John William Draper

“ On the part of the Saracens the conquest of Syria was conducted with ferocious piety. The belief of the Syrian Christians aroused in their antagonists sentiments of horror and indignation. “I will cleave the skull of any blaspheming idolater who says that the Most Holy God, the Almighty and Eternal, has begotten a son.” The Khalif Omar, who took Jerusalem, commences a letter to Heraclius, the Roman emperor: “In the name of the most merciful God! Praise be to God, the Lord of this and of the other world, who has neither female consort nor son.” ”

“ Nothing could prevent the Saracens from overrunning Asia Minor. Heraclius himself had to seek safety in flight. Syria, which had been added by Pompey the Great, the rival of Caesar, to the provinces of Rome, seven hundred years previously—Syria, the birthplace of Christianity, the scene of its most sacred and precious souvenirs, the land from which Heraclius himself had once expelled the Persian intruder—was irretrievably lost. ”

“ Thus Al-Gazzali says: “A knowledge of God cannot be obtained by means of the knowledge a man has of himself, or of his own soul. The attributes of God cannot be determined from the attributes of man. His sovereignty and government can neither be compared nor measured.” ”

“ Egypt was invaded, conquered, and annexed to the Persian Empire; the Patriarch of Alexandria escaped by flight to Cyprus; the African coast to Tripoli was seized. On the north, Asia Minor was subdued, and for ten years the Persian forces encamped on the shores of the Bosporus, in front of Constantinople.
In his extremity Heraclius begged for peace. “I will never give peace to the Emperor of Rome,” replied the proud Persian, “till he has abjured his crucified God, and embraced the worship of the sun.” ”

“ The female heart in all ages and countries is the same. She caused a slave to intimate to him what was passing in her mind, and, for the remaining twenty-four years of her life, Mohammed was her faithful husband. In a land of polygamy, he never insulted her by the presence of a rival. Many years subsequently, in the height of his power, Ayesha, who was one of the most beautiful women in Arabia, said to him: “Was she not old? Did not God give you in me a better wife in her place?” “No, by God!” exclaimed Mohammed, and with a burst of honest gratitude, “there never can be a better. ”

“ Though her military renown was thus recovered, though her territory was regained, there was something that the Roman Empire had irrecoverably lost. Religious faith could never be restored. In face of the world Magianism had insulted Christianity, by profaning her most sacred places—Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary—by burning the sepulchre of Christ, by rifling and destroying the churches, by scattering to the winds priceless relics, by carrying off, with shouts of laughter, the cross.
Miracles had once abounded in Syria, in Egypt, in Asia Minor ”

“ On the arrival of Musa the reduction of the Spanish peninsula was completed, and the wreck of the Gothic army driven beyond the Pyrenees into France. Considering the conquest of Spain as only the first step in his victories, he announced his intention of forcing his way into Italy, and preaching the unity of God in the Vatican. Thence he would march to Constantinople, and, having put all end to the Roman Empire and Christianity, would pass into Asia and lay his victorious sword on the footstool of the khalif at Damascus. ”

“ It so happened that Nestor, the Bishop of Antioch, who entertained the philosophical views of Theodore of Mopsuestia, had been called by the Emperor Theodosius the Younger to the Episcopate of Constantinople (A.D. 427) . Nestor rejected the base popular anthropomorphism, looking upon it as little better than blasphemous, and pictured to himself an awful eternal Divinity, who pervaded the universe, and had none of the aspects or attributes of man. Nestor was deeply imbued with the doctrines of Aristotle, and attempted to coordinate them with what he considered to be orthodox Christian tenets. ”

“ And I choose God for my Lord, Islam for my faith, Mecca for my temple, the Moslems for my brethren, Mohammed for my prophet, who was sent to lead us in the right way, and to exalt the true religion in spite of those who join partners with God.” Since the Persian invasion, Asia Minor, Syria, and even Palestine, were full of traitors and apostates, ready to join the Saracens. ”

“ From Bozrah it was only seventy miles northward to Damascus, the capital of Syria. Thither, without delay, the Saracen army marched. The city was at once summoned to take its option—conversion, tribute, or the sword. In his palace at Antioch, barely one hundred and fifty miles still farther north, the Emperor Heraclius received tidings of the alarming advance of his assailants. He at once dispatched an army of seventy thousand men. The Saracens were compelled to raise the siege. A battle took place in the plains of Aiznadin, the Roman army was overthrown and dispersed. ”

“ Peter to that city; while the true metropolis, the grand, the sacred place of the birth, the life, the death of Christ himself, was in the hands of the infidels! It has not been the Byzantine historians alone who have tried to conceal this great catastrophe. The Christian writers of Europe on all manner of subjects, whether of history, religion, or science, have followed a similar course against their conquering antagonists. It has been their constant practice to hide what they could not depreciate, and depreciate what they could not hide. ”

“ Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races, the Semitic have maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains and valleys, islands, and rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness of God. ”

“ As the result of this conflict, the doctrine of the unity of God was established in the greater part of the Roman Empire— The cultivation of science was restored, and Christendom lost many of her most illustrious capitals, as Alexandria, Carthage, and, above all, Jerusalem.
The policy of the Byzantine court had given to primitive Christianity a paganized form, which it had spread over all the idolatrous populations constituting the empire. There had been an amalgamation of the two parties. Christianity had modified paganism, paganism had modified Christianity. ”

“ Every thing happens according to the will of God, and has its appointed time, which can neither be hastened nor avoided. I return to him who sent me, and my last command to you is, that ye love, honor, and uphold each other, that ye exhort each other to faith and constancy in belief, and to the performance of pious deeds. ”

“ It may be particularly remarked that in Arabia they had a bishop.
The dissensions between Constantinople and Alexandria had thus filled all Western Asia with sectaries, ferocious in their contests with each other, and many of them burning with hatred against the imperial power for the persecutions it had inflicted on them. A religious revolution, the consequences of which are felt in our own times, was the result. It affected the whole world. ”

“ Arabia, an unconquered land of liberty, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Desert of Syria, gave them all, as the tide of fortune successively turned, a refuge. It had been so from the old times. Thither, after the Roman conquest of Palestine, vast numbers of Jews escaped ”

“ The Arab conqueror entered the Holy City riding by the side of the Christian patriarch and the transference of the capital of Christianity to the representative of Mohammedanism was effected without tumult or outrage. Having ordered that a mosque should be built on the site of the temple of Solomon, the khalif returned to the tomb of the Prophet at Medina.
Heraclius saw plainly that the disasters which were fast settling on Christianity were due to the dissensions of its conflicting sects ”

“ Of these, the Marionites regarded the Trinity as consisting of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Virgin Mary; the Collyridians worshiped the Virgin as a divinity, offering her sacrifices of cakes; the Nestorians, as we have seen, denied that God had “a mother.” They prided themselves on being the inheritors, the possessors of the science of old Greece. ”

“ If, satisfied with this picture of happiness, illiterate persons never inquired how the details of such a heaven were carried out, or how much pleasure there could be in the ennui of such an eternally unchanging, unmoving scene, it was not so with the intelligent. ”

“ With his own hand he offered up the camels in sacrifice. He considered that primeval institution to be equally sacred as prayer, and that no reason can be alleged in support of the one which is not equally strong in support of the other. ”

“ While their leader was tormented in an African oasis, many of them emigrated to the Euphrates, and established the Chaldean Church. Under their auspices the college of Edessa was founded. From the college of Nisibis issued those doctors who spread Nestor’s tenets through Syria, Arabia, India, Tartary, China, Egypt. The Nestorians, of course, adopted the philosophy of Aristotle, and translated the works of that great writer into Syriac and Persian. ”

“ But, though he rejected with indignation whatever might seem to disparage the doctrine of the unity of God, he was not able to emancipate himself from anthropomorphic conceptions. The God of the Koran is altogether human, both corporeally and mentally, if such expressions may with propriety be used. Very soon, however, the followers of Mohammed divested themselves of these base ideas and rose to nobler ones. ”

“ To internal animosities foreign pressures were eventually added and Arabism, which had done so much for the intellectual advancement of the world, came to an end when the Turks and the Berbers attained to power. ”

“ A nation may recover the confiscation of its provinces, the confiscation of its wealth; it may survive the imposition of enormous war-fines; but it never can recover from that most frightful of all war-acts, the confiscation of its women. When Abou Obeidah sent to Omar news of his capture of Antioch, Omar gently upbraided him that he had not let the troops have the women. “If they want to marry in Syria, let them ”