They were just at the moment exhausted by a long-continued struggle against each other. Heraclius, the Roman Emperor, was busy during the last years of Muhammad's life in restoring his recovered provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, which had been overrun by the Persians some years before. He was occupied with large schemes for the settlement of Church affairs and the reunion of Christendom. He and those about him evidently realised that the opposition of the Monophysites, who included the bulk of the Arab Christians, to the Chalcedonian formula and the bitter hostility of parties within the Church, weakened the stability of the Empire which he had recovered. But there is no reason to suppose that he realised the danger which threatened from Arabia. In 629 he was in Jerusalem restoring to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the true Cross which had been recovered from the Persians. The fact of his presence there and the large numbers of Roman soldiers then in Palestine may help to account for the defeat of the Moslem army at Muta in that year. Heraclius' stay in Jerusalem was stained by one of the few blots upon his memory — a massacre of the Jews. He had given them a promise of security; but when he arrived at Jerusalem, representations were made to him that they had sided with the Persians and had displayed a cruel hostility to the Christians. His better nature was overruled and he banished them from the city. This seems to have been followed by a violent persecution. The Jews had no cause to love Muhammad, but their feelings towards

the Christians had always been hostile, and this new persecution caused them, when the real struggle came, to throw their weight on the side of the Arabs, to whom it is said they acted as guides through the country.

Heraclius' dreams of a reunited Christendom were destined to prove equally disastrous. The new movement for the reconciliation of parties was based upon a formula of compromise devised by Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople, by which the dispute as to the two natures of Christ was to be dropped out of sight and emphasis to be laid upon the one will or energy (Monothelitism). At first the compromise seemed to offer the prospect of brilliant results, but in a short while it began to appear that it was not acceptable to the Church as a whole. Sophronius exerted himself against it, interviewing both Sergius and Heraclius, and endeavouring to dissuade them from introducing it. The Monophysites especially refused to accept it. In Egypt the situation was aggravated by the action of Cyrus, whom Heraclius had appointed Patriarch of Alexandria. Finding the Monothelite compromise unacceptable to the native Egyptian Church, he endeavoured to procure its acceptance by force, and his tenure of power was marked by a severe persecution directed against the Copts, which sapped still more their allegiance to the Roman Empire. Something similar seems to have happened in Syria. The supporters of the Chalcedonian formula had suffered most severely at the time of the Persian conquest of the country. The churches had fallen into the hands of the Mono-