70 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



no advance of the Church from her central position, 

 it witnessed changes in her fortune through the 

 intrusion of a strange people into her territory and 

 sanctuaries. 



Perhaps there are few events in history more 

 impressive than the conversion of the wild and 

 ignorant Arab tribes of the seventh century from 

 stone-worship to monotheism. The series of con- 

 quests which followed had also, as an indirect and 

 unforeseen result, effects of vast importance in the 

 revival and spread of Greek culture from the Tigris 

 to the Guadalquivir. It is not easy, neither does 

 the enquiry fall within our present purpose, to dis- 

 cover the special impulses which led Mohammed, 

 the leader of the movement, to preach a new faith 

 whose one creed, stripped of all subtleties, was the 

 unity of God. Large numbers of Jews and Christians 

 had settled in Arabia long before his time, and he 

 had become acquainted with the narrowness of the 

 one, and with the causes of the wranglings of the 

 other, riven, as these last-named were, into sects 

 quarrelling over the nature of the Person of Christ. 

 These, and the fetichism of his fellow-countrymen, 

 may, perhaps, have impelled him to start a crusade 

 the mandate for which, in fanatic impulse, he believed 

 came from heaven. The result is well known. The 

 hitherto untamed nomads became the eager instru- 

 ments of the prophet. Under his leadership, and 

 that of the able Khalifs who succeeded him, the flag 

 of Islam was carried from East to West, till within 

 one hundred years of the flight of Mohammed from 

 Mecca (622 A.D.) it waved from the Indian Ocean 



