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620 hands and electing its own metropolitan. After that, although the patriarchate of Alexandria might be nominally allowed to extend to Abyssinia, the Abyssinians really had an independent Church.

In the meantime we witness the sad spectacle of the utter vanishing of Christianity from Nubia, where once it had been strong and flourishing. For many years this region of the Soudan had existed as a Christian kingdom, which refused to admit the Arab suzerainty. Ahmed, the son of Solaim, who went to Nubia as an ambassador from the Moslem ruler, tells how he "passed through nearly thirty towns with fine houses, monasteries, numberless palm groves, vineyards, gardens and wide-spreading fields, besides herds of camels of great beauty and breeding." Kartoum was then adorned with magnificent buildings and great houses. Its churches were enriched with gold, and the whole city was beautified with gardens. The King of Nubia used to invite the bishops to join his wise men in discussing with him the affairs of the kingdom; in fact, he had a sort of House of Lords, consisting of peers temporal and spiritual. Ahmed himself was courteously received by King George, who, he says, took the Moslems with him in a procession on a festival day. But in course of time this happy relationship, which could only exist so long as the Egyptian government was not strong enough to break it up, came to an end. The King of Nubia had always declined to admit the suzerainty of the sultan. He persistently refused the tribute of slaves which the Mohammedan power demanded from him. When that power was sufficiently established, it punished the independence of Nubia by completely overrunning and conquering the country and effectually stamping out Christianity. The result is seen to-day in the barbarous Mohammedanism of the tribes of the Soudan, whose ancestors had constituted a highly civilised Christian kingdom.