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XXX, 2-9.
THE CHAPTER OF THE GREEKS.
I 25
overcome 1 in a few years ; to God belongs the order before and after; and on that day the believers shall rejoice in the help of God ;-God helps whom He will, and He is mighty, merciful. [5]—God's promise !—God breaks not His promise, but most men do not know !
They know the outside of this world's life, but of the hereafter they are heedless. Have they not reflected in themselves, that God created not the heavens and the earth, and what is between the two except in truth, and for a stated and appointed time ? bụt, verily, many men in the meeting of their Lord do disbelieve.
Have they not journeyed on in the land and seen how was the end of those before them who were stronger than they, and who turned up the ground and cultivated it more than they do cultivate it ? and there came to them their apostles with manifest signs; for God would never wrong them : it was themselves they wronged !
Then evil was the end of those who did evil, in that they said the signs of God were lies and mocked thereat.
1 About the beginning of the sixth year before the Higrah the Persians conquered Syria, and made themselves masters also of Palestine, and took Jerusalem. The Greeks were so distressed by their defeat that there appeared little likelihood of their being able to retrieve their fortune, and in the following year the Persians proceeded to lay siege to Constantinople itself. In the year 625 A.D., however, the fourth year before the Higrah, the Greeks gained a signal victory over the Persians, and not only drove them out of the borders of the Byzantine empire, but carried the war into Persian territory, and despoiled the city of Medayen. It is the defeat which is alluded to in this passage, and the subsequent victory that is prophesied, the date of the chapter being ascribed to the period when the Persians took Jerusalem.
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