Therefore, though the Mohammedan State did not directly interfere with the private profession and exercise of Christianity, but rather tolerated, and in a manner protected, it, yet it most effectually deprived its Christian subjects of all political and military power, and reduced them to a state of civil inferiority and helpless dependence on the armed and ruling class. Thus it could not fail to damage the Christian cause itself, though indirectly and covertly.

But the anti-Christian character of Islamism lies especially patent in its exterior policy, which it stamped upon the pages of history by its most pertinacious and stupendous efforts to bring the entire Christian world under its crushing rule. The Arab Mussulmans first pressed northward, wresting Palestine, the cradle of the Christian Faith, all Syria and Armenia, from the hands of the Christians. They indeed also subjugated fire-worshipping Persia, and pushed their conquests towards India, as also, by way of Khorassan, Bokhara, and Samarkand, deep into Central Asia, where Christianity disappeared from the Tartar tribes to which it had already found its way; but the chief object of their warlike ambition remained Western Christendom and its powerful capital on the Bosporus.

This was so clearly marked a plan of the Mussulmans, that scarcely had they established their power in Northern Syria, when they began to overrun Asia Minor, and, in less than thirty years from the death of Mohammed, besieged Constantinople by land and by water for six successive years. Fortunately they could not prevail against the valour and art — especially the so-called 'Greek fire' — by which the city was defended.

Being baffled again and again in their direct attempts to dethrone Christianity in its political capital, they started on a long detour in order, if possible, to reach their goal from the west, instead of from the east. Agricultural Egypt had fallen an easy prey into the hands of the hardy Arab warriors; and the Coptic Patriarch had obtained for it comparatively easy terms from the conquerors. This rich land, so conveniently near to the Arab home of Islam, was made the starting-point for extending the Mohammedan conquests westward over the whole of North Africa. Here the fanatical

Arabs pursued their anti-Christian policy with such deadly effect that soon the remnant of the once flourishing Church of which a Tertullian, a Cyprian, and an Augustine, had been ornaments became entirely effaced, and the sound of church-bells was silenced for ages by the call of the Moezzin.

Mohammedanised Africa became the stepping-stone for invading Christian Europe from the west. Before Islam had completed the first century of its existence, it sent its dauntless propagators, in the form of numerous troops of armed horsemen, across the straits into Spain; and in the short space of two years the rule of the Peninsula had passed from Christian into Mussulman hands. But Spain was only the first stage of the intended march of conquest through the heart of Europe to the crowning goal of Constantinople, the then capital of Christendom.

Not many years were allowed to pass before an army of hundreds of thousands of horsemen sallied forth from Spain, to make France the second stage on the expedition for the conquest of Christian Europe. The whole south of France was fearfully devastated, houses ruined, churches burnt, women ravished, children enslaved, till in the neighbourhood of Poitiers and Tours the barbarous Mussulman hosts encountered Charles Martel at the head of a powerful Franco-Germanic army, and fought with such desperate obstinacy that most of them fell under the crushing blows of these hammering arms, before the small remnant confessed themselves vanquished by seeking safety in a precipitate flight. Reinforced by fresh Arab hordes, they renewed their sanguinary onslaughts for several years, but with no better result, so that they had to retire for ever behind the Pyrenees, and to give up their attempted march, through Central Europe to the Bosporus, as impracticable.

The national independence of Christendom survived these desperate attacks, and the religion of Christ had time to confer its blessings, in a fuller measure and to a wider extent, upon the nations of Europe. Islamism, as represented by the Arabs, had clearly manifested alike its determined resolve and its utter inability, to overthrow and replace Christianity as a political force and a national power in the world.