origin and of but little consideration in the beginning, and this person pretended that he was sent by God as the last and the greatest of His prophets, and that his mission was to overthrow the Christian religion, to found another religion on its ruins, and also to found a universal empire, to which he was to subdue the whole human race, forcing them, under pain of temporal death and everlasting condemnation, to embrace his new religion and submit to his dominion. Within an astonishingly short period after the first promulgation of this new religion and the foundation of the temporal sovereignty connected with it, we find that either Mahomet or his immediate successors had subdued the greater part of the East and of Africa, had established his infamous apostacy in the fairest dioceses of the Eastern and African Churches, and had filled all Christendom with terror. St. Jerome had written the different passages we have cited between the years 331 and 422 of the Christian era; in 476 the Roman empire was extinguished by the deposition of its last Western emperor, who bore the ominous name of Romulus Angustulus; out of the political chaos there had arisen a number of new states, amongst which the emperor of Constantinople for a long while held a sort of primatial dignity; and in 612
