only to restore his affairs but to retaliate on the Persian
Empire. The operations by which he achieved this result were
worthy of the most brilliant days of Rome.

INVASION OF CHOSROES Though her military renown was thus
recovered, though her territory was regained, there was something
that the Roman Empire had irrecoverably lost. Religious faith
could never be restored. In face of the world Magianism had
insulted Christianity, by profaning her most sacred
places--Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary--by burning the sepulchre
of Christ, by rifling and destroying the churches, by scattering
to the winds priceless relics, by carrying off, with shouts of
laughter, the cross.

Miracles had once abounded in Syria, in Egypt, in Asia Minor;
there was not a church which had not its long catalogue of them.
Very often they were displayed on unimportant occasions and in
insignificant cases. In this supreme moment, when such aid was
most urgently demanded, not a miracle was worked.

Amazement filled the Christian populations of the East when they
witnessed these Persian sacrileges perpetrated with impunity. The
heavens should have rolled asunder, the earth should have opened
her abysses, the sword of the Almighty should have flashed in the
sky, the fate of Sennacherib should have been repeated. But it
was not so. In the land of miracles, amazement was followed by
consternation--consternation died out in disbelief.

2. But, dreadful as it was, the Persian conquest was but a
prelude to the great event, the story of which we have now to