78 



PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain 

 whence welled the controversies whose logomachies 

 were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and 

 the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years' 

 pause, the Saracens (Ar., sharkiin, orientals) resumed 

 their conquering march. They captured and burnt 

 Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and 

 then crossed over to Spain. In " the fair and fertile 

 isle of Andalusia " the Gothic king Roderick was 

 aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his 

 army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the in- 

 fidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in 

 six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the 

 north and northwestern portions excepted, for the 

 hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their inde- 

 pendence against the Arabs, as they had maintained 

 it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the 

 walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff 

 from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested 

 their advance in Western Europe; as, in a more mo- 

 mentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. 

 in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Moham- 

 medan conquest was first checked. 



Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their 

 destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, in- 

 cluded the burning of the remnants of the vast 

 Alexandrian library. " A revealed dogma is always 

 opposed to the free research that may contradict it," 

 and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than 

 Christianity, Its association, as a religion, with the 



