Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

Mohammed's invitation to the governor of Egypt, followed by the gift of the slave woman to Mohammed, led to disastrous consequences in Islam to woman's position. The prophet called in God to sanction man's lordship over woman: the first time in history that such a corruption claimed a divine sanction.

In the eighth year of the Hegira, January, 630, Mohammed obtained possession of Mecca. To avenge a rupture of the existing truce, he broke with 10,000 men into the neighbourhood of the city, which admitted him both as its temporal lord and as the prophet of God, without a fight. He received the homage of its inhabitants on one of the city's hills, and their oath to follow him in all wars against unbelievers. At the same time, he declared Mecca to be again a holy city, in which God had allowed him alone to shed blood, which, for the future, was never to be.

After gaining this possession of Mecca, Mohammed issued in the ninth Sura of the Koran what amounted to a new law of nations, and a new practice of war. From that time forward none but Mohammedans were to enter the holy city of Mecca and its circle: but likewise, outside of this, idolaters were to be exterminated, Jews and Christians were only to be suffered, when they paid tribute, and humbled themselves. “O true believers, verily the idolaters are unclean: let them not therefore, come near unto the holy temple after this year. And if ye fear want by the cutting off trade and communication with them, God will enrich you with His abundance, if He pleaseth, for God is knowing and wise. Fight against them who believe not in God, nor in the Last Day, and who forbid not that which God and His Apostle have forbidden, and profess not the true religion of those to whom the Scriptures have been delivered, until they pay tribute by right of subjection, and they be reduced low. The Jews say Ezra is the son of God, and the Christians say Christ is the Son of God. This is their saying in their mouths: they imitate the saying of those who were unbelievers in former times. May God resist them. How are they infatuated! Besides God, they take their priests and their monks for their lords, and Christ, the Son of Mary; only they are commanded to worship one God only. There is no God but He. Far be that from Him which they associate with Him. They seek to extinguish the light of God with their mouths: but God willeth no other than to perfect His light, although the infidels be averse thereto. It is He who hath sent His Apostle with the direction and true religion, that He may cause it to appear superior to every other religion, although the idolaters be averse thereto.”

This Sura was the last in time of those issued. “It bears the stamp of much reflection and careful execution.” In March, 631, Mohammed had sent the greater pilgrimage to Mecca, under guidance of Abu Bekr. This Sura was published on the chief day of the pilgrimage, and “its promulgation committed to Ali, who rode for that purpose on the prophet's slit-eared camel from Medina to Mecca, and, standing up before the whole assembly at Al Akaba, told them that he was the messenger of the Apostle of God unto them”. Thus it establishes the definitive position of Mohammed in regard to all other religions, and the exclusiveness of his own claim.

In the last days of Mohammed, when the religious capital of Arabia had been taken by him, and this new law of war had been published, embassies from all parts of Arabia streamed to him, for to the Arabians there remained no choice between the Koran and the sword. He may be considered as the lord by conquest of Arabia, and moreover as one who pretended to issue in the name of God and as His sole apostle a new world-religion. Scarcely more than a year after this proclamation of war against what he chose to consider idolatry he died on the 8th June 632, at the age of 63 lunar or 61 solar years.

When we review the ten years which elapsed from the Hegira to the death of Mohammed, the following points are salient.

The imposition of religious belief by force becomes more and more the main principle of Mohammed. As he increases in power the principle is set forth with greater distinctness. He began as a citizen of Mecca by trying to persuade his relations and friends. With some he succeeded. His kinsmen gave him a partial support rather of clanship than of faith. But he found it expedient to fly from his native city, and the flight marks to all future time the beginning of his assumption not only to be a prophet, but in that character to publish a new religion. The Flight is the Mohammedan era as the birth of Christ is the Christian. At the end of the ninth year the proclamation against idolatry in the ninth Sura, the last in time of the whole series, marks the completion of the parent idea. Mohammed declares himself the apostle of God, as such alone charged “with the direction and true religion,” while Christians, though they are commanded “to worship one God only, associate Christ the Son of Mary with Him”. Whereas Mohammed declares Christ to be indeed one in the series of prophets, the last before himself; but himself to be the prophet who completes the chain. Thus he enacts that Christians can be safe before his people only in one of two ways, either by forming part of them, that is, by taking Mohammed instead of Christ, or by submitting to pay tribute, and to the humiliations which accompany tribute. Thus the parent idea is the messiahship of force.

It may be noted that it comes out in a profession of faith drawn especially to exclude the association of the Son of Mary with God. Thus Mohammed crowns the work which Arius attempted three hundred years before. After the restless heresies in which the Greek mind had fluctuated during these three centuries, the greatest enemy to the Greek empire and faith was set up on that very negation of the godhead of Christ with which those heresies had begun. Fifty years of Arian success, in which the emperors, Constantius and Valens, take a large part, inspired and supported by Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus, four successive bishops of Byzantium, cause that disorganisation of the eastern Church which St. Basil described as its ruin. Fifty years of patronising the Monothelite heresy, in which the emperors Heraclius and Constans II. bear the largest part, supported by four Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, beginning in 628, mark the rise and accompany the establishment of the Mohammedan empire and creed. Honorius dies before the heresy is presented for acceptance in Rome in the imperial Ecthesis. Ten Popes succeeding Honorius, in spite of the temporal distress which surrounds them, oppose to the utmost the Byzantine heresy and despotism in the midst of whom one gloriously lays down his life and is martyred by the eastern emperor as guilty of high treason. This is the connection between Arius and Mohammed, who appears as the divine punishment and remedy for Byzantine successors of Constantine who would confiscate the liberty of the church, and for state-made patriarchs who foster and formulate heresy.

Secondly, the revelations which Mohammed professes to receive from God he professes also to be brought to him by the Angel Gabriel. Nor is he ashamed to make this angel serve him in actions of the utmost turpitude. Thus when the governor of Egypt bestows on him the slave-girl Mariam, he falls so desperately in love with her that his proper wives, including his favourite, the girl-wife Aischa, the daughter of his chief adherent, Abu Bekr, revolt. The prophet is embarrassed and summons the Angel Gabriel to his aid. Forthwith a passage of the Koran preaches to the discontented wives obedience in the name of God, and the prophet threatens that if they continue to be insubordinate he will dismiss them and find others more obedient and submissive. Nor is even this the lowest depth of infamy. For when he violates even the customs of the Arabs around him, loose as they were, and favourable to the selfishness of the stronger sex, and takes the wife of his most faithful follower and adopted son, he calls in Gabriel to justify the adultery in the name of God, and to enlarge to any extent which the prophet may choose his exclusive privilege of taking wives. It would be difficult to say how the stamp of imposture could be fixed on the Koran with more convincing force than by this association of an angel and of God himself with acts which are contrary to the universal natural law.

Thirdly, it may be remarked that as to polygamy, since it was the custom of the Arabians in his time to practise it without restraint, Mohammed might be considered as neither better nor worse than his countrymen, who had so corrupted the purity of the original law of marriage. This might be allowed if we were considering Mohammed simply as a Saracen of that time. But we are considering him in the light in which he put himself forward as the apostle of God, the one apostle who was to set forth the one God: “there is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. It is in this character that he did what no one had ever done before. Polygamy had crept in, “through the hardness of men's hearts,” but Mohammed attempted to set by his appeal to God and his use of the Angel Gabriel a divine sanction upon this great corruption, and upon the unlimited concubinage which he practised himself, and authorised in others. Thus St. John Damascene a hundred years after his time used of him these indignant words: “This Mamed put together many foolish things. Thus in the writing entitled ‘Woman’ he lays down the law that a man may openly take four wives, and a thousand concubines if he can, as many as he can subject to himself besides the four; and he may divorce when he pleases and take another. And he made this law for the following reason.” Then St. John narrates the case of Zeid and his wife in these words: “Zeid had a handsome wife; Mamed fell in love with her. As they sat together Mamed said, God has charged me to take thy wife. Zeid answered: Thou art the apostle, do as God told thee. Or to go further back, he said: God charged me that thou divorce thy wife. Zeid divorced her. After some days Mamed said: God also charged me to take her. So he took her and made her an adulteress, and then he enacted that every one who will may divorce his wife, and after the divorce, if she return to him, another must marry her first.”

Patriarchs and prophets have sinned, as well as common men; but Mohammed is the only legislator who has called in God to sanction his sin, and propagate it among others in the name of God: and he did this under the title that he was the special apostle of God, sent to propagate the only true religion. The terrible sin of David stands out as contrary to all his previous life. He sought pardon for it, and after it became the great penitent, and humbly bowed his head beneath chastisements as awful as his own sin. Mohammed exulted in his sin, as deserving of praise and exceptional privilege.

Fourthly, throughout the ten years, from the Hegira to his death, Mohammed carried out his own principle of propagating religion by force in his utter disregard of human life. As soon as he had left Mecca he practised robbery upon its caravans and killed without scruple those who resisted the robbery. He tried to make friends with Jewish clans around him, and when they rejected him for their Messias, slew them by hundreds. He slew even for private revenge those who stood in his way: and women as well as men.

These alleged revelations become in Mohammed's hands the enactments of a sovereign legislator. He claims them to be words of God delivered to him by the angel Gabriel. The personal character of Mohammed as developed in them is, therefore, of the greatest importance. He speaks not only of his “brother Moses” in the Jewish legislation which he closes, but of the Son of Mary as the Word and Spirit of God, on whose work he sets the superior seal of his own mission; and as a matter of fact, those who took his name had his personal character and actions before them for a standard, as the Christians had the Son of God. From the moment of his death this fact is brought out by the conduct of his followers. His chief companions meet and elect a head whom they call the chalif or successor of the prophet. That title is the sole source of his authority, which is both religious and civil, supreme in each, but supreme because it is the transmitted authority of the Prophet who is not a prophet only, but the “Apostle of God”. The four points above noted, the propagation of religion by force, the imposture in the use of the name of Gabriel, the enacting of polygamy with the superadded license of unbounded concubinage, and the employment of murder as means of success, mark the intense antagonism between the character of Mohammed and the character of Him whom he charged the Christians with associating to God. Instead of the Man, meek and humble of heart, who said to His disciples that in following His meekness and humility they should find rest for their souls, we have the man who ordered the believers in him to beat down all idolaters that did not profess, “There is one God, and Mohammed is His prophet,” and made death in battle against them to be the martyrdom which he chose for his people. Instead of the Man who said, “If I had not done among them the works which no other man hath done, they would not have sin,” we have the man who answered the appeal made to him for miraculous works in testimony of his mission, by disclaiming the power to do them. Instead of the Virgin's Son who set up the virginal life, and propagated His faith by the teaching and example of those who followed it, we have the man who forged a divine permission for the grossest polygamy and an unlimited concubinage obtained by successful war. Instead of the Man who reverenced above all men the sanctuary of human life, we have the man who murdered without scruple those who did not accept his mission.

As to the nature of the kingdom which each of these two set up, the One in His last words to His disciples on the night of His sacrifice said, “The kings of the gentiles lord it over them, and they that have power over them are called beneficent, but you not so: but he that is the greatest among you let him become as the younger, and he that is the leader as he that serveth”. In accordance with this precept, just as Mohammed was preparing to appear as the prophet, the greatest among Christians took as the symbol of his spiritual rule for his title, Servant of the servants of God: and so Chalid, the chief fighter, under Mohammed, Abu Bekr, and Omar, was termed “the sword of the swords of God”. The prophet in the Sura proclaiming his religion pronounced force to be the instrument of spreading it, and in doing this blood was to be shed like water: and from his time his chalifs have practised the slaughter of as many as they chose. Nor is this confined to enemies, but his religion has considered his own subjects thus slaughtered as witnesses of the prophet's claim. To be killed by order of the chalif is to the believer a title of honour, and the sacrifice of so many a day to his order a sacrifice to his religion.

The pretension put forward by Mohammed in the ninth Sura has been fully accepted by his people from the beginning. He is their apostle, and accordingly from his life they have taken and woven into their own in every age the employment of force, the imposture of a man's invention put in an angel's name, the right to take away life at the pleasure of the ruler, but above all, polygamy and concubinage. The sensual life of Mohammed began exactly at the time when, discarding persuasion as the instrument of converting unbelievers, he began to propagate by force his pretended mission as a prophet. The deterioration in the moral life coincides with the time when he passed from the character of one who sought to restore the religion of Abraham to the very different character of one who sought to introduce a new and universal religion. Moreover, this sensual life of the founder has likewise infected with a moral pestilence all those parts of Asia, Africa and Europe, wherein his followers have prevailed. The man who from fifty to sixty years of age was multiplying young wives, moving them to jealousy with a slave concubine, seizing the wife of an adopted son, in virtue of a feigned divine decree, and making a special license to himself as the prophet of God to marry as many wives as he pleased, and whose wives he pleased, has corrupted all the generations of those who profess his religion. But more than in any others this corruption is apparent in those who rule in the prophet's name. Omar, Osman, and Ali, the second, third, and fourth chalifs, followed Mohammed closely in this corruption of domestic life. Ali, the husband of his favourite daughter, equalled her father in his wives, as likewise Osman, the husband of another daughter. Every Mohammedan prince, as a rule, follows the founder of his dynasty and creed, and thus, as the race of the Virgin Mother reproduces in every age the example of her whom all generations call blessed, and her Divine Son has planted in her the tree of chastity, of which He is Himself the first fruit, and which takes root in an honourable people, and as every work of superhuman charity grows upon that tree, and the sex lost in Eve is glorified by Mary, so the Mohammedan line is equally true to its origin. To the very end of the long night of heathenism, on which the coming of our Lord dawned, monogamy still survived in the noblest descendants of Eve. The German had it and the Roman, and there were ages in which those races, heathen though they were, honoured woman, and maintained the sanctity of marriage, before it was exalted into a sacrament, and before the foundation of human society was consecrated by the blessing of the Redeemer, given in the touch of His Blood. The degradation of woman in every age and every people during the 1250 years of Mohammedan domination, is the special stamp of the various peoples who have borne his name. I take the example highest in position and worst in character. To the precept of Mohammed, enforced by his own conduct, we owe it that in Constantine's own city the very chalif who represents him continues without marriage to practise an unbounded concubinage. Thus from generation to generation the race of Othman – which can scarcely be called a family – has been continued, and enabled to reign over the fairest countries of the globe, Christian during many hundred years, for a period almost as long as the long descended lines of Capet and Hapsburg have subsisted in honourable marriage. Concubinage has provided it with children, and fratricide has prevented rivals down to the time of Sultan Mahmoud. When he succeeded to the throne, stained in every generation with such crimes, he was the only survivor of his race. Out of the previous history a Turkish annalist records without astonishment, for it was an ordinary incident, that in a tumult which had taken place at the funeral of Sultan Murad III., nineteen brothers of the Sultan Mohammed III., all innocent and guiltless, were strangled and added to the company of martyrs. From the life of Mohammed himself has sprung a despotism without limit, a cruelty which scorns natural affection, and a sensuality without example.

As the personal life on earth of the Son of God is seen in the religion which He planted, and in the history of the people which He formed and maintains, so the personal life of the man Mohammed is seen in the religion which bears his name, and in the people which have carried it on. It is only to elucidate this thought that I have selected these particulars of the Arabian's life, and as a prelude to the contrast which the religions themselves present.

A few months after his return from the great pilgrimage to Mecca in 632, Mohammed was preparing a third campaign against the Byzantines, which however could only be executed after his death. A word must be said as to his exact position at the moment of his death. In the ten years which follow immediately the Hegira, the original camel driver, who became husband of Chadidja, and lived with her virtuously to her death, pursued the life of a freebooter, which had many alternations of failure and success. In his character of prophet, “the apostle of God,” he aimed at material power, and scrupled not to pursue it by deceit, robbery, and murder, all exercised as means of converting men to the worship of one God, the almighty and “most merciful”. He had fifteen months before his death so far prevailed as to obtain mastery over the city which he had left as a fugitive. It was in a certain sense the capital of Arabia, and he was claiming and in a great degree receiving the homage of all Arabians. But other men who also called themselves prophets, such as Moseilama, were his rivals. The subjection of Arabia was by no means complete at the time of his death. The German historian – himself of the Jewish race and religion – from whose careful study of Mohammedan writers I have taken many of the incidents above recorded, says that with the exception of his weakness in his relations to the female sex, in regard to which he claimed the privileges allowed to him as a special favour from God, he gave a fair example to his people. There was the greatest simplicity as to his dwelling, his clothing, and his food. He was so unassuming that he not only refused every external mark of honour from his companions, but declined every service even from his slaves which he could perform himself. He was often seen in the market place buying food, mending his clothes in a miserable little room, or milking a goat in his court. Every one could approach him at all hours, whether in the street or in his dwelling. He visited all the sick, and showed sympathy to every sufferer, and was also magnanimous and indulgent where policy did not otherwise require. His generosity and benevolence, and also his care for the common good were boundless, so that in spite of the many presents which he received from all sides, and the rich plunder which came to him from his wars, he left little property behind him, and treated even this as belonging to the State. After his death it was not given to his daughter Fatima, his only heiress, the wife of Ali. He had other sons and daughters besides Fatima, on the number of whom tradition varies. They all died before him. We may name only Rukejja and Umm Kolthum, whom the future Chalif Osman successively espoused, both by his first wife Chadidja; and also Ibrahim son of the Coptic slave Mariam, whose early death the prophet sorely lamented. But this historian treats the bringing in the Angel Gabriel as the bearer of his revelations to have been a deceit throughout.

The power which Mohammed claimed rested entirely on the truth of his assertion that God had committed to him a prophetical office, carrying with it the promulgation of a new and universal religion. The absolute falsehood of this assertion is contained in the invention of the Angel Gabriel. The Jewish historian whom I have quoted fully admits this imposture, just as St. John Damascene made it a reproach a hundred years after Mohammed's time. The virtues above mentioned, what are they but the beautiful spots of the tiger's skin veiling the ferocity of the beast? Mohammed by the confession of his friends would appear to have had two intense passions, one for sweet odours, the other for women. Thalebi commenting on the 5th Sura records how ten zealous disciples used often to meet and pray in the house of Osman. They watched through the night and had resolved to prepare themselves for paradise by chastity and mortification. Mohammed did not approve of it, and preached to the people that it was no way his mind that those who professed Islam should abstain, like Christian priests and religious, from women and from eating flesh, and from sweet odours; should debar themselves from sleep, and practice hardships. Fighting was his monkhood. Abulfeda says he openly confessed as to himself, “Two things attract me and carry me away: women and sweet odours. My joy is in these two pleasures, and they make me more prayerful.” In fact Mohammed was never so pious as when he took a new wife; while he deserted them all for the Coptic slave-girl Mariam. And the Koran told him that he was right.

What were pharisaic prayings in the market place to the devotions of Mohammed? He called upon all with whom he came in contact to accept the one God, and Mohammed as his prophet, on pain of being exterminated, and he delivered up to the pleasure of the Mohammedan fighter as many female captives as any one could take, over and above the four wives whom he allowed to all. These captives were not the victims of angry passions in men maddened by a furious conflict, but the avowed and justified reward of those who might, if slain in battle, have been martyrs, but instead were victorious. The very worst corruption which we meet with in the idol worship and demon worship of Greeks and Romans was the shamelessness which pandered to all lusts of the flesh under cover of religion. But Mohammed added to this corruption. In virtue of his Koran the most infamous passions were allowed not in belief of false gods, themselves models of impurity, but in worshipping the one holy God. In all this the example as well as the word of the religious founder had gone before, and his people followed it from age to age.

Mohammed then at the time of his death was a successful robber in a country wherein the tribal life was in a state of great confusion and incessant changes, and the ancestral religion had degenerated into a rude and senseless idolatry. The race which occupied Arabia – the whole people which claimed Ishmael the son of Abraham for their ancestor – was devoid of order and of culture, of art or science, and had not affected the history of the world beyond its own boundaries. That the lord of Byzantium on the one hand or the lord of Ctesiphon on the other contemplated permanent danger to their realms from the incursions of such a race can as little be supposed as that Europe now is in fear of subjugation from a host of Caffres or Zulus, people, in personal bravery, resolution and bodily strength, equal probably to what the Saracens then were.

In Omar's chalifate he had sent an army of 30,000 men, under one of Mohammed's eldest companions, to compel the Persians on the Euphrates to become Mohammedans. They had placed themselves under the last heir of the royal race, the young and valiant Jezdejerd. When the embassy requiring them to accept Islam or tribute came, the heir of the great king said to them mockingly: “You came hither as traffickers and beggars. Your food was green lizards; your drink salt water; your dress rough camel's hair. Now you would force upon us a hateful religion. Hunger pushes you on; so I forgive you. Go back and I will load your camels with corn and dates. If you disdain a generous offer, punishment shall find you in Persia.” Then the old sheick Mughira answered undismayed: “What thou sayest of our misery is true. So great was our poverty that we fed on worms, snakes, and scorpions. The hair of our camels and our goats we worked into a covering for our nakedness. Our faith consisted in perpetual war and robbery. We put even our daughters to death to escape supporting them. Then God took pity on our miserable state, and sent us through His holy prophet the book of the true faith. It commands us to make war against the heathen, to change our poverty and our misery for riches and power. Take then our religion which binds you to no other burdens than all the faithful bear. Or pay the tribute of the heathen. Will you do neither, arm yourselves to fight.”

Such was the people among whom Mohammed arose. The spirit which he wakened speaks in the words of the poetess Chansa, with which she sent her four sons to battle. “By God, the only one, ye are the sons of a man as ye are the sons of a woman. I have not deceived your father; I have not brought your uncle to shame, nor stained your race. Ye know what rich reward God has promised to Moslim for war against the unbelieving. Bethink you that the eternal dwelling is better than this place of sojourn.” All her four sons fell in battle. Chansa cried: “Praise be to the Lord who has made me a name through the martyr-death of my sons”. The words of this mother breathe the whole spirit which made Islam a conquering power.

Mohammed had died without leaving any indication as to whom he wished for his successor. His chief adherents, Abu Bekr, father of his wife Aischa, in whose residence he had died, his sons-in-law Ali and Omar, with their several parties, met together. Omar put aside his own claims, and had influence sufficient to procure the election of Abu Bekr, and to frustrate that of Ali. Severe as the struggle to obtain the chalifate was, at the moment it brought with it greater burden than dignity. Mohammed had spread his belief more by bribery, deceit, and violence than by conviction. Many provinces of Arabia after his death were shaking it off. Aischa's own words were, “when the apostle of God died, the Arabs were deserting him; the Jews and Christians raised their head; the hypocrites no longer concealed their hypocrisy, and the Moslim were like an abandoned flock on a cold winter night”. Abu Bekr's prudence and Omar's energy put an end to the rivalry of pretending prophets and Bedouin reluctance of taxation. In March, 633, revolt in Arabia was overthrown, and the first chalif could execute the injunction of Mohammed to spread Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula.

The choice of a chalif not in the family of Mohammed to carry on his newly made realm and religion with armed hand was of the utmost moment to both. In idea realm and religion were one and the same thing. And the choice indicated that force was the power which ruled both. Abu Bekr had not only been chosen by the influence of Omar, but during his short chalifate of two years had that most resolute of all Mohammed's companions behind him to support, inspire, and perhaps control him. When the companions met upon his death in 634 Omar's star was in the ascendant; and in the ten years of his chalifate he won in the opinion of his people the highest name which any Mohammedan ruler has attained. In truth, he made the empire. At the first choice of Abu Bekr for chalif it was but a horde of robbers in a province hitherto without name in history; when twelve years later Omar died by the hand of an assassin, it already rivalled the greatest empires of the world. To feel the profound contrast between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of Mohammed, we need but to consider the course of the first twelve years from the death of each founder. When the sword of Herod fell upon St. James, the son of thunder, the first of the apostles who was to seal his faith with his blood, and so fulfil his acceptance of his Lord's chalice, the kingdom of Christ had been preached among labours and trials innumerable. No one had yielded submission to it but in obedience to the inward dictate of conscience, and every one who so accepted it had suffered loss so far as this world is concerned. It was from imminent peril of death that when St. James, probably then the second in rank and influence of the apostolic band, was put to death, the first of all escaped from prison under angelic guard and went into another place to found the Roman Church. A martyrdom undergone by one apostle and a martyrdom postponed by another marked the setting up of St. Peter's pastoral staff in the capital of the Cæsars. The Christian people were everywhere then a poor, distressed, and praying people; hardly distinguished by the imperial Roman from the provincials of Judea, whom among all his subjects he most disliked. When Omar died, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria had fallen beneath his arms; the sepulchre of Christ was in his power; the patriarch of the holy city trembled lest the chalif of Mohammed should desecrate it to be a mosque by praying in it. Every Mohammedan convert received honour and wealth; everyone not converted to Mohammedanism risked honour and life, wife and child. The Christian martyr shed his blood on the scaffold; the Mohammedan martyr died in the heat of battle, and his companions received for the danger which they had risked and overcome the persons and goods of the conquered. Omar's empire stretched for thousands of miles over Africa and Asia; his authority was that of the prophet, who wielded civil power as an appendage of the spiritual, because, as he held, there could not be two swords in one sheath. The chief apostle exercised one of the greatest of his acts – that of choosing the capital of the Christian faith – when he was flying from a tyrant put in Jerusalem by the caprice of a Roman emperor. The arms were spiritual in one kingdom and material in the other; exercised with the long suffering of an apostle in one, with the unquestioned despotism in the other of a ruler who triumphed over souls by destroying bodies. The fundamental opposition which marks the two kingdoms is seen in strongest evidence during the first twelve years in each.

Hitherto, in human history, there is one man and one man only, who has matched himself with the Son of God: and not only matched himself, but declared that he was the superior; that the commission given to the Son of Mary was subordinate to the commission given to the Son of Abd Allah: that the prophet Jesus led up to the prophet Mohammed. It is certain that in the Mohammedan religion its prophet occupies the place which in the Christian religion is occupied by our Lord. But when this is said, it must be said with the understanding that “Mohammed's religion is a Judaism built stiffly on an abstract unity of God, stripped of its Messianic character, and of all the deeper spiritual elements which belong to that character”. When it is said that Mohammed has matched himself with Christ, it must be added that he has first stripped Christ of the divine Sonship, and placed Him simply as a prophet in a series of prophets, the last and greatest of whom is Mohammed himself. He has denied the Blessed Trinity: he has termed the honour paid by Christians to the Son, idolatry; he ranks Christians as idolaters for offering it, as being incompatible with the unity of God. He denies the Incarnation on the Arian ground, that it is impossible for the one only Nature to generate or be generated. He has denied the fall of man, equally as he denies his restoration. He denies the passion of Christ, for unfallen man needs no such sacrifice as that of the Son of God offered upon the Cross. In the system set up by him there is no sacrifice. In that point of singular meaning it stands alone among the religions of the earth. Accordingly there is no priesthood. Mohammed claimed to exercise the prophetical and in it the regal power; but not the sacerdotal. There is none such in his religion. Such as it is, on an infinitely lower level than the Christian, Mohammed is the centre of it. From the Jewish and the Christian religions he took prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, likewise the doctrines of primary import, the unity of the godhead, the resurrection of man in body as well as spirit, to a final and eternal judgment of reward or punishment. That which came from himself is purely bad; a corruption affecting all the relations between the sexes, and reducing all those who live in his religion to a far worse condition, as respects those relations, than experienced by those who lived in Greek, or Roman, or German heathenism, at their worst. As the personal life of Mohammed, from the time of his claim to be the prophet of a new religion, was in this respect infamous, so is his religion. All that the Christian faith and Church, by the sufferings of unnumbered martyrs, and the wisdom of great pastors, who are the honour of human nature, had done in 600 years for the restoration of marriage, the creation of woman's worth and dignity, the whole fabric of the Christian home, the whole offspring of Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Calvary, Mohammed, by word and example, strove to overthrow. He embodied in his religion the revenge of Asia and Africa upon Christian purity: and the hand which established a pure Arian doctrine, as to the Godhead, destroyed the Christian wife and child, husband and father, so far as its malignant influence extended. So it was at the beginning: so it has been through the 1260 years: so it is now.

The whole movement of Mohammed was to establish a counter kingdom to that of Christ, of which he who lived as a sensualist from fifty to sixty years of age is the standard. His chalifs were its continuators. And while his instrument was conquest, the bait which keeps each successive generation, and defies the approach of the Christian faith, is the indulgence of those sensual enjoyments which marked the life of the founder from the time of the Flight, which has equally marked the conduct of the ruler and the rich during all the twelve centuries. The Mohammedan peasant may have a virtuous home, for the harem is beyond his means: he may be sparing, sober, and honest: but where is the Mohammedan ruler or rich man whose inner life will bear inspection? As Roman law stopped before entering the slave apartment, Mohammedan law stops before entering the women's apartment: while the mark of the chalifs supreme dignity is to have no wife, but concubines, in the very words of St. John Damascene, a thousand if he please. Has any false religion ever shown such a mark of imposture? or is any opposition to the Son of God so deep as this, so universal in its effect upon the whole character?

About a hundred years after the time of Mohammed there lived at the court of the chalif of Damascus the man who ranks as the last great Father of the eastern Church: who, indeed, anticipated in some degree in that Church the position afterwards held by St. Thomas Aquinas, in the West. His father, Sergius, though a fervent Christian, held high office in the Syrian court. He purchased and set free captive Christians, and among them was a Thalian monk, named Cosmas, learned in theology and philosophy. Cosmas became teacher of his benefactor's son, John: and gave him such an education, that upon the death of his father the chalif made him one of the chiefs of his council, while Peter, bishop of Damascus, charged him to defend by writings the Christian truth against unbelievers.

He must have known well the religion of the chalif, in whose court he was a high officer. He thus speaks of Mohammed. “Down to the time of Heraclius the Saracens were avowed idolaters. Afterwards a false prophet arose among them, named Mamed. He lighted upon the Old and New Testament, and as the result of confabulations with a certain Arian monk constructed a heresy of his own. He gained by the appearance of piety influence with his people, and pretended that a Scripture was brought down to him from heaven. Having put together in his book certain most absurd statements, he delivered to them a worship.

“He says there is one God, the Creator of all things, who is neither begotten nor begetting. He says that Christ is the Word and Spirit of God, a creature and a servant: and that He was born without a father from Mary, the sister of Moses and Aaron. For, says he, the Word and Spirit of God entered Mary, and she bore Jesus a prophet and servant of God. The Jews wickedly wished to crucify Him: they seized and crucified His shadow. But Christ Himself, he says, was not crucified, nor did He die. For God took Him to Himself into Heaven, for He loved Him. And this, he says, that when Christ ascended into Heaven, God asked Him: ‘Jesus, didst Thou say, I am the Son of God, and God?’ And he says, Jesus answered, ‘Lord, pardon me. Thou knowest that I never said it, nor am too proud to be Thy servant. But men that were transgressors wrote it, that I said this word, and they lied against Me, and are in error’. And God answered and said to Him: ‘I know that Thou didst not say this word’. Now he said many other portentous and ridiculous things in this Scripture of his, which he pretends to have been sent down to him from God. Now when we allege, who is the witness that God gave him a Scripture? Which of the prophets foretold that such a prophet was to arise? Moses received the law from God in the sight of all the people, when he appeared on Mount Sinai, in cloud, and fire, and darkness, and storm. And all the prophets from Moses onwards foretold the coming of Christ, and that Christ is God, and that the Son of God would come in the flesh, and would be crucified, and die, and rise again, and that He is the Judge of the living and the dead. And when we ask, why did not your prophet come so, others bearing witness to him. Why did not God, as He gave the law to Moses in the sight of the people on the smoking mountain, give the Scripture which you speak of to him in your presence, that you also may be assured. They answer, God does what He will. We reply, that we know well. But we ask how the Scripture came down to your prophet. And they answer, the Scripture came down upon him when he was sleeping.

“Again we ask, how is it, when in this Scripture of yours he enjoined to do nothing, and to receive nothing without witnesses, that you did not ask him, first show by witnesses that you are a prophet, and have come forth from God, and what Scripture bears witness to you? They are mute through shame. Since you may not marry without witnesses, nor market, nor possess, nor take an ass or beast of burden without witness. Wives, indeed, you have, and possessions, and asses, and all the rest through witnesses. Faith alone and Scripture you have without a witness. He who gave you this has no security whatever. No witness preceding him is known: but he received it asleep. They call us associators, because we bring in an associate to God, when we say that Christ is the Son of God, and God. We reply, prophets and Scripture have handed this down to us. You, as you assert, acknowledge prophets. If we are wrong in saying that Christ is Son of God, it is they who have taught it and delivered it to us.”

The objection here made in general, that Mohammed had no witness to his mission, and none to the assertion that his Scripture came from God, has received no answer. Indeed, not only is there no witness that the Koran was given by God, or by the agency of the prophet Gabriel, but the condition in which it was left by Mohammed at his death supplies the strongest internal evidence that the Scripture was an imposture. This is the account given by the historian of the present day, who has used thirty years of his life to study, and compare Mohammedan writers on their prophet.

“The Koran is the Arabic name for the Mohammedan Bible, or collection of discourses held by Mohammed in the name of God, in his quality as inspired prophet, which, as he asserts, were partly communicated through the angel Gabriel, partly revealed to him immediately by God through dreams or visions. But the Koran is not, like the Bible, a book drawn up in chronological order, or according to the variety of its contents, but a mixing up of hymns, prayers, dogmas, sermons, casual writings, narratives, legends, laws, and orders of the day, with many repetitions and contradictions. This comes because Mohammed himself made no collection of the revelations given singly to him during a course of twenty-three years. It is probable that it was not even his wish that all of them should be kept, since a great number of them had only a transitory meaning. Likewise he had undertaken so many alterations in his doctrines and laws that he had reason to shrink from handing them all down to posterity. In fine he certainly wished to retain up to his death free room for modifications and additions which might be necessary. But after his death all fragments of the revelation were thrown together, even when they had been repealed by others, or were already issued in different form. All portions of the Koran, scattered in different hands, inscribed on parchment, palm-leaves, bones, stones, or other rough materials for writing, were collected – or even such as lived only in the remembrance of his companions and disciples – and were divided, mostly without regard to their contents, or the time at which they had been revealed, into greater or smaller chapters, Suras; and thus the actual Koran, with all its defects, was made. It is only by an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of Mohammed's life, and the language of the Koran, in some degree possible to restore the chronological order of its several parts. By the help of Mohammed's Arabian biographers, some of whom go back so far as the second century of the Mohammedan era, it is possible to determine the date of such sections as relate to historical events. Where this is not the case, the character and form of the revelation serve to direct. Mohammed in his first time appears more as a reformer, later as the founder of a new religion, at last as prince and legislator. In the first period he was carried away by inward enthusiasm: his language has a rhythmical movement, with true poetic colouring. In the second period a calmer consideration takes the place of excited fancy; he is more rhetorician than poet: his words spring rather from an understanding wide awake, not sparkling, as before, with warmth of heart. In the third period the language sinks to sober prose, not only in ordaining laws, issuing injunctions, or narrating campaigns, but when he paints, as before, God's Almightiness, the wonders of creation, the terrors of the last judgment, or the joys of paradise.

“The Koran was first collected by the chalif Aim Bekr. This collection is said to have been occasioned by the death of many acquainted with the Koran in the war against the rival prophet, Moseilama, and the fear that there would soon no longer be men who had learnt it by heart and understood it. A certain Zeid who had served the prophet as secretary was charged to collect the revelations, and when he had completed his work, he gave it over to the chalif, from whose hand after his death it passed into that of his successor, Omar. Omar left it to his daughter Hafsah, widow of Mohammed. Zeid's work aimed merely at providing a copy of all the scattered fragments. No thought seems as yet to have been taken to arrange them in order or to divide them into chapters. This collection had as yet no public authority, for other fragments were in circulation, which varied from it more or less, so that there were often disputations about the true reading of particular passages. To meet this state of things, so dangerous to the unity of the faith and the law, Chalif Osman caused a new edition of the Koran to be prepared. The collection made by Abu Bekr formed the basis of this. Osman sent copies of this edition to the chief cities of the subject provinces, and caused all versions varying from it to be destroyed. The division of the Koran into 114 chapters dates from Osman. In this, however, as above remarked, neither subject nor order of time was sufficiently considered. The sequence was generally determined by the size of the chapters, the larger being put at the head, and the smaller at the close. The Koran of Osman now stood for the ground text of the divine revelation. If later further copies led to variations of the text, they spring from the incompleteness of the Kufish writing, which continued in use for several hundred years. In this not only were the vowel marks wanting, but the diacritic points which served to distinguish from each other several similar letters.

“The Koran contains subjects of highly mixed character. It embraces not only the whole doctrine and legislation of Mohammed, but likewise a considerable portion of his life, of his mental and material struggles, as well as the history of prophets preceding him, and the legends concerning them.”

Thus in the year 632 a robber who was compelling the whole Arabian people to submit to his authority had somewhat suddenly died. His companions, robbers like himself, met together after his death. They proclaimed the dead chieftain “to be supreme teacher of religion, and, in that capacity, law-giver over the whole extent of the social, civil, and political domain”. They elected one of themselves to continue this authority by the name of chalif, or successor. In this act I note four things. The successor is not taken out of Mohammed's family, but by free choice of the faithful. Secondly, he is chosen as a spiritual head: but this headship carries in itself the whole temporal power. Thirdly, the place of Mohammed among his own faithful, corresponds to the place of Christ in his Church, if we bear in mind all the differences which distinguish the two communities. Fourthly, the chalif in the Mohammedan community corresponds to the Pope in the Christian. He is the successor of Mohammed, God's Apostle, as the Pope is the successor of St. Peter. The chalif is the bearer of Mohammedanism, as Mohammed's vicegerent: the Pope is the bearer of Christendom, as the vicegerent of Christ, and the spiritual Peter. As Christ and Mohammed answer to each other in religions radically antagonistic to each other, so Pope answers to chalif, with the same requisite differences.

It is to be noted that Christendom and Islam coincide as to the time of their rise. A Catholic Church there had been through all the six preceding centuries. But the allegiance of different bodies politic to one Christian faith and legislation was only beginning when Mohammed arose. The various kingdoms which the Teuton races were forming in all the countries of the West drew their common spiritual life from the Pope in Rome. The eastern emperor was becoming one of many sovereigns who acknowledged the authority of Peter. If Heraclius thought himself to wield the one sovereignty displayed by Justinian, he was undeceived before his death. If his grandson kidnapped a Pope out of his Lateran Church and Palace, and then martyred him as a traitor to his absolute power, the isles of the West were looking upon him at the same time as the bestower to them of the Christian faith, and of all the blessings which that faith brought with it to their civil life. St. Wilfrid spoke to the Northumbrian king concerning the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven. The king listened and obeyed. Thus the roots of Christendom were sprouting in France and Spain and Britain at the moment that Omar guided the suffrages of Mohammed's companions to choose the aged Abu Bekr for his successor. From that time these powers are formed over against each other in perpetual contrast and antagonism. The union of the two powers in Islam becomes the centre of a complete despotism. The distinction of the two powers in Christendom – which Pope Gelasius had marked with so much emphasis to the encroaching emperor Anastasius a hundred and forty years before – which St. Martin exercised at the cost of his life in the time of the third chalif – was the pledge and guarantee to Christendom of authority, supreme but temperate, of spiritual rule protecting civil liberty. A long succession of Popes – at the mercy of eastern despots as to civil matters – maintain their spiritual independence and their guidance of that new assemblage of nations in a common Christendom through the terrible seventh century. At the same moment Northern Africa, and Egypt, and Syria fall passively into the hands of the chalifate, and Byzantium loses the half of its power and trembles for its own existence.

How vast in its importance for future ages the establishment of the chalifate upon the death of Mohammed was, may be seen from the following considerations. It cannot be denied that the absolutely despotic form of government in lands under the sway of Mohammed has been created by the influence of the religion. It has indeed often been maintained that the genius of Asiatic peoples specially produces this form of rule. But states which are not Mohammedan rest on quite a different basis: and their rulers are or were subject to great and essential limitations. A Hindu king who reigned under the laws of Manu could not break through the immunities of the Brahmins, or the separation of the castes. An emperor of China, though he be called the son of heaven, and his throne be approached only with forms of the deepest submission, can name no officer except according to the list of candidates provided by the learned order. Not so the Princes of the Faithful. Two elements here concur to produce the most complete form of despotism: the mixing together or more properly unification of the spiritual and the temporal power; and the military power resting on conquest. According as the theocratic or the military principle prevailed, the sovereignty would take a distinct colouring: the despotism assume a milder or a sterner aspect. When, as in the case of the Arabian chalifs, and in a certain degree of the Turkish sultans since Selim, the religious character prevailed, and the political power, in accordance with the original spirit of Islam, appeared only as an issue and endowment of the spiritual, the unconditional submission would take more of a religious and conscientious devotedness. Then the dynasty, clothed in the divinity which hedges a king, could enjoy greater stability and security: the ruler himself, reminded ever of his consecrated character, of the duties and the higher responsibility which lay upon him, would make through regard for the prescriptions of religion a more moderate use of an authority in itself unlimited. Where, on the contrary, the spirit of an arbitrary military lordship prevailed, as in most of the kingdoms formed after the overthrow of the chalifate in Central Asia, the blind obedience of the subject would rather be the result of fear and custom. An attempt to overthrow the possessor of supreme power, with the self-same violence by means of which he had raised himself to it, would appear at once as allowable and attractive. Thence would follow more frequent change of dynasty, indifference to it on the part of the population, continual suspicion, and tyrannical exercise of even the bloodiest means to put down every opposing force.

Thus the government of the Ottoman kingdom did not take that character of brutal tyranny which marks the history of Persia. The Persian king is so absolutely lord of the life and property of his subjects, that a sentence even issued in a drunken revel without the least formality receives immediate execution. A Persian proverb truly says: To be near the shah is to be near a burning fire. The general view that a king is naturally tyrannical and unjust has passed into the very language, so that a complainant for the strongest expression of the wrong which he has suffered says: He played the king over me. Thus the learned in the law maintain that the king's commands are superior to the right of nature, they only yield to a positive divine command. The lordship of the Ottoman sultans, though resting on the same principle of unlimited power, appears on the whole milder and more moderate. Here too, as the founder of the line declared, all property belongs to the sultan; here also “the slave's neck is thinner than a hair,” and all subjects rank as the sultan's slaves, and even call themselves so: here too the sultan's mother calls her son “my lion” or “my tiger,” and Moslim name the sultan not only “the Shadow of God,” or “the Refuge of the World,” but also “the Executioner, the Slayer,” since he alone possesses the absolute right over the life of all. Turkish doctors ascribe to him also a holy character not to be effaced by any immorality. If his actions shew a scorn of all admitted conceptions of justice or prudence, yet in force of a Mohammedan fiction it is assumed that he does much or most of this in consequence of a divine suggestion, and therefore that his motives can neither be discerned nor judged by men. In the same spirit the learned in the law maintain that the sultan can put to death every day fourteen persons, without giving reason, or lying under imputation of tyranny. Whoever receives death without resistance from his hand or by his order becomes thereby a martyr, and many of his servants are said to have striven after the honour of such a death as a secure pledge of eternal happiness. A tyrannical power such as this as a rule naturally strikes those only who stand near the throne. The members of his own family, the higher officers of state, fall victims to it. The mass of the people seldom feels such direct effects of their despot. Here the principle holds, the higher the dignity, the more perfect the confidence, the greater the danger. The grand visiers, the other selves of the sultans in temporal matters have experienced this. A hundred and eighty statesmen have held this highest office of the kingdom from 1370 to 1789: most of them therefore scarcely more than two years. Many have been executed after a short time. One of the most esteemed Mohammedan princes, Soliman the Magnificent, executed during his government, one after the other, most of the men on whose shoulders he had laid the most important works and the highest offices of his kingdom. An instinct of obedience, an inclination to unconditional absolute subjection under absolute authority prevails among Mohammedans, to which the utmost cruelty appears endurable, the utmost perversity natural.

It must be added that the Sultan of Morocco unites the spiritual, and the temporal power, as sheriff, that is descendant of the prophet through Hosein and Ali. He is a despot as absolute as the king of Persia. All depends upon his will. He makes, alters, suppresses, and restores laws. He changes them according to his humour, convenience, or interests. Here there is no body of Ulema, no Mufti clothed with an authority independent of the sovereign, no divan, colleges, or ministerial departments. All follows the single command of the ruler.

The nature of the supreme authority in these three Moslem empires speaks at the present day of its origin in the person of Mohammed.

What we see is this. The misuse of Cæsarean power in applying to the Church of God, which from the beginning by divine order was independent, a supremacy in spiritual things not belonging to the civil ruler, is allowed by Divine Providence to call forth a far more terrible despotism, in the guise of a false prophet who invents a religion of which he is to be the apostle, and then claims all power, spiritual and temporal, as belonging to him in the character of apostle, and the use of force as the means of propagation. That despotism is allowed to seize for permanent occupation the richest provinces of the eastern empire, and to make its capital in fear of perpetual subjection. But it is also used to check the imperial usurpation over the Church, and to begin an era, now lasting for twelve centuries and a half, in which two religions, and two forms of government springing from these religions, stand over against each other in perpetual and irreconcilable opposition.

The structure of the Church was vehemently shaken by the earthquake which attended the pouring out of Islam upon the south-eastern and southern countries of the former Roman empire. It had to be seen whether the whole fabric would maintain itself upon its foundation of rock when such mighty portions of its structure were torn by main force away. Moslem writers say, when the locust swarm darkened vast countries, they bore on their wings these Arabic words: – “We are God's host, each of us has nine and ninety eggs; and if we had a hundred we should lay waste the world with all that is in it”.

The hundredth egg has never been granted, but if the assassin's stroke had not carried off Chalif Omar in 644, and again Chalif Osman in the year 656, and again Chalif Ali in the year 661, perhaps the desolation might have been fully accomplished; as also if the chalifate, created by election in 632, had not become within thirty years a mere hereditary kingdom, in which rival pretenders and rival families exhausted the strength of Islam by perpetual conflicts. The empire of the sword has also illustrated the divine decree: “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword”.

Chapter V. Old Rome And New Rome

The seizure of Pope St. Martin in his Lateran Church by the exarch of Ravenna, Kalliopas, under order from the Emperor Constans II., his secret deportation to Constantinople, his trial before the Senate as guilty of high treason, his condemnation to death, and subsequent death in the Crimea from hardship or starvation, with the election of Pope Eugenius during his lifetime by the Roman clergy through dread of a Monothelite being forced upon them by the Byzantine; all this marks probably the lowest point of civil depression and helplessness to which the Papacy was ever reduced in those momentous three centuries which run from Genseric to Aistulf, from 455 to 755. The emperor who committed acts so mean, perfidious, and cruel was reigning over an empire already cut in two by the sword of Mohammed's chalif. How little he had heeded the chastisement we learn from an incident in the trial of the great eastern confessor, St. Maximus, which I have already recorded, but to which I recur that I may exhibit the full insolence of the eastern despot, as well as his blindness. Theodosius, the consul, coming straight out from the emperor's cabinet, with the condemnation of Maximus in his hand, addressed him in these words: “Learn, Sir Abbot, that when we get a little relief from this rout of heathens (that is, of the Saracens who had stripped Constans of Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North Africa as far as Kairowan), by the Holy Trinity we will bring you to terms, and your Pope, who is now lifted up, and all the talkers there, and the rest of your disciples; and we will cook you all, each in his own place, as Martin has been cooked”.

These words were spoken on the 14th December, 656. The Pope Eugenius was the Pope alluded to in them, and it is inferred from them that he rejected those terms of union which the emperor was seeking to impose and which the nuntios were willing to accept. The martyrdom of St. Martin had taken place on the 16th September of the preceding year, 655.

It was the providence of God that the chalif himself never allowed the sworn protector of the Church who sat on the eastern throne to execute this threat. Rather he was all through this century in dread lest the Mohammedan, having fixed his throne at Damascus, should advance it to Constantinople. It was again the providence of God that Constantinople itself should not fall during this time of its utmost weakness, and so open the whole of northern Europe to Mohammedan domination. The city of Constantine was then the material rampart which stopped the impetuous current of Saracen invasion to the north. The chalif Muawiah, who reigned over the immense Saracen empire from 661 to 680, was strong enough continually to beat the Emperor, to ravage his Asiatic territory, to advance towards his capital, but he was never able to take it. The advance of the seat of the Saracenic empire from the remote Medina to the near and beautiful Damascus, the paradise of eastern cities, dwelling in its perpetual garden among ever-flowing waters of Abana and Pharpar, was itself a sign how the empire had fallen. A religion founded on the denial of the Christian faith, of which it was, moreover, the special rival, had full possession of the once Roman and Christian East. Muawiah became chalif on the death of Ali in 661. He had conducted the civil war against Ali, which distracted for five years the Saracen power, with the forces of Syria, as its governor; and when he became supreme made it the capital of his empire.

Constans II., having crowned with martyrdom the greatest confessor of the West, Pope Martin, and the greatest confessor of the East, St. Maximus, resolved in the year 662, to visit the West. The tyranny of Constans in regard to the Pope was not completed even by his treatment of St Martin. When he had condemned this Pope, but before he had caused his death he is supposed to have compelled the Roman clergy to elect another Pope. This was Eugenius, who was recognised in the year 654 for Pope, while St. Martin was yet alive. Whether the urgency and threats of the imperial ministers overcame at length the constancy of the clergy, or whether, as is more probable, they feared to see some heretic sent by the emperor to occupy the throne of St. Peter, they elected Eugenius, by birth a Roman, a person of great goodness and holy life, who held the See two years and eight months. The synodical letter of Peter, the fourth Monothelite patriarch of Constantinople in succession was sent to him, but being obscure in its expressions about our Lord, was sent back with indignity. It would seem that the exceeding danger of the time caused the election and consecration of Pope Eugenius in the lifetime of St. Martin, to pass for legitimate. Eugenius died in 657, and was succeeded by Pope Vitalian, after a vacancy of a month and 29 days.

Pope Eugenius had not acknowledged either of the patriarchs Paulus or Peter by writing to them, but Vitalian sent his nuntios to Constans to announce his accession to the papacy by his synodical letter. Constans received them graciously, acknowledged the privileges of the Roman Church, and sent by them to St. Peter at Rome a copy of the gospels bound in golden covers and studded with diamonds. Vitalian, says Anastasius, preserved in all respects the ecclesiastical rule and vigour.

Constans had a brother named Theodosius, whom he forced to become a deacon, and he had repeatedly received from his hands the chalice of the Lord's Blood. Afterwards he caused him to be murdered. He was said to have often dreamt of his victim, offering him a chalice full of blood, with the words: “Brother, drink”. The stings of conscience and the hatred of the people for his cruelty and his protection of heresy, were supposed to drive him from his capital.