Chapter VIII: The Inroads of Mahometanism

A.D. 609-A.D. 732

[Sidenote: Arianism prepares the way for Mahometanism.]

The various heresies, and especially the heresy of Arius, which had so widely troubled the peace of the Eastern Church, though they were not suffered by God's Mercy to cause a lasting schism, yet left behind them a certain weakness resulting in the decay of many of the Churches of the East, and finally in their overthrow by the false faith of the impostor Mahomet. The present state of the Churches of Ephesus, Sardis, and Laodicea, if viewed in the light shed upon it by the prophetic Epistles of St. John the Divine, may serve to show us how God withdraws His Blessing from a Church no less surely than from an individual Christian, when His Grace is obstinately rejected and despised.