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.