10 THE ORIGIN OF ISLAM LECT

Cyrill made concessions or offered explanations of his doctrine which the Syrians accepted. But they had to consent to see Nestorius driven into banishment. Dragged and driven from place to place, the rest of the deposed patriarch's life was miserable. He never ceased to protest that he did not hold the doctrines attributed to him. But he had given his name to a schism. His irreconcilable supporters, driven from Syria, found a refuge and congenial soil for their teaching in the Church farther east. The East in its conservatism still clung to the Syrian type of thought which it had learned from Theodore of Mopsuestia and his school. It recoiled from the doctrine of the "one nature". Under the influence of this fresh influx of Antiochean thought, the Church whose centres of learning were at Edessa and Nisibis became definitely Nestorian, and when later the Nestorians were driven from Edessa they found refuge within the Persian Empire. The Church of the Euphrates valley and farther east was cut off from the Church of the Empire, not only by a different political allegiance, but by a difference of creed.

Peace did not long prevail even in the Church within the Empire. Dioscuros, who succeeded Cyrill as Patriarch of Alexandria, made himself obnoxious by the bitterness with which he proceeded against those whom he suspected of Nestorianism; and the doctrine of the "one nature" ran into extremes which gave pause even to those who had followed Cyrill. The Council of Chalcedon, held in A.D. 451 to deal with these and other matters, instead of pacify

I EASTERN CHURCH AND ARABIA 11

ing the Church in the East, added fuel to the fire. For while it condemned Nestorius it recognised the two natures, and even used the phrase in its formula. The one Lord Jesus Christ is declared to be "in two natures". Trouble almost immediately began in Palestine. For the monks and the populace had become strongly attached to the "one nature". Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem, who had consented to the Chalcedonian formula, was driven from his see, and the city was sacked by a mob. The supporters of the formula, backed by the power of the State, naturally strove to maintain and further to assert their position. The contest swayed backwards and forwards. But the mass of the population retained their sympathy with the Monophysite view. In Egypt the same thing happened. In spite of persecution the strict Monophysites maintained themselves, and in course of time formed a separate Church, which included the great mass of the Copts, the native population, while the Melkite or official Church wielded influence practically only with the official class.

To some of the events in the long struggle, especially in Syria, I shall have to refer later. Here it is sufficient to point out that it was from the attempt to impose the Chalcedonian formula, and from the bitter partisanship that grew around the phrases "one nature" and "two natures", that the formation of the separate Churches of the East, the Coptic, the Syrian Monophysite or Jacobite, and also the Armenian, may be said to have begun. Several attempts were made to heal the breach; and as we shall see, at the very end,