e. I the Lord will cast terror into the hearts of the
infidels. Strike off their heads and their fingers' ends. Beware lest ye
turn your back in battle. Verily, he that turneth his back shall draw
down upon himself the wrath of God. His abode shall be hell fire; an
evil journey thither._

And we are told that on the recital of these verses "the heart of the
people was refreshed and their eyes lightened, and they felt the
tranquillity that ensueth thereupon." Three days they fought, and on the
morning of the fourth, returning with unabated vigor to the charge, they
scattered to the winds the vast host of Persia.[47]

[Sidenote: Defeat of Byzantine army on the Yermuk, A.D. 634.]
Nor was it otherwise in the great battle of the Yermuk, which laid Syria
at the feet of the Arabs. The virgin vigor of the Saracens was fired by
a wild fanatical zeal "to fight in the ways of the Lord," obtaining thus
heavenly merit and a worldly prize--the spoil of Syria and its fair
maidens ravished from their homes; or should they fall by the sword, the
black-eyed houries waiting for them on the field of battle. "Of warriors
nerved by this strange combination of earth and heaven, of the flesh and
of the spirit, of the incentives at once of faith and rapine, of
fanatical devotion to the prophet and deathless passion for the sex, ten
might chase a hundred half-hearted Romans. The forty thousand Moslems
were stronger far than the two hundred and forty thousand of the enemy."
The combat lasted for weeks; but at the last the Byzantine force was
utterly routed, and thousands hurled in wild confusion over the beetling
cliffs of the Yermuk into the yawning chasm of Wacusa.[48]

[Sidenote: Islam planted by aid of material force.]
Such, then, was the nature of the Moslem propaganda, such the agency by
which the faith was spread, and such the motives at once material and
spiritual by which its martial missionaries were inspired. No wonder
that the effete empires of Rome and Persia recoiled and quivered at the
shock, and that province after province quickly fell under the sway of
Islam. It is far from my intention to imply that the truths set forth by
the new faith had nothing to do with its success. On the contrary, it
may well be admitted that but for those truths success might have been
impossible. The grand enunciation of the Divine Unity, and the duty of
an absolute submission to the same; the recognition of a special
providence reaching to the minu