were the temptations of riches, luxury, and power, presented by
the episcopates, that the election of a bishop was often
disgraced by frightful murders. In the East, in consequence of
the policy of the court of Constantinople, the Church had been
torn in pieces by contentions and schisms. Among a countless host
of disputants may be mentioned Arians, Basilidians,
Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Gnostics, Jacobites,
Marcionites, Marionites, Nestorians, Sabellians, Valentinians. Of
these, the Marionites regarded the Trinity as consisting of God
the Father, God the Son, and God the Virgin Mary; the
Collyridians worshiped the Virgin as a divinity, offering her
sacrifices of cakes; the Nestorians, as we have seen, denied that
God had "a mother." They prided themselves on being the
inheritors, the possessors of the science of old Greece.

But, though they were irreconcilable in matters of faith, there
was one point in which all these sects agreed --ferocious hatred
and persecution of each other. Arabia, an unconquered land of
liberty, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Desert of Syria,
gave them all, as the tide of fortune successively turned, a
refuge. It had been so from the old times. Thither, after the
Roman conquest of Palestine, vast numbers of Jews escaped;
thither, immediately after his conversion, St. Paul tells the
Galatians that he retired. The deserts were now filled with
Christian anchorites, and among the chief tribes of the Arabs
many proselytes had been made. Here and there churches had been
built. The Christian princes of Abyssinia, who were Nestorians,
held the southern province of Arabia--Yemen--in possession.

By the monk Bahira, in the convent at Bozrah, Mohammed was taught