could not make an apostolic See. The new family of Justinian, ascending the eastern throne, was compelled by the internal state of the east, to acknowledge the Roman Primacy. Justinian never broke from that acknowledgment, but he termed his own bishop ecumenical patriarch in his laws: and every Byzantine bishop clung to the title given by an absolute sovereign. In the time of Pope Gregory the Great, a hundred years after the decree of Pope Gelasius, recording the pre-eminent rank and order of the three original Petrine Sees, of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, the Byzantine bishop is allowed to be a patriarch, Alexandria and Antioch have fallen under him. They themselves have been throughout all the intervening time the seats of violent party spirit, the spirit of the two conflicting heresies, striving for masterdom, disturbing succession in the sees, and ready by any obsequious act to get on their side the bishop of the capital, who dispenses the smiles of the emperor. Against all primitive order that bishop is found to consecrate his subordinate patriarchs at Alexandria and Antioch: to put down one and to raise another. When his usurpation was fresh and still incomplete, the patriarch Theophilus could persecute St. Chrysostom for the wrong done to Alexandria; but the patriarch Cyrus, made for his subserviency to Heraclius and Sergius to sit in the seat of St. Athanasius, addresses Sergius as “My Lord, the thrice-blessed Father of fathers, the ecumenical patriarch, Sergius, the least of his servants,” and his acts are as humble as his words.

It is clear that the eastern patriarchal system had fallen from intrinsic corruption before the joint operation of Byzantine despotism and the ambition of the bishop of the capital, who bought every accession to his own power and influence by acting in ecclesiastical matters as the instrument of the imperial will. This fall was complete before the events which mark the last ten years of the reign of Heraclius as a time of unequalled and irretrievable disaster both to the Church and to the State.

Yet something must still be added to portray that civil condition of the State which led on to this disaster. In all this time the city of the emperor's residence had been exhausting of their wealth – by the terrible severity of the imperial taxation – the provinces subject to it. Egypt and Syria lived under a perpetual oppression no less than Italy and Rome. Every distinction, every favour, which Antioch, when Queen of the east, may have brought to Syria, had long migrated to the banks of the Bosphorus. All the national feeling of Egypt was aggrieved by the ruler who treated the dower of Cleopatra – the imperial gem of Augustus – as a storehouse to be plundered at pleasure. And the national spirit was intensified to fever heat by the hatred of Byzantium on the part of the Eutychean population, forming the vast majority in the whole country.

Thus the wide eastern empire instead of worshipping in union of heart and gladness of spirit that transcendent mystery in which is throned the grandeur and the mercy of the Christian dispensation, instead of falling in prostrate adoration before that vision of condescending love which the angels desire to look into, broke itself into endless conflicts in disputing about it, until the mystery of grace became a rancorous jarring of ambitious rivals. During more than 200 years this suicidal conflict was engaged in ruining the resources of a vast dominion, which in the hands of a Constantine or a Theodosius, with the spirit of a St. Leo to guide them, would have been impregnable to every enemy. Had emperor and people been faithful to the Council of Chalcedon, and to the authority which they admitted to be based on a divine promise made to St. Peter, neither the disunited hordes of the North, nor the far inferior savages of the South, nor even the impact of the great Sassanide empire would have availed to overcome the Roman power. This last and greatest enemy Heraclius had subdued. He went forth in the name of the Crucified One whom Chosroes had called upon him to disavow, and won the fight. Yet even as he was carrying back the Cross and entering the Holy City in triumph, Heraclius had become a traitor to him whom he was professing to honour. He had already conceived, under an evil influence and by the inspiration of the patriarch at his right hand, a compromise of doctrine which he thought would induce the rebellious Egyptian people to return to his allegiance. He hoped also that the same compromise would exorcise the Nestorian spirit at Antioch. They who did not agree were to be drawn into an appearance of agreement by an ambiguous formula. And the See of the Apostle Peter, last and greatest witness of the true doctrine, was to be forced into accepting the deceit, and ratifying it for the old truth by submitting to an imperial decree, which, independent of the heresy contained in it, was a violation of the Church's liberty.

The fifty years which run from 628 to 678 contain the various acts of one prolonged attempt by the Byzantine emperors to enforce their religious despotism on the Pope in the shape of the Monothelite heresy. The two standard-bearers of the heresy are two patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria. Precisely at this time the Mohammedan power appears upon the scene. While Heraclius is brooding over the compromise of Sergius for reuniting an empire dislocated by heresy, Mohammed is purposing the foundation of an empire resting on material force. While Heraclius is assuming the right to define the doctrine of the Church in virtue of his imperial power, Mohammed is constructing a claim to prophetic rank from which imperial power itself shall emanate. The Mohammedan claim is the exact antithesis of the Byzantine usurpation: the rise of a false prophet punishes the attempt among Christians to rule the spiritual by the civil power.

Upon the death of Mohammed in 632, his companions took counsel together and elected Abu Bekr to carry on the dominion based upon religion which Mohammed had invented. They gave him the title of “Chalif of God's Apostle”. As the vicar of the new prophet, he was to exert the absolute power which belonged to the prophet's office, and of which the civil sovereignty was an offshoot. This power was rooted in the belief that Mohammed had been sent by God. The quality therefore of every act exercised by the first chalif, and by every successor, depended on the truth of such a mission.

By the choice of Abu Bekr, father of Aischa, the favourite wife of Mohammed, it was resolved that the succession to the chalifate should be elective, not hereditary. The most stirring principle of the new power was that everyone who died for its extension, which was called the Holy War, should pass at once to paradise. Paradise had been drawn by Mohammed after his own sensual imagination to suit the taste of a most sensual people. The empire sought by Mohammed and his followers was to be imposed by force. Abu Bekr stirred up the sons of the desert to this Holy War, proclaiming that he who fought for God's cause should have 700 good works counted for each step, 700 honours allotted to him, and 700 sins forgiven.

Abu Bekr held the chalifate but two years, dying in 634 at the age of 63 years. But at the very time of his death the pearl of Syria, Damascus, fell into the hands of his generals, Amrou and Khaled. From Medina the city of the prophet, and the seat of the chalif, he had sent forth three armies. Moseilama, a prophet who competed with Mohammed, was destroyed, the discontented tribes in Arabia itself were reduced to obedience. The Persian provinces on the Euphrates were attacked. The Roman empire itself was summoned to accept the new religion, or to become tributary.

Upon the death of Abu Bekr, the chief associates of Mohammed around him proclaimed Omar as chalif, and entitled him Chalif, and Prince of the Faithful. In the ten years of his chalifate, from 634 to 644, Omar made the Mohammedan empire. He had exerted great influence over Mohammed himself; he had been most powerful with Abu Bekr, who pointed him out for a successor. The man who had been of violent temper and bloody battles, now sedulously practised the administration of justice. He gave much, and used little for himself. He wore a patched dress, and fed on barley bread and water; he prayed and preached, and ate and slept upon the steps of the mosque among the pilgrims. There he received the messengers of kings. The severe chalif, a sworn foe to all effeminacy, strove to train a rude host to war. Arts he proscribed, even those of house and ship-building. When the great city of Modain, or Ctesiphon, was taken, he commanded the library of the Persian kings to be thrown into the Tigris. When some of his soldiers had put on silken garments which they had looted in Syria, he rubbed their faces in the mud and tore their garments in pieces. Such was the man under whom half-armed nomad tribes broke the armies of Heraclius, and took one after another the cities of Syria.

But on the side of the emperor were divided counsels, distrust, rankling enmities; Nestorian and Eutychean heretics hating each other, and still more the sovereign under whom they should have fought as well for a common country as for a common faith. The fate of Syria was decided in a terrible battle on the banks of the Hieromax, or Yarmuk. There, the Saracen generals, Obeidah and Khaled, “The sword of God,” utterly defeated the Greek army of 80,000 men. Obeidah wrote to the chalif Omar: “In the name of the most merciful God, I must make thee to know that I encamped on the Yarmuk, and Manuel was near us with a force such as the Moslem never had a greater. But God struck down that host, and gave us the victory out of His overflowing grace and goodness. God has given to 4030 Moslim the honour of martyrdom. All that fled into the desert and mountains we have put down; have beset all roads and passes; God has made us lords of their lands and riches and children. Written after the victory from Damaskus where I am, and await thy command for the division of the booty. Farewell, and the blessing and grace of God be over thee and all Moslim.”

After this, city upon city surrendered in affright. In the winter of 636, Obeidah lay before Jerusalem, from which Heraclius took away the Holy Cross with himself to Constantinople. At Antioch, in his dismay, he asked the question why those miserable half naked barbarians, the Arabs, not to be compared with the Romans in armour, or art of war, beat them in the field. A veteran answered him that the wrath of God was on the Romans, who despised His commands, were guilty of every excess, allowed themselves intolerable oppression and violence.

We do not read that Heraclius made an attempt to relieve Jerusalem, which yet was besieged during a year. Obeidah wrote to the patriarch and the inhabitants: “Salutation and blessing to all those who walk in the right way. We invite you to confess that there is only one God, and Mohammed is His Prophet. If you will not make this confession, then resolve to make your city tributary to the chalif. If you delay to do this, I will set my people upon you, who all love death more than you love wine and swine flesh. Hope not that I will draw away hence, until, if God please, I have killed all your warriors, and made slaves of your children.”

The patriarch Sophronius negotiated without hope of earthly aid, and Obeidah, to save the Holy City, the cradle of prophets, from being desecrated by blood-shedding, yielded to the Christian wish that the chalif in person should be asked to receive the keys of the city, and regulate the conditions of surrender. And in 637 Chalif Omar came from Medina. As the Commander of the Faithful entered the city, he rode on a camel, clothed like the poorest Bedouin, and carrying on the same rough beast a sack of dates, rice, and bruised wheat or maize, also a water-skin, and a large wooden platter, on which he took his food with his companions. The terms of capitulation which he granted to the patriarch remained for long a standard to the Moslem in the like cases. First of all was the poll tax imposed by the Koran. The inhabitants to be protected and secured in life and property; their churches not to be pulled down, nor used by any but themselves. The Christians duly to pay tribute; to build no new churches either in the city or country; not to prevent Moslim by night or day from entering the churches. Their doors to be always open to travellers. The Christian to whom a traveller comes, shall entertain him three days gratis. Christians shall say nothing against the Koran. Shall prevent no one becoming Moslem. Shall show honour to Moslim. Shall not wear garments, or shoes, or turbans, like theirs. Shall not divide their hair like them. Shall not bear surnames like them. Shall not ride on saddles. Shall bear no arms, nor Arabic writing on their seals, nor give away wine, nor sell it. They shall wear the same kind of dress everywhere, and that with a girdle. They may have no slave who has served a Moslem. No crosses on the churches; nor ring bells, but only strike them.

The chalif Omar caused himself to be led into all the holy places in the garb of a pilgrim by the patriarch Sophronius, even to the church of the Resurrection. There he placed himself on the floor, and the patriarch was most anxious lest he should practise his own acts of devotion there. With breaking heart the patriarch quoted to those around him the words of Daniel, “The abomination of desolation in the temple”.

Twelve hundred and fifty years have borne witness to the truth of that sorrowful word, and still, “the desolation continues even to the end,” and the soldier of the false prophet keeps order among Christians before the sepulchre of their Lord.