Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which insisted that all other Gods were impostors.
Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.
Mahomet died in 632.
Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.
Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.
Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife and highway robbery.
But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more intelligent among the laity and the clergy.
We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a building which stands empty six days out of every seven and a place where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.
We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.
The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or, if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.