The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicæa, had organized itself with an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesiphon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus broken. From that point on, Mazdaists, Manichæans, and Nestorians have a common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its old battle-cry of εἷς θεός had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the starting-point of Islam (“Allah il Allah”). The Western Church continued to be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire--that is, the cult-Church became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself--for Islam almost annihilated it--but in the accident that it was _from it_ that the young peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a new creation,[457] receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West--which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a Greek city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and Gaul.

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World’s Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example. Of these mighty facts Western theologians and historians give an entirely false picture. All that their gaze, riveted upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is the Western direction that fits in with their “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” schema, and even within these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Christianity, they regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.

But even before Christianity--and this is a fact of which the immense significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly interpreted as _mission_ effort--the Pagan Church had won for the Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the Druidism that Cæsar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult-Church (and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later emperor-worship.[458] The missionary efforts of Christianity here would have been less successful than they were if the other cult-Church--its near relative--had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from Christianity to Paganism.

The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm of the Khazars[459] and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in A.D. 1000) for safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel.

From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichæans penetrated the empires on either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian, as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichæism had by 400 become a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichæan sects in southern France as late as the Crusades[460]; but the two religions drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of the Manichæan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.

The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails. When the Western Church converted the Frankish King Chlodwig in 496, the missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and the westernmost Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of the Southern were in the Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after Boniface (718), Germany became converted, the Nestorian missionaries were within an ace of winning China itself. They had entered Shantung in 638. The Emperor Gao-dsung (651-84) permitted churches to be built in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity was preached in the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic and Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been preserved, “all China was covered with the palaces of Concord.” But it is in the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot be called inexpert in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians, Mazdaists, and Manichæans as adherents of a single “Persian” religion,[461] just as the population of the Western Roman provinces were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.

Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper significance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key to its fabulous successes. Although on political grounds it practised an astounding toleration--John Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek Church, was, under the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph--Judaism, Mazdaism, and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabh III, complains that tens of thousands of Christians went over to it as soon as it came on the scene, and in North Africa--the home of Augustine--the entire population fell away to Islam at once. Mohammed died in 632. In 641 the whole domain of the Monophysites and the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the Talmud and the Avesta) were in the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before Constantinople, and the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in 628 a relative of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-dsung and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques in Shantung, and in 720 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long established in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two centuries later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out of the remains of the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in Java.

For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of _outward_ religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian’s time, as truly as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent. Any book on religious history shows “_the_” Christian religion as having had _two ages of grand thought-movements_--0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West.[462] _But these are two springtimes of two Cultures_, and in them are comprised also the non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing of the University of Athens by Justinian in 529 was not, as is always stated, the end of Classical philosophy--there had been no Classical philosophy for centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and--as the historians forget to add--_to end the Christian theology also_ by closing those of Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished--just as it was in the West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540), for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end. So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when Chosroës Nushirvan in 529 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak--which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of marriage and worldly property, and had been supported by King Kobad I as counteracting the power of Church and nobility--Avestan dogma similarly passed into fixity.