y, it was short.
Christians as teachers, physicians, philosophers, were famous in the
foundation of the learning of the palmy days of the khalifs. But the
whole {100} structure fell before the invasions, in later days, of the
Mongols and the Turks.

[Sidenote: The Church in Palestine.]

From the more distant parts of the Persian Empire we may pass to the
land where the Church had its birth. During the period of revived
power in the Empire, Palestine was at peace under Justinian's rule.

In Jerusalem itself[13] it is chiefly to be said that the emperor
engaged in large restorations and some original church building after
the style of his better known work. He had a severe struggle with the
Samaritans, but it led to many conversions.[14]

[Sidenote: Conquest by the Persians.]

But here, as elsewhere, as time went on the encroachments of the
Persians were a perpetual danger to the Christianity of the East. In
615 Jerusalem fell into their hands. The Jews, whom earlier emperors
had, like Justinian, kept in subjection, had grown in the days of
Heraclius to be much more powerful in Syria than the Christians, and it
was they who secured Jerusalem and gave it into the hands of the
Persians; and again, after the Christians had overpowered the garrison,
the city was given back to them and to scenes of pillage and outrage;
the churches, so splendid as early as the fourth century, and described
in glowing language by Procopius in the sixth, were sacked and defiled;
the clergy and the patriarch were made captive; the Holy Cross,
discovered by the Empress Helena, was sent away into Persia; and "all
these things," says the chronicler, "happened not in a year or a month,
but within a few days." The ruined churches were, however, restored
{101} before long by the alms of the faithful, and it was not long
before the Christians themselves were favoured by the Persian king, and
Chosroes, in consequence of a council at Jerusalem in 628, legalised,
it would seem, the Monophysite heresy as the representative of
Christianity. [Sidenote: Reconquest by Heraclius, 622.] The conquest
of Egypt followed on that of Syria; and the union of the Coptic Church
with that of the Syrian Monophysites was a result, natural and almost
inevitable, of the community of suffering between them. Within a few
years--his campaign began in 622--the heroic emperor Heraclius won back
all that had been lost, utterly defeated the Persians, won back the
Holy R