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Rh tion with any other result than the painful instruction derivable from the gradual ruin of a great institution, through the unfaithful surrender of those divine doctrines and spiritual privileges which, without exception, are always essential to the true life, beneficence, and well-being of a Christian church. The vitality of the primeval faith, and along with it whatever was spiritual and peculiar in the religion of Christ, died gradually away, and with it the glory departed. The grandeur of hierarchical predominance, the accession of secular wealth, the fitful patronage of emperors, yielded nothing to replace it. The essential character of the true churchly state was gone, and could never be constituted or recalled by these things; for "the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." Soon, too, the doctrinal integrity of Antioch became impaired, and this once apostolical communion was dismantled of the bulwarks of truth, and, in the just dispensations of Providence, was permitted to sink into that hopeless decay which has proved, through a similar process of apostasy, the doom of many of the earliest ecclesiastical foundations.

The city of Antioch was taken by the Saracens in the year 609: the church was then under the episcopal rule of Athanasius, a Monothelite. The patriarchal jurisdiction of the bishops, no longer fortified by the protection of the Court of Byzantium, from that time speedily declined; and, destitute of any intrinsic spiritual energy, their authority became a shadow, and their personal succession subject to frequent interruptions.

magnificent Antiochia Magna, where the Seleucidæ held their court, where Roman emperors fixed their sojourn, the chosen home of oriental grandeur and