The Monophysite controversy led to the founding of the Jacobite sect. Secret consecrations at Constantinople by bishops in prison during Justinian's severe rule sent a bishop to Hira for the Arabian Christians in Persia, and another to the borders of Edessa, who founded the Jacobites and with the assistance of Egyptian Monophysite bishops continued the episcopal succession. In Egypt there arose the division between the Melkites, who followed the imperial orders and accepted the decisions of the Councils, and the Copts, who dissented. The Monophysites of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, with temporary and superficial differences, remained practically at one. National differences confirmed their divergence from the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Thus while in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere the Church was still powerfully represented, though side by side with strong sectarian organisations, there were, when the followers of Muhammad came to add to the confusion, three nationalistic and heretical bodies, separate from the Church—those of Persia and Armenia and Ethiopia. Of the last something must now be said.
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[Sidenote: The Abyssinian Church.]
South of Egyptian territory, properly so called, lay the Ethiopians, vassals of Egypt, tracing in a dim fashion their Christianity back to one of those queens who bore the title of Candace. These wild and warring tribes kept up continual conflict, and among the Blemmyes men still worshipped Isis in the temple of Philae. In 548 began the conversion of the Nobadae of the Soudan, of whose reception into the Christian fold the great Monophysite missionary, John of Ephesus, gives an account. Churches were built, and one inscription at least survives with the name of a Christian king. Beyond them the Alodaei learnt the faith from the same preacher, Longinus. Nubia, or Mugurrah, was also visited by Christian missionaries at the same time. Under Justinian, the temple of Philae was turned into a church, and the Blemmyes became Christian. Christian remains long existed, even down to the neighbourhood of Khartoum; and it was long before the Muhammadan conquerors swept all the worship of Christ away. Further south Christianity spread on both sides of the Red Sea. In Arabia Felix was the kingdom of the Homerites or Himyarites, whose chief city was Safar, and at different times they were ruled by the same king as the land of Axum, "the farthest Ind" of the Greek chronicler Theophanes. After the dispersion, Jewish colonies settled in Arabia, and in the fourth century Christianity followed. At the end of the fifth century a bishop is found among the Homerites, and a Trinitarian inscription is dated 542-3. About the same time the Church in Abyssinia, founded in the time of S. Athanasius, received the national religion of the country through the conversion of the Negus at the end {112} of the fifth century. While the land of Safar at times relapsed into heathenism and massacred Christians, the Abyssinians remained firm in the faith. Procopius tells that Ellesthaeos, an Ethiopian king, during the reign of Justin I., invaded the land of the Homerites to avenge their persecutions and to suppress the Jewish predominance and set up a Christian king. With him and his successors Justinian entered into treaties, as also with the kings of Axum or Abyssinia. While the Muhammadan conquest swept away the Christianity of the Arabians and drove those who clung to it northward to the banks of the Euphrates, the Church in Abyssinia, which had accepted Monophysitism, remained independent, just as its mother church of Egypt obtained toleration. It still continues separate, Monophysite, and in communion with the Coptic Church of Egypt.
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CHAPTER X
THE CHURCH IN THE WESTERN ISLES
[Sidenote: Christianity in Britain.]
When Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his brother monks to preach to the Teutonic tribes which had made Britain their home, there were already two Churches in the island. There was the Church of the Brythons, gradually separated by the advance of the Saxons into the Churches of Cumbria or Strathclyde, Wales, and West Wales or Cornwall. These stood apart from the English for a long time, were late in accepting the Catholic customs of the West, and had no influence on the progress of English Christianity. And there was the Church founded in North Britain by Celtic missionaries from Ireland. In Ireland there seems little doubt that Christianity was known by the end of the fourth century. In the fifth century the progress was extraordinarily rapid. S. Patrick "organised the Christianity which already existed; he converted kingdoms which were still pagan, especially in the west; and he brought Ireland into connection with the Church of the Empire, and made it formally part of Universal Christendom." [1]
The subsequent history of the Church in Ireland forms a fit introduction to that of the Church in {114} England, in spite of the separation between them. Irish Christianity did not long preserve its close union with Western Europe. The popes, as well as the emperors, were too weak to interfere in the distant islands. The Irish relapsed into the use of what is called the Celtic Easter, and to other practices which were usual before Patrick's day and which served to cut them off from the newly-converted Teutons, as well as from the Latin world in general. [Sidenote: Death of S. Patrick, 461.] Patrick died in 461. In 563 Columba, trained in the great schools which had sprung up in the Irish monasteries, crossed to what is now called Scotland to confirm the faith of the Irish settlers and to convert the heathen Picts. The organisation of the Church to which he belonged was essentially tribal and monastic. [Sidenote: The Celtic Church.] Though S. Patrick had probably consecrated diocesan bishops in large numbers, the Church soon became "predominantly monastic." Tribal feeling was so strong that the Church, too, assimilated itself to the tribal idea, and the Church's monasteries were her tribes. In a land where there were no cities monasteries took their place, and the bishops naturally came to dwell in them, and so to seem less prominent in their episcopal than in their monastic aspect. The monks became the chief power in Christian Ireland; and in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries there were many bishops without dioceses, and it seems probable that their rank, though not their function, was less important than that of the abbats, the heads of the tribal monasticism.