After these things, the earth was invaded, and Damascus, the capital of Syria, attacked. An army of seventy thousand succors -- indifferently styled Syrians, from the place of their birth or warfare; Greeks, from the religion and language of their sovereign; and Romans, from the appellation still assumed by the successors of Constantine -- were encountered and dispersed; and, after a siege of seventy days, Damascus was taken by storm and capitulation, A.D. 634. While being surrendered in one quarter, the city was betrayed and taken by assault in the opposite. Caled, the Sword of God, rushed in with his rapacious and sanguinary lion-toothed locusts. "No quarter," he cried, "no quarter to the enemies of the Lord;" his trumpets sounded, and a torrent of Mariolatrous blood was poured into the streets of Damascus. A large majority of the people accepted the terms of toleration and tribute offered by Abu Obeidah, the general in chief; but Caled, "the lieutenant of the Commander of the Faithful," was for a general massacre. The fury of "the Sword of God" was at length appeased; nevertheless he sternly declared that, after a respite of three days, all who left the city as exiles, with Thomas, their valiant, though unsuccessful defender, might be pursued and destroyed by the Moslems. On the fourth day, he issued from Damascus in pursuit. Having overtaken the promiscuous multitude of priests, monks and citizens, encamped in a pleasant valley, insufficiently provided with arms, and already vanquished by sorrow and fatigue, Caled and his cavalry rushed upon them, smoking with fury. Except a captive who was pardoned and dismissed, the Arabs enjoyed the satisfaction of believing that not a Virgin-Mary worshipper of either sex escaped the edge of their scymitars.

Thus, the Pit of the Abyss was effectually "opened" by the key-sword in the hand of the first of the Caliphs. The "smoke of the pit" was curling and drifting over "the earth" in the direction of the Great Sea. After the battle of Yermuk, the conquest of Jerusalem, and then of Aleppo and Antioch, Heraclius fled from the country, and bid an eternal farewell to Syria, which, A.D. 639, bowed under the sceptre of the Caliphs seven hundred years after Pompey had despoiled the last of the Macedonian kings. Thus, the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit; and Syria, now become Arabian, became the seat and support of the house of Ommiyah; and the revenue, the soldiers, the ships of that powerful kingdom were consecrated to enlarge on every side the empire of the caliph-kings of the locusts, "the angel of the abyss," the ABADDON, in the land of the Hebrew tongue.

But the "torment" of the catholic worshippers of images and daemons was not to be confined to the land of Israel; it was to extend to the countries where Greek was the vernacular, and there the caliph-power was to be revealed as the most potent and absolute of the globe. It was to torment with an intensity that should acquire for it in Greek the name APOLLYON, the destroyer. In the ten years of the administration of the caliph Omar, the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six thousand cities or castles, destroyed four thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and erected fourteen hundred mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mohammed. One hundred years after his flight from Mecca, the arms and reign of "the Angel of the Abyss" extended from India to the Atlantic Ocean, over the various and distant provinces which may be comprised under the names of Persia, Syria, Egypt, Africa, and Spain. Their armies, which consisted chiefly of cavalry and archers, advanced with the speed of horses, and fought with the courage of lions; and it excites no little perplexity in the mind of the historian to explain by what means the church and state of the Roman world were saved from destruction by so invincible a foe. But their preservation is attributable, not to the virtue, skill and power of those establishments, but to the fact that "to them it was given that they should not kill them." The Greek Church and State were not to be broken up and to become politically extinct; and therefore, though Constantinople was twice besieged by the Saracens, the first time for seven years, and the last for thirteen months, they could not capture it, and abolish its dominion. They were not to inflict political death upon the Byzantine Empire, which they would certainly have done had they captured Constantinople. This consummation was reserved for the Four Angel-Powers of the Euphrates, under the sixth trumpet. The horse-like locusts were only to darken, torment, and injure, for a specific period; and when this was passed, according to the analogy of the insects to which they were likened, to settle down so as at length to be found no longer tormenting "the earth."