when Islam was already storming at the frontiers, a final attempt was being made to transcend the controversy and find the unity of Christ in the Will (the Monothelite position). But in general it may be said that concessions came too late when events had already embittered parties, and the methods used to introduce them embittered feelings still more and made confusion worse confounded.

Into the formation of these separate Monophysite Churches there entered more than merely intellectual disputes and doctrinal differences. Personal sympathies and indignation at the treatment meted out to favourite bishops played their part. Probably, too, behind all was a dim feeling of nationality. The feeling of independence and the character of the population was expressing itself in religion, and being repressed became only the more obstinate in opposition.

However that may be, the result was that when Islam arrived it found both in Syria and in Egypt a divided Church, embittered feelings which made Christians more eager to triumph over fellow-Christians whom they regarded as heretics, than to combine against a common foe, and a lukewarmness on the part of the native population towards a government which had for long tried alternately to cajole and to force them into acceptance of a hated doctrine.

The sophisticated Christianity of Greek speculation and dogmatism had not only failed to capture Arabia, but had undermined the power of resistance of both Church and Empire, when a new religion sprang from the soil of Arabia

itself and rose in its youthful strength to challenge both. Nor must the blame for this result be laid entirely upon the Churches of the East which we are accustomed to regard as heretical. The great Church of the Empire must bear its share, and perhaps the major share, of the guilt.

But if Islam may thus be regarded as a hostile force, whose irruption into the cultured lands of the East was made easy by the pride and unloveliness of a debased Christianity, from another point of view it may be regarded as in part at least the fruit of Christianity itself. Its appearance is evidence of the germinal force of certain great religious ideas, most of which are common to Judaism and to Christianity. It is a remarkable fact that the three great Monotheistic religions of the world are of Semitic origin and took their rise on the confines of the Arabian Peninsula. Some have suggested that the monotony of the desert is conducive to the idea that man and the world are subject to a single divine power. But the desert does not naturally produce Monotheism any more than does the sea, or the steppe, the mountain, or the plain. The real source of the world's great religions is in history, in the reaction of men's spirits to the course of events, or, in other words, to the divine education of the race. These three great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Muhammadanism, are historically connected, and the root from which they all sprang is to be found in the prophetic impulse which the course of history called forth amongst the people of Israel.

That both Judaism and Christianity played a