Nor was their sagacity in this matter less remarkable than their pertinacity. The Holy See has the reputation, even with men of the world, of seeing instinctively what is favourable, what is unfavourable, to the interests of religion and of the Catholic Faith. Its undying opposition to the Turks is not the least striking instance of this divinely imparted gift. From the very first it pointed at them as an object of alarm for all Christendom, in a way in which it had marked out neither Tartars nor Saracens. It exposed them to the reprobation of Europe, as a people, with whom, if charity differ from merciless ferocity, tenderness from hardness of heart, depravity of appetite from virtue, and pride from meekness and humility, the faithful never could have sympathy, never alliance. It denounced, not merely an odious outlying deformity, painful simply to the moral sight and scent, but an energetic evil, an aggressive, ambitious, ravenous foe, in whom foulness of life and cruelty of policy were methodized by system, consecrated by religion, propagated by the sword. I am not insensible, I wish to do justice, to the high qualities of the Turkish race. I do not altogether deny to its national character the grandeur, the force and originality, the valour, the truthfulness and sense of justice, the sobriety and gentleness, which historians and travellers speak of; but, in spite of all that has been done for them by nature and by the European world, Tartar still is the staple of their composition, and their gifts and attainments, whatever they may be, do but make them the more efficient foes of faith and civilization.

3.

It was said by a Prophet of old, in the prospect of a fierce invader, "a day of clouds and whirlwinds, a numerous and strong people, as the morning spread upon the mountains. The like to it hath not been from the beginning, nor shall be after it, even to the years of generation and generation. Before the face thereof a devouring fire, and behind it a burning flame. The land is like a garden of pleasure before it, and behind it a desolate wilderness; neither is there any one can escape it." Now I might, in illustration of the character which the Turks bear in history, suitably accommodate these words to the moral, or the social, or the political, or the religious calamities, of which they were the authors to the Christian countries they overran; and so I might bring home to you the meaning and drift of that opposition with which the Holy See has met them in every age. I might allude (if I dare, but I dare not, nor does any one dare),—else, allusion might be made to those unutterable deeds which brand the people which allows them, even in the natural judgment of men, as the most flagitious, the most detestable of nations. I might enlarge on the reckless and remorseless cruelty which, had they succeeded in Europe, as they succeeded in Asia, would have decimated or exterminated her children; I might have reminded you, for instance, how it has been almost a canon of their imperial policy for centuries, that their Sultan, on mounting the throne, should destroy his nearest of kin, father, brother, or cousin, who might rival him in his sovereignty; how he is surrounded, and his subjects according to their wealth, with slaves carried off from their homes, men and boys, living monuments of his barbarity towards the work of God's hands; how he has at his remorseless will and in the sudden breath of his mouth the life or death of all his subjects; how he multiplies his despotism by giving to his lieutenants in every province, a like prerogative; how little scruple those governors have ever felt in exercising this prerogative to the full, in executions on a large scale, and sudden overwhelming massacres, shedding blood like water, and playing with the life of man as though it were the life of a mere beast or reptile. I might call your attention to particular instances of such atrocities, such as that outrage perpetrated in the memory of many of us,—how, on the insurrection of the Greeks at Scio, their barbarian masters carried fire and sword throughout the flourishing island till it was left a desert, hurrying away women and boys to an infamous captivity, and murdering youths and grown men, till out of 120,000 souls, in the spring time, not 900 were left there when the crops were ripe for the sickle. If I do not go into scenes such as these in detail, it is because I have wearied and troubled you more than enough already, in my account of the savage perpetrations of Zingis and Timour.

Or I might, in like manner, still more obviously insist on their system of compulsory conversion, which, from the time of the Seljukian Sultans to the present day, have raised the indignation and the compassion of the Christian world; how, when the lieutenants of Malek Shah got possession of Asia Minor, they profaned the churches, subjected Bishops and Clergy to the most revolting outrages, circumcised the youth, and led off their sisters to their profligate households;—how, when the Ottomans conquered in turn, and added an infantry, I mean the Janizaries, to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from first to last, for near five hundred years, of boys, all born Christian, a body of at first 12,000, at last 40,000 strong, torn away year by year from their parents, circumcised, trained to the faith and morals of their masters, and becoming in their turn the instruments of the terrible policy of which they had themselves been victims; and how, when at length lately they abolished this work of their hands, they ended it by the slaughter of 20,000 of the poor renegades whom they had seduced from their God. I might remind you how within the last few years a Protestant traveller tells us that he found the Nestorian Christians, who had survived the massacres of their race, living in holes and pits, their pastures and tillage land forfeited, their sheep and cattle driven away, their villages burned, and their ministers and people tortured; and how a Catholic missionary has found in the neighbourhood of Broussa the remnant of some twenty Catholic families, who, in consequence of repudiating the Turkish faith, had been carried all the way from Servia and Albania across the sea to Asia Minor; the men killed, the women disgraced, the boys sold, till out of a hundred and eighty persons but eighty-seven were left, and they sick, and famished, and dying among their unburied dead. I could of course continue this topic also to any extent, and draw it out as an illustration of the words of the Prophet which I have quoted. But I prefer to take those words literally, as expressive of the desolation spread by an infidel foe over the face of a flourishing country; and then I shall be viewing the Turkish rule under an aspect addressed to the senses, not admitting of a question, calculated to rouse the sensibilities of Christians of whatever caste of opinion, and explanatory by itself of the determined front which the Holy See has ever made against it.

4.

The Catholic Church was in the first instance a wanderer on the earth, and had nothing to attach her to its soil; but no sooner did persecution cease, and territory was allowed to her, than she began to exert a beneficent influence upon the face of the land, and on its cultivators. She shed her consolations, and extended her protection, over the serf and the slave; and, while she gradually relaxed his fetters, she sent her own dearest children to bear his burden with him, and to aid him in the cultivation of the soil. Under the loving assiduity of the Benedictine Monk, the ravages of war were repaired, the plantation throve, the river diffused itself in rills and channels, and hill and dale and plain rejoiced in corn land and pasture. And when in a later time a world was to be created, not restored, when the deep forests of the North were to be cleared, and the unwholesome marsh to be drained, who but the missionaries from the same great Order were to be the ministers of temporal, as well as spiritual, benefits to the rude tribes they were converting? And then again, when history moved on into the era of the first Turkish outbreak, who but St. Bernard, the very preacher of the Crusade, who but he led on his peaceful Cistercians, after the pattern of his master, St. Stephen, to that laborious but cheerful husbandry, which they continue in the wild places of the earth even to this day? Never has Holy Church forgotten,—abhorrent, as she is, from the Pantheistic tendencies which in all ages have surrounded her,—never has she forgotten the interests of that mighty mother on whose bosom we feed in life, into whose arms we drop in death; never has she forgotten that that mother is the special creature of God, and to be honoured, in leaf and flower, in lofty tree and pleasant stream, for His sake, as well as for our own; that while it is our primeval penalty to till the earth, she lovingly repays us for our toil; that Adam was a gardener even in Paradise, and that Noe inaugurated his new world by "beginning to be a husbandman, and by planting a vineyard."

Such is the genius of the true faith; and it might have been thought, that, though not Christians, even of very gratitude, the barbarous race, which owed a part of whatever improvement of mind or manners they had received to the fair plains of Sogdiana, would, on seizing on their rich and beautiful lands on the north, east, and south of the Mediterranean, have felt some sort of reverence for their captive, and, while enjoying her gifts, would have been merciful to the giver. But the same selfish sensuality, with which they regard the rational creation of God, possesses them in their conduct towards physical nature. They have made the earth their paramour, and are heartless towards her dishonour and her misery. We have lately been reminded in this place of the Doge of Venice[48] making the Adriatic his bride, and claiming her by a ring of espousal; but the Turk does not deign to legitimatize his possession of the soil he has violently seized, or to gain a title to it by any sacred tie; caring for no better right to it than the pirate has to the jurisdiction of the high seas. Let the Turcoman ride up and down Asia Minor or Syria for a thousand years, how is the trampling of his horse-hoofs a possession of those countries, more than a Scythian raid or a Tartar gallop across it? The imperial Osmanli sits and smokes long days in his pavilion, without any thought at all of his broad domain except to despise and to plunder and impoverish its cultivators; and is his title made better thereby than the Turcoman's, to be the heir of Alexander and Seleucus, of the Ptolemies and Massinissa, of Constantine and Justinian? What claim does it give him upon Europe, Asia, and Africa, upon Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, that he has frustrated the munificence of nature and demolished the works of man?

5.

Asia Minor especially, the peninsula which lies between the Black Sea, the Archipelago, and the Mediterranean, was by nature one of the most beautiful, and had been made by art one of the most fertile of countries. It had for generations contained flourishing marts of commerce, and it had been studded with magnificent cities, the ruins of which now stand as a sepulchre of the past. No country perhaps has seen such a succession of prosperous states, and had such a host of historical reminiscences, under such distinct eras and such various distributions of territory. It is memorable in the beginning of history for its barbarian kings and nobles, whose names stand as commonplaces and proverbs of wealth and luxury. The magnificence of Pelops imparts lustre even to the brilliant dreams of the mythologist. The name of Croesus, King of Lydia, whom I have already had occasion to mention, goes as a proverb for his enormous riches. Midas, King of Phrygia, had such abundance of the precious metals, that he was said by the poets to have the power of turning whatever he touched into gold. The tomb of Mausolus, King of Caria, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It was the same with the Greek colonies which were scattered along its coasts; they are renowned for opulence, for philosophy, and for the liberal and the fine arts. Homer among the poets, Thales among philosophers, Herodotus, the father of history, Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians, Apelles, the prince of painters, were among their citizens; and Pythius, who presented one of the Persian Kings with a plane-tree and a vine of massive gold, was in his day, after those kings, the richest man in the known world.

Then come the many splendid cities founded by the successors of Alexander, through its extent; and the powerful and opulent kingdoms, Greek or Barbarian, of Pontus, and Bithynia, and Pergamus—Pergamus, with its library of 200,000 choice volumes. Later still, the resources of the country were so well recognised, that it was the favourite prey of the Roman statesmen, who, after involving themselves in enormous debts in the career of ambition, needed by extortion and rapine to set themselves right with their creditors. Next it became one of the first seats of Christianity; St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles relates to us the apostolic labours of St. Paul there in town and country; St. John wrote the Apocalypse to the Churches of seven of its principal cities; and St. Peter, his first Epistle to Christians scattered through its provinces. It was the home of some of the greatest Saints, Martyrs, and Doctors of the early ages: there first, in Bithynia, the power of Christianity manifested itself over a heathen population; there St. Polycarp was martyred, there St. Gregory Thamaturgus converted the inhabitants of Pontus; there St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Gregory Nyssen, St. Basil, and St. Amphilochius preached and wrote. There were held three of the first four Councils of the Church, at Chalcedon, at Ephesus, and at Nicaea, the very city afterwards profaned by the palace of the Sultan. It abounded in the gifts of nature, for food, utility, or ornament; its rivers ran with gold, its mountains yielded the most costly marbles; it had mines of copper, and especially of iron; its plains were fruitful in all kinds of grain, in broad pastures and luxuriant woods, while its hills were favourable to the olive and the vine.

Such was that region, once celebrated for its natural advantages, for its arts, its splendour, as well as for its gifts of grace; and the misery and degradation which are at present imprinted on the very face of the soil are the emblems of that worse ruin which has overtaken the souls of its children. I have already referred to the journal of Dr. Chandler, who saw it, even in its western coast, overrun by the hideous tents of the Turcomans. Another traveller of late years[49] tells us of that ancient Bithynia, which runs along the Black Sea, a beautiful and romantic country, intersected with lofty mountains and fertile valleys, and abounding in rivers and forests. The luxuriance of the pastures, he says, and the richness of the woods, often reminded him of an English gentleman's park. Such is it as nature has furnished it for the benefit of man; but he found its forests covered with straggling Turcomans and numerous flocks of goats. As he was passing through Phrygia, the inhabitants smiled, when he asked for ruins, assuring him that the whole country was overspread with them. There too again he found a great part of its face covered with the roving Turcomans, "a boisterous and ignorant race, though much more honourable and hospitable," he adds, "than the inhabitants of the towns." Mr. Alison tells us that when the English fleet, in 1801, was stationed on the southern coast, some sailors accidentally set fire to a thick wood, and the space thus left bare was studded all along with the ruins of temples and palaces.

A still more recent traveller[50] corroborates this testimony. Striking inland from Smyrna, he found "the scenery extremely beautiful, and the land," he continues, "which is always rich, would be valuable, if sufficiently cultivated, but it is much neglected." In another part of the country, he "rode for at least three miles through a ruined city, which was one pile of temples, theatres, and buildings, vying with each other in splendour." Now here, you will observe, I am not finding fault with the mere circumstance that the scenes of ancient grandeur should abound in ruins. Buildings will decay; old buildings will not answer new uses; there are ruins enough in Europe; but the force of the argument lies in this, that in these countries there are ruins and nothing else; that the old is gone, and has not been replaced by the new. So was it about Smyrna; and so too about Sardis: "Its situation," he says, "is very beautiful, but the country over which it looks is now almost deserted, and the valley is become a swamp. Its little rivers of clear water, after turning a mill or two, serve only to flood, instead of draining and beautifying the country." His descriptions of the splendour of the scenery, yet of the desolation of the land, are so frequent that I should not be able to confine my extracts within bounds, did I attempt to give them all. He speaks of his route as lying through "a rich wilderness" of ruins. Sometimes the landscape "so far exceeded the beauty of nature, as to seem the work of magic." Again, "the splendid view passed like a dream; for the continual turns in the road, and the increasing richness of the woods and vegetation, soon limited my view to a mere foreground. Nor was this without interest; on each projecting rock stood an ancient sarcophagus; and the trees half concealed the lids and broken sculpture of innumerable tombs."

The gifts of nature remain; he was especially struck with the trees. "We traversed the coast," he says, "through woods of the richest trees, the planes being the handsomest to be found in this or perhaps any other part of the world. I have never seen such stupendous arms to any trees." Everything was running wild; "the underwood was of myrtle, growing sometimes twenty feet high, the beautiful daphne laurel, and the arbutus; and they seemed contending for preeminence with the vine, clematis, and woodbine, which climbed to the very tops, and in many instances bore them down into a thicket of vegetation, impervious except to the squirrels and birds, which, sensible of their security in these retreats, stand boldly to survey the traveller." Elsewhere he found the ground carpeted with the most beautiful flowers. A Protestant Missionary,[51] in like manner, travelling in a different part of the country, speaks of the hedges of wild roses, the luxuriant gardens and fruit-trees, principally the cherry, the rich soil, the growth of beech, oak, and maple, the level meadows and swelling hills covered with the richest sward, and the rivulets of the purest water. No wonder that, as he tells us, "sitting down under a spreading walnut-tree, by the side of a murmuring mill stream, he was led by the charming woodland scenery around to reflect upon that mysterious Providence, by which so beautiful a country has been placed under such a blighting government, in the hands of so ignorant and barbarous a people."

The state of the population is in keeping with the neglected condition of the country. It is, down to the present time, wasting away; and that there are inhabitants at all seems in the main referable to merely accidental causes. On the road from Angora to Constantinople there were old people, twenty years since, who remembered as many as forty or fifty villages, where now there are none; and in the middle of the last century two hundred places had become forsaken in the tract lying between those two cities and Smyrna.[52]

This desolation is no accident of a declining empire; it dates from the very time that a Turk first came into the country, from the era of the Seljukian Sultans, eight hundred years ago. We have indirect but clear proof of it in the course of history following their expulsion from the country by the Crusaders. For a while the Greeks recovered their dominion in its western portion, and fixed their imperial residence at Nicaea, which had been the capital of the Seljukians. A vigorous prince mounted the throne, and the main object of his exertions and the special work of his reign was the recovery of the soil. We are told by an English historian,[53] that he found the most fertile lands without either cultivation or inhabitants, and he took them into his own management. It followed that, in the course of some years, the imperial domain became the granary and garden of Asia; and the sovereign made money without impoverishing his people. According to the nature of the soil, he sowed it with corn, or planted it with vines, or laid it down in grass: his pastures abounded with herds and flocks, horses and swine; and his speculation, as it may be called, in poultry was so happy, that he was able to present his empress with a crown of pearls and diamonds out of his gains. His example encouraged his nobles to imitation; and they learned to depend for their incomes on the honourable proceeds of their estates, instead of oppressing their people, and seeking favours from the court. Such was the immediate consequence when man cooeperated with the bountifulness of nature in this fruitful region; and it brings out prominently by its contrast the wretchedness of the Turkish domination.

6.

That wretchedness is found, not in Asia Minor only, but wherever Turks are to be found in power. Throughout the whole extent of their territory, if you believe the report of travellers, the peasantry are indigent, oppressed, and wretched.[54] The great island of Crete or Candia would maintain four times its present population; once it had a hundred cities; many of its towns, which were densely populous, are now obscure villages. Under the Venetians it used to export corn largely; now it imports it. As to Cyprus, from holding a million of inhabitants, it now has only 30,000. Its climate was that of a perpetual spring; now it is unwholesome and unpleasant; its cities and towns nearly touched one another, now they are simply ruins. Corn, wine, oil, sugar, and the metals are among its productions; the soil is still exceedingly rich; but now, according to Dr. Clarke, in that "paradise of the Levant, agriculture is neglected, inhabitants are oppressed, population is destroyed." Cross over to the continent, and survey Syria and its neighbouring cities; at this day the Turks themselves are dying out; Diarbekr, which numbered 400,000 souls in the middle of last century, forty years afterwards had dwindled to 50,000. Mosul had lost half its inhabitants; Bagdad had fallen from 130,000 to 20,000; and Bassora from 100,000 to 8,000.

If we pass on to Egypt, the tale is still the same. "In the fifteenth century," says Mr. Alison, "Egypt, after all the revolutions which it had undergone, was comparatively rich and populous; but since the fatal era of Turkish conquest, the tyranny of the Pashas has expelled industry, riches, and the arts." Stretch across the width of Africa to Barbary, wherever there is a Turk, there is desolation. What indeed have the shepherds of the desert, in the most ambitious effort of their civilization, to do with the cultivation of the soil? "That fertile territory," says Robertson, "which sustained the Roman Empire, still lies in a great measure uncultivated; and that province, which Victor called Speciositas totius terrae florentis, is now the retreat of pirates and banditti."

End your survey at length with Europe, and you find the same account is to be given of its Turkish provinces. In the Morea, Chateaubriand, wherever he went, beheld villages destroyed by fire and sword, whole suburbs deserted, often fifteen leagues without a single habitation. "I have travelled," says Mr. Thornton, "through several provinces of European Turkey, and cannot convey an idea of the state of desolation in which that beautiful country is left. For the space of seventy miles, between Kirk Kilise and Carnabat, there is not an inhabitant, though the country is an earthly paradise. The extensive and pleasant village of Faki, with its houses deserted, its gardens overrun with weeds and grass, its lands waste and uncultivated, and now the resort of robbers, affects the traveller with the most painful sensations."[55] Even in Wallachia and Moldavia the population has been gradually decreasing, while of that rich country not more than a fortieth part is under tillage. In a word, the average population in the whole Empire is not a fifth of what it was in ancient times.

7.

Here I am tempted to exclaim (though the very juxtaposition of two countries so different from each other in their condition needs an apology), I cannot help exclaiming, how different is the condition of that other peninsula in the centre of which is placed the See of Peter! I am ashamed of comparing, or even contrasting, Italy with Asia Minor—the seat of Christian governments with the seat of a barbarian rule—except that, since I have been speaking of the tenderness which the Popes have shown, according to their means, for the earth and its cultivators, there is a sort of fitness in pointing out that the result is in their case conformable to our just anticipation. Besides, so much is uttered among us in disparagement of the governments of that beautiful country, that there is a reason for pressing the contrast on the attention of those, who in their hearts acknowledge little difference between the rulers of Italy and of Turkey. I think it will be instructive, then, to dwell upon the account given us of Italy by an intelligent and popular writer of this day; nor need we, in doing so, concern ourselves with questions which he elsewhere discusses, such as whether Italy has received the last improvements in agriculture, or in civil economy, or in finance, or in politics, or in mechanical contrivances; in short, whether the art of life is carried there to its perfection. Systems and codes are to be tested by their results; let us put aside theories and disputable points; let us survey a broad, undeniable, important fact; let us look simply at the state both of the land and of the population in Italy; let us take it as our gauge and estimate of political institutions; let us, by way of contrast, put it side by side of the state of land and population, as reported to us by travellers in Turkey.

Mr. Alison, then, in his most diligent and interesting history of Europe,[56] divides the extent of Italy into three great districts, of mountain, plain, and marsh. The region of marsh lies between the Apennines and the Mediterranean; and here, I confess, he finds fault with the degree of diligence in reclaiming it exerted by its present possessors. He notices with dissatisfaction that the marshes of Volterra are still as pestilential as in the days of Hannibal; moreover, that the Campagna of Rome, once inhabited by numerous tribes, is now an almost uninhabited desert, and that the Pontine Marshes, formerly the abode of thirty nations, are now a pestilential swamp. I will not stop to remind you that the irruptions of barbarians like the Turks, have been the causes of this desolation, that the existing governments had nothing to do with it, and that, on the contrary, they have made various efforts to overcome the evil. For argument's sake, I will allow them to be a reproach to the government, for they will be found to be only exceptions to the general state of the country. Even as regards this low tract, he speaks of one portion of it, the plain of the Clitumnus, as being rich, as in ancient days, in herds and flocks; and he enlarges upon the Campagna of Naples as "still the scene of industry, elegance, and agricultural riches. There," he says, "still, as in ancient times, an admirable cultivation brings to perfection the choicest gifts of nature. Magnificent crops of wheat and maize cover the rich and level expanse; rows of elms or willows shelter their harvests from the too scorching rays of the sun; and luxuriant vines, clustering to the very tops of the trees, are trained in festoons from one summit to the other. On its hills the orange, the vine, and the fig-tree flourish in luxuriant beauty; the air is rendered fragrant by their ceaseless perfume; and the prodigy is here exhibited of the fruit and the flower appearing at the same time on the same stem."

So much for that portion of Italy which owes least to the labours of the husbandman: the second portion is the plain of Lombardy, which stretches three hundred miles in length by one hundred and twenty in breadth, and which, he says, "beyond question is the richest and the most fertile in Europe." This great plain is so level, that you may travel two hundred miles in a straight line, without coming to a natural eminence ten feet high; and it is watered by numerous rivers, the Ticino, the Adda, the Adige, and others, which fall into the great stream of the Po, the "king of rivers," as Virgil calls it, which flows majestically through its length from west to east till it finds its mouth in the Adriatic. It is obvious, from the testimony of the various travellers in the East, whom I have cited, what would be the fate of this noble plain under a Turkish government; it would become nothing more or less than one great and deadly swamp. But Mr. Alison observes: "It is hard to say, whether the cultivation of the soil, the riches of nature, or the structures of human industry in this beautiful region, are most to be admired. An unrivalled system of agriculture, from which every nation in Europe might take a lesson, has long been established over its whole surface, and two, and sometimes three successive crops annually reward the labours of the husbandman. Indian corn is produced in abundance, and by its return, quadruple that of wheat, affords subsistence for a numerous and dense population. Rice arrives at maturity to a great extent in the marshy districts; and an incomparable system of irrigation, diffused over the whole, conveys the waters of the Alps to every field, and in some places to every ridge, in the grass lands. It is in these rich meadows, stretching round Lodi, and from thence to Verona, that the celebrated Parmesan cheese, known over all Europe for the richness of its flavour, is made. The vine and the olive thrive in the sunny slopes which ascend from the plain to the ridges of the Alps; and a woody zone of never-failing beauty lies between the desolation of the mountain and the fertility of the plain."

8.

Such is his language concerning the cultivation at present bestowed upon the great plain of Italy; but after all it is for the third or mountainous region of the country, where art has to supply the deficiencies of nature, that he reserves his enthusiastic praises. After speaking of what nature really does for it in the way of vegetation and fruits, he continues: "An admirable terrace-cultivation, where art and industry have combined to overcome the obstacles of nature, has everywhere converted the slopes, naturally sterile and arid, into a succession of gardens, loaded with the choicest vegetable productions. A delicious climate there brings the finest fruits to maturity; the grapes hang in festoons from tree to tree; the song of the nightingale is heard in every grove; all nature seems to rejoice in the paradise which the industry of man has created. To this incomparable system of horticulture, which appears to have been unknown to the ancient Romans, and to have been introduced into Europe by the warriors who returned from the Crusades, the riches and smiling aspect of Tuscany and the mountain-region of Italy are chiefly to be ascribed; for nothing can be more desolate by nature than the waterless declivities, in general almost destitute of soil, on which it has been formed. The earth required to be brought in from a distance, retaining walls erected, the steep slopes converted into a series of gentle inclinations, the mountain-torrent diverted or restrained, and the means of artificial irrigation, to sustain nature during the long droughts of summer, obtained. By the incessant labour of centuries this prodigy has been completed, and the very stony sterility of nature converted into the means of heightening, by artificial means, the heat of summer.... No room is lost in these little but precious freeholds; the vine extends its tendrils along the terrace walls ... in the corners formed by their meeting, a little sheltered nook is found, where fig-trees are planted, which ripen delicious fruit under their protection. The owner takes advantage of every vacant space to raise melons and vegetables. Olives shelter it from the rains; so that, within the compass of a very small garden, he obtains olives, figs, grapes, pomegranates, and melons. Such is the return which nature yields under this admirable system of management, that half the crop of seven acres is sufficient in general for the maintenance of a family of five persons, and the whole produce supports them all in rustic affluence. Italy, in this delightful region, still realizes the glowing description of her classic historian three hundred years ago."

The author I have quoted goes on next to observe that this diligent cultivation of the rock accounts for what at first sight is inexplicable, viz., the vast population, which is found, not merely in the valleys, but over the greater part of the ridges of the Apennines, and the endless succession of villages and hamlets which are perched on the edge or summit of rocks, often, to appearance, scarcely accessible to human approach. He adds that the labour never ends, for, if a place goes out of repair, the violence of the rain will soon destroy it. "Stones and torrents wash down the soil; the terraces are broken through; the heavy rains bring down a shapeless mass of ruins; everything returns rapidly to its former state." Thus it is that parts of Palestine at present exhibit such desolate features to the traveller, who wonders how it ever could have been the rich land described in Scripture; till he finds that it was this sort of cultivation which made it what it was, that this it was the Crusaders probably saw and imported into Europe, and this that the ruthless Turks in great measure laid waste.

Lastly, he speaks of the population of Italy; as to the towns, it has declined on account of the new channels of commerce which nautical discovery has opened, to the prejudice of the marts and ports of the middle ages. In spite of this, however, he says, "that the provinces have increased both in riches and inhabitants, and the population of Italy was never, either in the days of the Emperors, or of the modern Republics, so considerable as it is at the present moment. In the days of Napoleon, it gave 1,237 to the square marine league, a density greater than that of either France or England at that period. This populousness of Italy," he adds, "is to be explained by the direction of its capital to agricultural investment, and the increasing industry with which, during a long course of centuries, its inhabitants have overcome the sterility of nature."

Such is the contrast between Italy under its present governments and Asia Minor under the Turks; and can we doubt at all, that, if the Turks had conquered Italy, they would have caused the labours of the agriculturist and the farmer to cease, and have reduced it to the level of their present dominions?

FOOTNOTES:

[48] Vid. a beautiful passage in Cardinal Wiseman's late lecture at Liverpool.

[49] Vid. Murray's Asia.

[50] Sir Charles Fellows.

[51] Vid. Smith and Dwight's Travels.

[52] Eclectic Review, Dec., 1839.

[53] Gibbon.

[54] Alison on Population, vol. i. p. 309, etc.

[55] Vol. i., p. 66, note.

[56] Alison, ch. xx., Sec. 28.



LECTURE VI.

The Pope and the Turk.

1.

And now, having dwelt upon the broad contrast which exists between Christendom and Turkey, I proceed to give you some general idea of the Ottoman Turks, who are at present in power, as I have already sketched the history of the Seljukian. We left off with the Crusaders victorious in the Holy Land, and the Seljukian Sultan, the cousin of Malek Shah, driven back from his capital over against Constantinople, to an obscure town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman, who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso's celebrated Poem of "Jerusalem Delivered,"—

That Solyman, than whom there was not any Of all God's foes more rebel an offender; Nay, nor a giant such, among the many Whom earth once bore, and might again engender; The Turkish Prince, who first the Greeks expelling, Fixed at Nicaea his imperial dwelling.

And then he made his infidel advances From Phrygian Sangar to Meander's river; Lydia and Mysia, humbled in war's chances, Bithynia, Pontus, hymned the Arch-deceiver; But when to Asia passed the Christian lances, To battle with the Turk and misbeliever, He, in two fields, encountered two disasters, And so he fled, and the vexed land changed masters.

Two centuries of military effort followed, and then the contest seemed over; the barbarians of the North destroyed, and Europe free. It seemed as though the Turks had come to their end and were dying out, as the Saracens had died out before them, when suddenly, when the breath of the last Seljukian Sultan was flitting at Iconium, and the Crusaders had broken their last lance for the Holy Sepulchre, on the 27th of July, 1301, the rule and dynasty of the Ottomans rose up from his death-bed.

2.

Othman, the founder of the line and people, who take from him the name of Ottoman or Osmanli, was the grandson of a nomad Turk, or Turcoman, who, descending from the North by Sogdiana and the Oxus, took the prescriptive course (as I may call it) towards social and political improvement. His son, Othman's father, came into the service of the last Sultan of the Seljukian line, and governed for fifty-two years a horde of 400 families. That line of sovereigns had been for a time in alliance with the Greek Emperors; but Othman inherited the fanaticism of the desert, and, when he succeeded to his father's power, he proclaimed a gazi, or holy war, against the professors of Christianity. Suddenly, like some beast of prey, he managed to leap the mountain heights which separated the Greek Province from the Mahomedan conquests, and he pitched himself in Broussa, in Bithynia, which remained from that time the Turkish capital, till it was exchanged for Adrianople and Constantinople. This was the beginning of a long series of conquests lasting about 270 years, till the Ottomans became one of the first, if not the first power, not only of Asia, but of the world.

These conquests were achieved during the reigns of ten great Sultans, the average length of whose reigns is as much as twenty-six years, an unusual period for military sovereigns, and both an evidence of the stability, and a means of the extension, of their power. Then came the period of their decline, and we are led on through the space of another 270 years, up to our own day, when they seem on the verge of some great reverse or overthrow. In this second period they have had as many as twenty-one Sultans, whose average reigns are only half the length of those who preceded them, and afford as cogent an argument of their national disorder and demoralization. Of these twenty-one, five have been strangled, three have been deposed, and three have died of excess; of the remaining ten, four only have attained the age of man, and these come together in the course of the last century; two others have died about the age of thirty, and three about the age of fifty. The last, the thirty-first from Othman, is the present Sultan, who came to the throne as a boy, and is described at that time by an English traveller, as one of the most "sickly, pale, inanimate, and unmanly youths he ever saw,"[57] and who has this very year just reached the average length of the reign of his twenty predecessors.

The names of the Ottoman Sultans are more familiar to us and more easy to recollect than other Oriental sovereigns, partly from their greater euphony as Europeans read them, partly from their recurrence again and again in the catalogue. There are four Mahomets, four Mustaphas, four Amuraths or Murads, three Selims, three Achmets, three Othmans, two Mahmoods, two Solimans, and two Bajazets.[58]

I have already described Othman, the founder of the line, as a soldier of fortune in the Seljukian service; and, in spite of the civilizing influences of the country, the people, and the religion, to which he had attached himself, he had not as yet laid aside the habits of his ancestors, but was half shepherd, half freebooter. Nor is it likely that any of his countrymen would be anything else, as long as they were still in war and in subordinate posts. Peace must precede the enjoyment, and power the arts of government; and the very readiness with which his followers left their nomad life, as soon as they had the opportunity, shows that the means of civilization which they had enjoyed, had not been thrown away on them. The soldiers of Zingis, when laden with booty, and not till then, cried out to be led back, and would fight no more; Tamerlane, at the end of fifty years, began to be a magnificent king. In like manner, Othman observed the life of a Turcoman, till he became a conqueror; but, as soon as he had crossed Mount Olympus, and found himself in the Greek territory as a master, he was both willing and able to accommodate himself to a pomp and luxury to which a mere Turcoman was unequal. He bade adieu to his fastnesses in the heights, and he began to fortify the towns and castles which he had heretofore pillaged. Conquest and civilization went hand in hand; his successor, Orchan, selected a capital, which he ornamented with a mosque, a hospital, a mint, and a college; he introduced professors of the sciences, and, what was as great a departure from Tartar habits, he raised a force of infantry, among his captives (in anticipation of the Janizaries, formed soon after), and he furnished himself with a train of battering engines. More strange still, he gained the Greek Emperor's daughter in marriage, a Christian princess; and lastly, he crossed over into Europe under cover of friendship to the court of Constantinople, and possessed himself of Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont. His successors gained first Roumelia, that is, the country round Constantinople, as far as the Balkan, with Adrianople for a capital; then they successively swept over Moldavia, Servia, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Morea. Then they gained a portion of Hungary; then they took Constantinople, just 400 years ago this very year. Meanwhile they had extended their empire into Syria, Egypt, and along the coast of Africa. And thus at length they more than half encompassed the Mediterranean, from the straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Venice, and reigned in three quarters of the world.

3.

Now you may ask me, what were Christians doing in Europe all this while? What was the Holy Father about at Rome, if he did not turn his eyes, as heretofore, on the suffering state of his Asiatic provinces, and oppose some rampart to the advance of the enemy upon Constantinople? and how has he been the enduring enemy of the Turk, if he acquiesced in the Turk's long course of victories? Alas! he often looked towards the East, and often raised the alarm, and often, as I have said, attempted by means of the powers of Christendom, what his mission did not give him arms to do himself. But he was impeded and embarrassed by so many and such various difficulties, that, if I proposed to go through them, I should find myself engaged in a history of Europe during those centuries. I will suggest some of them, though I can do no more.

1. First of all, then, I observe generally, that the Pope, in attempting to save Constantinople and its Empire, was attempting to save a fanatical people, who had for ages set themselves against the Holy See and the Latin world, and who had for centuries been under a sentence of excommunication. They hated and feared the Catholics, as much as they hated and feared the Turks, and they contemned them too, for their comparative rudeness and ignorance of literature; and this hatred and fear and contempt were grafted on a cowardly, crafty, insincere, and fickle character of mind, for which they had been notorious from time immemorial. It was impossible to save them without their own cordial cooeperation; it was impossible to save them in spite of themselves.

These odious traits and dispositions had, in the course of the two hundred years during which the Crusades lasted, borne abundant fruits and exhibited themselves in results intolerable to the warlike multitudes who had come to their assistance. For two hundred years "each spring and summer had produced a new emigration of pilgrim warriors for the defence of the Holy Land;"[59] and what had been the effect upon the Greeks of such prodigality of succour? what satisfaction, what gratitude had they shown for an undertaking on the part of the West, which ought properly to have been their own, and which the West commenced, because the East asked it? When the celebrated Peter the Hermit was in Constantinople, he would have addressed himself first of all to its imperial master; and not till the Patriarch of the day showed the hopelessness of seeking help from a vicious and imbecile court, did he cry out: "I will rouse the nations of Europe in your cause." The Emperors sought help themselves instead of lending it. Again and again, in the course of the Holy Wars, did they selfishly betake themselves to the European capitals; and they made their gain of the successes of the Crusaders, as far as they had opportunity, as the jackal follows the lion; but from the very first, their pride was wounded, and their cowardice alarmed, at the sight of their protectors in their city and provinces, and they took every means to weaken and annoy the very men whom they had invited. In the great council of Placentia, summoned by Urban the Second, before the Crusades were yet begun, in the presence of 200 Latin Bishops, 4,000 inferior clergy, and 30,000 laity, the ambassadors of the Greek Emperor had been introduced, and they pleaded the distress of their sovereign and the danger of their city, which the misbelievers already were threatening.[60] They insisted on its being the policy of the Latin princes to repel the barbarian in Asia rather than when he was in the heart of Europe, and drew such a picture of their own miseries, that the vast assembly burst into tears, and dismissed them with the assurance of their most zealous cooeperation.

Yet what, I say, was the reception which the cowardly suppliants had given to their avengers and protectors? From the very first, they threw difficulties in the way of their undertaking. When the heroic Godfrey and his companions in arms arrived in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, they found themselves all but betrayed into a dangerous position, where they might either have been starved, or been easily attacked. When at length they had crossed over into Asia, the Crusaders found themselves without the means of sustenance. They had bargained for a fair market in the Greek territories; but the Imperial Court allowed the cities which they passed by to close their gates upon them, to let down to them from the wall an insufficient supply of food, to mix poisonous ingredients in their bread, to give them base coin, to break down the bridges before them, and to fortify the passes, and to mislead them by their guides, to give information of their movements to the Turk, to pillage and murder the stragglers, and to hang up their dead bodies on gibbets along the highway. The Greek clergy preached against them as heretics and schismatics and dogs; the Patriarch and the Bishops spoke of their extermination as a merit, and their priests washed and purified the altars where the Latin priests had said mass. Nay, the Emperors formed a secret alliance with Turks and Saracens against them, and the price at which they obtained it, was the permission of erecting a mosque in Constantinople.

As time went on, they did not stop even here. A number of Latin merchants had settled at Constantinople, as our own merchants now are planted all over the cities of the Continent. The Greek populace rose against them; and the Emperor did not scruple to send his own troops to aid the rioters. The Latins were slaughtered in their own homes and in the streets; their clergy were burned in the churches, their sick in the hospitals, and their whole quarter reduced to ashes; nay, 4,000 of the survivors were sold into perpetual slavery to the Turks. They cut off the head of the Cardinal Legate, and tied it to the tail of a dog, and then chanted a Te Deum. What could be said to such a people? What could be made of them? The Turks might be a more powerful and energetic, but could not be a more virulent, a more unscrupulous foe. It did not seem to matter much to the Latin whether Turk or Greek was lord of Constantinople; and the Greek justified the indifference of the Latin by declaring that he would rather have the Turban in Constantinople than the Tiara.

2. It is the nature of crime to perpetuate itself, and the atrocities of the Greeks brought about a retaliation from the Latins. Twenty years after the events I have been relating, the Crusading hosts turned their arms against the Greeks, and besieged and gained possession of Constantinople; and, though their excesses seem to have been inferior to those which provoked them, it is not to be supposed that a city could be taken by a rude and angry multitude, without the occurrence of innumerable outrages. It was pillaged and disfigured; and the Pope had to publish an indignant protest against the work of his own adherents and followers. He might well be alarmed and distressed, not only for the crime itself, but for its bearing on the general course of the Crusades; for, if it was difficult under any circumstances to keep the Greeks in a right course, it was doubly difficult, when they had been injured, even though they were the original offenders.

4.

3. But there were other causes, still less satisfactory than those I have mentioned, tending to nullify all the Pope's efforts to make head against the barbarian power. I have said that the period of the Ottoman growth was about 270 years; and this period, viz., the fourteenth and fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, was the most disastrous and melancholy in the internal history of the Church of any that can be named. It was that miserable period, which directly prepared the way for Protestantism. The resistance to the Pope's authority, on the part of the states of Europe generally, is pretty nearly coincident with the rise of the Ottomans. Heresy followed; in the middle of the fourteenth century, the teaching of Wickliffe gained ground in England; Huss and others followed on the Continent; and they were succeeded by Luther. That energy of Popes, those intercessions of holy men, which hitherto had found matter in the affairs of the East, now found a more urgent incentive in the troubles which were taking place at home.

4. The increase of national prosperity and strength, to which the alienation of kings and states from the Holy See must be ascribed, in various ways indisposed them to the continuance of the war against the misbelievers. Rulers and people, who were increasing in wealth, did not like to spend their substance on objects both distant and spiritual. Wealth is a present good, and has a tendency to fix the mind on the visible and tangible, to the prejudice of both faith and secular policy. The rich and happy will not go to war, if they can help it; and trade, of course, does not care for the religious tenets of those who offer to enter into relations with it, whether of interchange or of purchase. Nor was this all; when nations began to know their own strength, they had a tendency to be jealous of each other, as well as to be indifferent to the interests of religion; and the two most valiant nations of Europe, France and England, gave up the Holy Wars, only to go to war one with another. As in the twelfth century, we read of Coeur de Lion in Palestine, and in the thirteenth, of St. Louis in Egypt, so in the fourteenth do we read the sad tale of Poitiers and Cressy, and in the fifteenth of Agincourt. People are apt to ask what good came of the prowess shown at Ascalon or Damietta; forgetting that they should rather ask themselves what good came of the conquests of our Edwards and Henries, of which they are so proud. If Richard's prowess ended in his imprisonment in Germany, and St. Louis died in Africa, yet there is another history which ends as ingloriously in the Maid of Orleans, and the expulsion of tyrants from a soil they had usurped. In vain did the Popes attempt to turn the restless destructiveness of the European commonwealth into a safer channel. In vain did the Legates of the Holy See interpose between Edward of England and the French king; in their very presence was a French town delivered over by the English conqueror to a three days' pillage.[61] In vain did one Pope take a vow of never-dying hostility to the Turks; in vain did another, close upon his end, repair to the fleet, that "he might, like Moses, raise his hands to God during the battle;"[62] Christian was to war with Christian, not with infidel.

The suppliant Greek Emperor in one of his begging missions, as they may be called, came to England: it was in the reign of Henry the Fourth, but Henry could do nothing for him. He had usurped the English Crown, and could not afford to rescue the Holy Sepulchre, with so precarious a position at home. However, he was under some kind of promise to take the Cross, which is signified in the popular story, that he had expected to die at Jerusalem, whereas he died in his palace at Westminster instead, in the Jerusalem chamber. It is said, too, that he was actually meditating a Crusade, and had ordered galleys to be prepared, when he came to his end.[63] His son, Henry the Fifth, crossed the Channel to conquer France, just at the very, the only time, when the Ottoman reverses gave a fair hope of the success of Christendom. When premature death overtook him, and he had but two hours to live,[64] he ordered his confessor to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms; and, when the verse was read about building the walls of Jerusalem, the word caught his ear; he stopped the reader, and observed that he had proposed to conquer Jerusalem, and to have rebuilt it, had God granted him life. Indeed, he had already sent a knight to take a survey of the towns and country of Syria, which is still extant. Alas, that good intentions should only become strong in moments of sickness or of death!

A like necessary or unnecessary attention, as the case might be, to national concerns and private interests, prevailed all over Europe. In the same century[65] Charles the Seventh of France forbade the preaching of a Crusade in his dominions, lest it should lay him open to the attacks of the English. Alfonso of Portugal promised to join in a Holy War, and retracted. Alfonso of Arragon and Sicily took the Cross, and used the men and money raised for its objects in a war against the Genoese. The Bohemians would not fight, unless they were paid; and the Germans affected or felt a fear that the Pope would apply the sums they contributed for some other purpose.

5. Alas! more must be said; it seldom happens that the people go wrong, without the rulers being somewhere in fault, nor is the portion of history to which I am referring an exception. It must be confessed that, at the very time the Turks were making progress, the Christian world was in a more melancholy state than it had ever been either before or since. The sins of nations were accumulating that heavy judgment which fell upon them in the Ottoman conquests and the Reformation. There were great scandals among Bishops and Priests, as well as heresy and insubordination. As to the Pontiffs who filled the Holy See during that period, I will say no more than this, that it did not please the good Providence of God to raise up for His Church such heroic men as St. Leo, of the fifth, and St. Gregory, of the eleventh century. For a time the Popes removed from Italy to France; then, when they returned to Rome, there was a schism in the Papacy for nearly forty years, during which time the populations of Europe were perplexed to find the real successor of St. Peter, or even took the pretended Pope for the true one.

5.

Such was the condition of Christendom, thus destitute of resources, thus weakened by internal quarrels, thus bribed and retained (so to speak) by the temptations of the world, at the very time when the Ottomans were pressing on its outposts. One moment occurred, and just one, in their history, when they might have been resisted with success. You will recollect that the Seljukians were broken, not simply by the Crusaders, but also, though not so early, by the terrible Zingis. What Zingis was to the Seljukians, such, and more than such, was Timour to the Ottomans. It was in their full career of victory, and when everything seemed in their power, when they had gained the whole province of Roumelia, which is round about Constantinople, that a terrible reverse befell them. The Sultan then on the throne was Bajazet, surnamed Ilderim, or the Lightning, from the rapidity of his movements. He had extended his empire, or his sensible influence, from the Carpathians to the Euphrates; he had destroyed the remains of rival dynasties in Asia Minor, had carried his arms down to the Morea, and utterly routed an allied Christian army in Hungary. Elated with these successes, he put no bounds to his pride and ambition. He vaunted that he would subdue, not Hungary only, but Germany and Italy besides; and that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter's, at Rome. The Apostle heard the blasphemy; and this mighty conqueror was not suffered to leave this world for his eternal habitation without Divine infliction in evidence that He who made him, could unmake him at His will. The Disposer of all things sent against him the fierce Timour, of whom I have already said so much. One would have thought the two conquerors could not possibly have come into collision—Timour, the Lord of Persia, Khorasan, Sogdiana, and Hindostan, and Bajazet, the Sultan of Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. They were both Mahomedans; they might have turned their backs on each other, if they were jealous of each other, and might have divided the world between them. Bajazet might have gone forward towards Germany and Italy, and Timour might have stretched his conquests into China.

But ambition is a spirit of envy as well as of covetousness; neither of them could brook a rival greatness. Timour was on the Ganges, and Bajazet was besieging Constantinople, when they interchanged the words of hatred and defiance. Timour called Bajazet a pismire, whom he would crush with his elephants; and Bajazet retaliated with a worse insult on Timour, by promising that he would capture his retinue of wives. The foes met at Angora in Asia Minor; Bajazet was defeated and captured in the battle, and Timour secured him in an iron-barred apartment or cage, which, according to Tartar custom, was on wheels, and he carried him about, as some wild beast, on his march through Asia. Can imagination invent a more intolerable punishment upon pride? is it not wonderful that the victim of it was able to live as many as nine months under such a visitation?

This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century, shortly before young Harry of Monmouth, the idol of English poetry and loyalty, crossed the sea to kill the French at Agincourt; and an opportunity was offered to Christendom to destroy an enemy, who never before or since has been in such extremity of peril. For fourteen years a state of interregnum, or civil war, lasted in the Ottoman empire; and the capture of Constantinople, which was imminent at the time of Bajazet's downfall, was anyhow delayed for full fifty years. Had a crusade been attempted with the matured experience and subdued enthusiasm, which the trials of three hundred years had given to the European nations, the Ottomans, according to all human probability, would have perished, as the Seljukians before them. But, in the inscrutable decree of Heaven, no such attempt was made; one attempt indeed was made too soon, and a second attempt was made too late, but none at the time.

1. The first of these two was set on foot when Bajazet was in the full tide of his victories; and he was able, not only to defeat it, but, by defeating, to damp the hopes, and by anticipation, to stifle the efforts, which might have been used against him with better effect in the day of his reverses. In the year 1394, eight years before Bajazet's misfortunes, Pope Boniface the Ninth proclaimed a Crusade, with ample indulgences for those who engaged in it, to the countries which were especially open to the Ottoman attack. In his Bull, he bewails the sins of Christendom, which had brought upon them that scourge which was the occasion of his invitation. He speaks of the massacres, the tortures, and slavery which had been inflicted on multitudes of the faithful. "The mind is horrified," he says, "at the very mention of these miseries; but it crowns our anguish to reflect, that the whole of Christendom, which, if in concord, might put an end to these and even greater evils, is either in open war, country with country, or, if in apparent peace, is secretly wasted by mutual jealousies and animosities."[66]

The Pontiff's voice, aided by the imminent peril of Hungary and its neighbouring kingdoms, was successful. Not only from Germany, but even from France, the bravest knights, each a fortress in himself, or a man-of-war on land (as he may be called), came forward in answer to his call, and boasted that, even were the sky to fall, they would uphold its canopy upon the points of their lances. They formed the flower of the army of 100,000 men, who rallied round the King of Hungary in the great battle of Nicopolis. The Turk was victorious; the greater part of the Christian army were slain or driven into the Danube; and a part of the French chivalry of the highest rank were made prisoners. Among these were the son of the Duke of Burgundy; the Sire de Coucy, who had great possessions in France and England; the Marshal of France (Boucicault), who afterwards fell on the field of Agincourt; and four French princes of the blood. Bajazet spared twenty-five of his noblest prisoners, whom their wealth and station made it politic to except; then, summoning the rest before his throne, he offered them the famous choice of the Koran or the sword. As they came up one by one, they one by one professed their faith in Christ, and were beheaded in the Sultan's presence. His royal and noble captives he carried about with him in his march through Europe and Asia, as he himself was soon to grace the retinue of Timour. Two of the most illustrious of them died in prison in Asia. As to the rest, he exacted a heavy ransom from them; but, before he sent them away, he gave them a grand entertainment, which displayed both the barbarism and the magnificence of the Asiatic. He exhibited before them his hunting and hawking equipage, amounting to seven thousand huntsmen and as many falconers; and, when one of his chamberlains was accused before him of drinking a poor woman's goat's milk, he literally fulfilled the "castigat auditque" of the poet, by having the unhappy man ripped open, in order to find in his inside the evidence of the charge.

Such was the disastrous issue of the battle of Nicopolis; nor is it wonderful that it should damp the zeal of the Christians and weaken the influence of the Pope, for a long time to come; anyhow, it had this effect till the critical moment of the Turkish misfortunes was over, and the race of Othman was recovering itself after the captivity and death of its Sultan. "Whereas the Turks might have been expelled from Greece on the loss of their Sultan," says Rainaldus, "Christians, torn to pieces by their quarrels and by schism, lost a fit and sufficient opportunity. Whence it followed, that the wound inflicted upon the beast was not unto death, but he revived more ferocious for the devouring of the faithful."

2. However, Christendom made a second attempt still, but when it was too late. The grandson of Bajazet was then on the throne, one of the ablest of the Sultans; and, though the allied Christian army had considerable success against him at first, in vain was the bravery of Hunniades, and the preaching of St. John Capistran: the Turk managed to negotiate with its leaders, to put them in the wrong, to charge them with perjury, and then to beat them in the fatal battle of Varna, in which the King of Hungary and Poland and the Pope's Legate were killed, with 10,000 men. In vain after this was any attempt to make head against the enemy; in vain did Pope after Pope raise his warning voice and point to the judgment which hung over Christendom; Constantinople fell.

6.

Thus things did but go on worse and worse for the interest of Christendom. Even the taking of Constantinople was not the limit of the Ottoman successes. Mahomet the Conqueror, as he is called, was but the seventh of the great Sultans, who carried on the fortunes of the barbarian empire. An eighth, a ninth followed. The ninth, Selim, returned from his Eastern conquests with the last of the Caliphs in his company, and made him resign to himself the prerogatives of Pontiff and Lawgiver, which the Caliph inherited from Mahomet. Then came a tenth, the greatest perhaps of all, Soliman the Magnificent, the contemporary of the Emperor Charles, Francis the First of France, and Henry the Eighth of England. And an eleventh might have been expected, and a twelfth, and the power of the enemy would have become greater and greater, and would have afflicted the Church more and more heavily; and what was to be the end of these things? What was to be the end? why, not a Christian only, but any philosopher of this world would have known what was to be the end, in spite of existing appearances. All earthly power has an end; it rises to fall, it grows to die; and the depth of its humiliation issues out of the pride of its lifting up. This is what even a philosopher would say; he would not know whether Soliman, the tenth conqueror, was also to be the last; but if not the tenth, he would be bold to say it would be the twelfth, who would close their victories, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth. But what a philosopher could not say, what a Christian knows and enjoys, is this, that one earthly power there is which is something more than earthly, and which, while it dies in the individual, for he is human, is immortal in its succession, for it is divine.

It was a remarkable question addressed by the savage Tartars of Zingis to the missionaries whom the Pope sent them in the thirteenth century: "Who was the Pope?" they asked; "was he not an old man, five hundred years of age?"[67] It was their one instinctive notion of the religion of the West; and the Turks in their own history have often had cause to lament over its truth. Togrul Beg first looked towards the West, in the year 1048; twenty years later, between the years 1068 and 1074,[68] his successor, Malek Shah, attracted the attention of the great St. Gregory the Seventh. Time went on; they were thrown back by the impetuosity of the Crusaders; they returned to the attack. Fresh and fresh multitudes poured down from Turkistan; the furious deluge of the Tartars under Zingis spread itself and disappeared; the Turks sunk in it, but emerged; the race seemed indestructible; then Othman began a new career of victory, as if there had never been an old one, and founded an empire, more stable, more coherent than any Turkish rule before it. Then followed Sultan after Sultan, each greater than his predecessor, while the line of Popes had indeed many bright names to show, Pontiffs of learning, and of piety, and of genius, and of zeal and energy; but still where was the destined champion of Christendom, the holy, the inflexible, the lion-hearted, the successor of St. Gregory, who in a luxurious and a self-willed age, among his other high duties and achievements, had the mission, by his prayers and by his efforts, of stopping the enemy in his full career, and of rescuing Catholicism from the pollution of the blasphemer? The five hundred years were not yet completed.

But the five hundred years at length were run out; the long-expected champion was at hand. He appeared at the very time when the Ottoman crescent had passed its zenith and was beginning to descend the sky. The Turkish successes began in the middle of the eleventh century; they ended in the middle of the sixteenth; in the middle of the sixteenth century, just five hundred years after St. Gregory and Malek Shah, Selim the Sot came to the throne of Othman, and St. Pius the Fifth to the throne of the Apostle; Pius became Pope in 1566, and Selim became Sultan in that very same year.

O what a strange contrast, Gentlemen, did Rome and Constantinople present at that era! Neither was what it had been, but they had changed in opposite directions. Both had been the seat of Imperial Power; Rome, where heresy never throve, had exchanged its Emperors for the succession of St. Peter and St. Paul; Constantinople had passed from secular supremacy into schism, and thence into a blasphemous apostasy. The unhappy city, which with its subject provinces had been successively the seat of Arianism, of Nestorianism, of Photianism, now had become the metropolis of the false Prophet; and, while in the West the great edifice of the Vatican Basilica was rising anew in its wonderful proportions and its costly materials, the Temple of St. Sophia in the East was degraded into a Mosque! O the strange contrast in the state of the inhabitants of each place! Here in the city of Constantine a God-denying misbelief was accompanied by an impure, man-degrading rule of life, by the slavery of woman, and the corruption of youth. But there, in the city which Apostles had consecrated with their blood, the great and true reformation of the age was in full progress. There the determinations in doctrine and discipline of the great Council of Trent had lately been promulgated. There for twenty years past had laboured our own dear saint, St. Philip, till he earned the title of Apostle of Rome, and yet had still nearly thirty years of life and work in him. There, too, the romantic royal-minded saint, Ignatius Loyola, had but lately died. And there, when the Holy See fell vacant, and a Pope had to be appointed in the great need of the Church, a saint was present in the conclave to find in it a brother saint, and to recommend him for the Chair of St. Peter, to the suffrages of the Fathers and Princes of the Church.

7.

St Carlo Borromeo,[69] the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was the nephew of the Pope who was just dead, and though he was only twenty-five years of age at the time, nevertheless, by the various influences arising out of the position which he held, and from the weight attached to his personal character, he might be considered to sway the votes of the College of Cardinals, and to determine the election of a new Pontiff. It is remarkable that Cardinal Alessandrino, as St. Pius was then called, (from Alexandria, in North Italy, near which he was born,) was not the first object of his choice. His eyes were first turned on Cardinal Morone, who was in many respects the most illustrious of the Sacred College, and had served the Church on various occasions with great devotion, and with distinguished success. From his youth he had been reared up in public affairs, he had held many public offices, he had great influence with the German Emperor, he had been Apostolical Legate at the Council of Trent. He had great virtue, judgment, experience, and sagacity. Such, then, was the choice of St. Carlo, and the votes were taken; but it seemed otherwise to the Holy Ghost. He wanted four to make up the sufficient number of votes. St. Carlo had to begin again; and again, strange to say, the Cardinal Alessandrino still was not his choice. He chose Cardinal Sirleto, a man most opposite in character and history to Morone. He was not nobly born, he was no man of the world, he had ever been urgent with the late Pope not to make him Cardinal. He was a first-rate scholar in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; versed in the Scriptures, ready as a theologian. Moreover, he was of a character most unblemished, of most innocent life, and of manners most popular and winning. St. Pius as well as St. Carlo advocated the cause of Cardinal Sirleto, and the votes were given a second time; a second time they came short. It was like holy Samuel choosing Eliab instead of David. Then matters were in confusion; one name and another were mentioned, and no progress was made.

At length and at last, and not till all others were thought of who could enter into the minds of the electors, the Cardinal Alessandrino himself began to attract attention. He seems not to have been known to the Fathers of the conclave in general; a Dominican Friar, of humble rank, ever taken up in the duties of his rule and his special employments, living in his cell, knowing little or nothing of mankind—such a one St. Carlo, the son of a prince and the nephew of a Pope, had no means of knowing; and the intimacy, consequent on their cooeperation in behalf of Cardinal Sirleto, was the first real introduction which the one Saint had to the other. It was just at this moment that our own St. Philip was in his small room at St. Girolamo, with Marcello Ferro, one of his spiritual children, when, lifting up his eyes to heaven, and going almost into an ecstasy, he said: "The Pope will be elected on Monday." On one of the following days, as they were walking together, Marcello asked him who was to be Pope. Philip answered, "Come, I will tell you; the Pope will be one whom you have never thought of, and whom no one has spoken of as likely; and that is Cardinal Alessandrino; and he will be elected on Monday evening without fail." The event accomplished the prediction; the statesman and the man of the world, the accomplished and exemplary and amiable scholar, were put aside to make way for the Saint. He took the name of Pius.

I am far from denying that St. Pius was stern and severe, as far as a heart burning within and melting with the fulness of divine love could be so; and this was the reason that the conclave was so slow in electing him. Yet such energy and vigour as his was necessary for his times. He was emphatically a soldier of Christ in a time of insurrection and rebellion, when, in a spiritual sense, martial law was proclaimed. St. Philip, a private priest, might follow his bent, in casting his net for souls, as he expressed himself, and enticing them to the truth; but the Vicar of Christ had to right and to steer the vessel, when it was in rough waters, and among breakers. A Protestant historian on this point does justice to him. "When Pope," he says, "he lived in all the austerity of his monastic life, fasted with the utmost rigour and punctuality, would wear no finer garments than before ... arose at an extremely early hour in the morning, and took no siesta. If we doubted the depth of his religious earnestness, we may find a proof of it in his declaration, that the Papacy was unfavourable to his advance in piety; that it did not contribute to his salvation and to his attainment of Paradise; and that, but for prayer, the burden had been too heavy for him. The happiness of a fervent devotion, which often moved him to tears, was granted him to the end of his life. The people were excited to enthusiasm, when they saw him walking in procession, barefooted and bareheaded, with the expression of unaffected piety in his countenance, and with his long snow-white beard falling on his breast. They thought there had never been so pious a Pope; they told each other how his very look had converted heretics. Pius was kind, too, and affable; his intercourse with his old servants was of the most confidential kind. At a former period, before he was Pope, the Count della Trinita had threatened to have him thrown into a well, and he had replied, that it must be as God pleased. How beautiful was his greeting to this same Count, who was now sent as ambassador to his court! 'See,' said he, when he recognized him, 'how God preserves the innocent.' This was the only way in which he made him feel that he recollected his enmity. He had ever been most charitable and bounteous; he kept a list of the poor of Rome, whom he regularly assisted according to their station and their wants." The writer, after proceeding to condemn what he considers his severity, ends thus: "It is certain that his deportment and mode of thinking exercised an incalculable influence on his contemporaries, and on the general development of the Church of which he was the head. After so many circumstances had concurred to excite and foster a religious spirit, after so many resolutions and measures had been taken to exalt it to universal dominion, a Pope like this was needed, not only to proclaim it to the world, but also to reduce it to practice; his zeal and his example combined produced the most powerful effect."[70]

8.

It is not to be supposed that a Saint on whom lay the "solicitude of all the churches," should neglect the tradition, which his predecessors of so many centuries had bequeathed to him, of zeal and hostility against the Turkish power. He was only six years on the Pontifical throne; and the achievement of which I am going to speak was among his last; he died the following year. At this time the Ottoman armies were continuing their course of victory; they had just taken Cyprus, with the active cooeperation of the Greek population of the island, and were massacring the Latin nobility and clergy, and mutilating and flaying alive the Venetian governor. Yet the Saint found it impossible to move Christendom to its own defence. How, indeed, was that to be done, when half Christendom had become Protestant, and secretly perhaps felt as the Greeks felt, that the Turk was its friend and ally? In such a quarrel England, France, and Germany were out of the question. At length, however, with great effort, he succeeded in forming a holy league between himself, King Philip of Spain, and the Venetians. Don John, of Austria, King Philip's half brother, was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces, and Colonna admiral. The treaty was signed on the 24th of May; but such was the cowardice and jealousy of the parties concerned, that the autumn had arrived, and nothing of importance was accomplished. With difficulty were the armies united; with difficulty were the dissensions of the commanders brought to a settlement. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were scouring the Gulf of Venice, blockading the ports, and terrifying the city itself.

But the holy Pope was securing the success of his cause by arms of his own, which the Turks understood not. He had been appointing a Triduo of supplication at Rome, and had taken part in the procession himself. He had proclaimed a jubilee to the whole Christian world, for the happy issue of the war. He had been interesting the Holy Virgin in his cause. He presented to his admiral, after High Mass in his chapel, a standard of red damask, embroidered with a crucifix, and with the figures of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the legend, "In hoc signo vinces." Next, sending to Messina, where the allied fleet lay, he assured the general-in-chief and the armament, that "if, relying on divine, rather than on human help, they attacked the enemy, God would not be wanting to His own cause. He augured a prosperous and happy issue; not on any light or random hope, but on a divine guidance, and by the anticipations of many holy men." Moreover, he enjoined the officers to look to the good conduct of their troops; to repress swearing, gaming, riot, and plunder, and thereby to render them more deserving of victory. Accordingly, a fast of three days was proclaimed for the fleet, beginning with the Nativity of our Lady; all the men went to confession and communion, and appropriated to themselves the plentiful indulgences which the Pope attached to the expedition. Then they moved across the foot of Italy to Corfu, with the intention of presenting themselves at once to the enemy; being disappointed in their expectations, they turned back to the Gulf of Corinth; and there at length, on the 7th of October, they found the Turkish fleet, half way between Lepanto and the Echinades on the North, and Patras, in the Morea, on the South; and, though it was towards evening, strong in faith and zeal, they at once commenced the engagement.

The night before the battle, and the day itself, aged as he was, and broken with a cruel malady, the Saint had passed in the Vatican in fasting and prayer. All through the Holy City the monasteries and the colleges were in prayer too. As the evening advanced, the Pontifical treasurer asked an audience of the Sovereign Pontiff on an important matter. Pius was in his bedroom, and began to converse with him; when suddenly he stopped the conversation, left him, threw open the window, and gazed up into heaven. Then closing it again, he looked gravely at his official, and said, "This is no time for business; go, return thanks to the Lord God. In this very hour our fleet has engaged the Turkish, and is victorious." As the treasurer went out, he saw him fall on his knees before the altar in thankfulness and joy.

And a most memorable victory it was: upwards of 30,000 Turks are said to have lost their lives in the engagement, and 3,500 were made prisoners. Almost their whole fleet was taken. I quote from Protestant authorities when I say that the Sultan, on the news of the calamity, neither ate, nor drank, nor showed himself, nor saw any one for three days; that it was the greatest blow which the Ottomans had had since Timour's victory over Bajazet, a century and a half before; nay, that it was the turning-point in the Turkish history;[71] and that, though the Sultans have had isolated successes since, yet from that day they undeniably and constantly declined, that they have lost their prestige and their self-confidence, and that the victories gained over them since are but the complements and the reverberations of the overthrow at Lepanto.

Such was the catastrophe of this long and anxious drama; the hosts of Turkistan and Tartary had poured down from their wildernesses through ages, to be withstood, and foiled, and reversed by an old man. It was a repetition, though under different circumstances, of the history of Leo and the Hun. In the contrast between the combatants we see the contrast of the histories of good and evil. The Enemy, as the Turks in this battle, rushing forward with the terrible fury of wild beasts; and the Church, ever combating with the energetic perseverance and the heroic obstinacy of St. Pius.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Formby's Visit to the East.

[58] The three remaining of the thirty are Orchan, Ibrahim, and Abdoul Achmet.

[59] Gibbon.

[60] Gibbon.

[61] Hume's History.

[62] Ranke, vol. i

[63] Turner's History.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Gieseler's Text Book.

[66] Baronius.

[67] Bergeron.

[68] Gibbon says twenty years: Sharon Turner gives 1074.

[69] Bollandist. Mai. 5.

[70] Ranke's Hist. of the Popes.

[71] "The battle of Lepanto arrested for ever the danger of Mahometan invasion in the south of Europe."—Alison's Europe, vol. ix. p. 95. "The powers of the Turks and of their European neighbours were now nearly balanced; in the reign of Amurath the Third, who succeeded Selim, the advantages became more evidently in favour of the Christians; and since that time, though the Turks have sometimes enjoyed a transitory success, the real stability of their affairs has constantly declined."—Bell's Geography, vol. ii, part 2. Vid. also Ranke, vol. i., pp. 381-2. It is remarkable that it should be passed over by Professor Creasy in his "Fifteen Decisive Battles."



IV.

THE PROSPECTS OF THE TURKS.



LECTURE VII.

Barbarism and Civilization.

1.

My object in the sketch which I have been attempting, of the history of the Turks, has been to show the relation of this celebrated race to Europe and to Christendom. I have not been led to speak of them by any especial interest in them for their own sake, but by the circumstances of the present moment, which bring them often before us, oblige us to speak of them, and involve the necessity of entertaining some definite sentiments about them. With this view I have been considering their antecedents; whence they came, how they came, where they are, and what title they have to be there at all. When I now say, that I am proceeding to contemplate their future, do not suppose me to be so rash as to be hazarding any political prophecy; I do but mean to set down some characteristics in their existing state (if I have any right to fancy, that in any true measure we at the distance of some thousand miles know it), which naturally suggest to us to pursue their prospective history in one direction, not in another.

Now it seems safe to say, in the first place, that some time or other the Ottomans will come to an end. All human power has its termination sooner or later; states rise to fall; and, secure as they may be now, so one day they will be in peril and in course of overthrow. Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, each has had its day; and this was so clear to mankind 2,000 years ago, that the conqueror of Carthage wept, as he gazed upon its flames, for he saw in them the conflagration of her rival, his own Rome. "Fuit Ilium." The Saracens, the Moguls, have had their day; those European states, so great three centuries ago, Spain and Poland, Venice and Genoa, are now either extinct or in decrepitude. What is the lot of all states, is still more strikingly fulfilled in the case of empires; kingdoms indeed are of slow growth, but empires commonly are but sudden manifestations of power, which are as short-lived as they are sudden. Even the Roman empire, which is an exception, did not last beyond five hundred years; the Saracenic three hundred; the Spanish three hundred; the Russian has lasted about a hundred and fifty, that is, since the Czar Peter; the British not a hundred; the Ottoman has reached four or five. If there be an empire which does not at all feel the pressure of this natural law, but lasts continuously, repairs its losses, renews its vigour, and with every successive age emulates its antecedent fame, such a power must be more than human, and has no place in our present inquiry. We are concerned, not with any supernatural power, to which is promised perpetuity, but with the Ottoman empire, famous in history, vigorous in constitution, but, after all, human, and nothing more. There is, then, neither risk nor merit in prophesying the eventual fall of the Osmanlis, as of the Seljukians, as of the Gaznevides before them; the only wonder is that they actually have lasted as much as four hundred years.

Such will be the issue and the sum of their whole history; but, certain as this is, and confidently as it may be pronounced, nothing else can be prudently asserted about their future. Times and moments are in the decrees of the All-wise, and known to Him alone; and so are the occurrences to which they give birth. The only further point open to conjecture, as being not quite destitute of data for speculating upon it, is the particular course of events and quality of circumstances, which will precede the downfall of the Turkish power; for, granting that that downfall is to come, it is reasonable to think it will take place in that particular way, for which in their present state we see an existing preparation, if such can be discerned, or in a way which at least is not inconsistent with the peculiarities of that present state.

2.

Hence, in speculating on this question, I shall take this as a reasonable assumption first of all, that the catastrophe of a state is according to its antecedents, and its destiny according to its nature; and therefore, that we cannot venture on any anticipation of the instruments or the conditions of its death, until we know something about the principle and the character of its life. Next I lay down, that, whereas a state is in its very idea a society, and a society is a collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some common possession, and to the extent of that common possession, the presence of that possession held in common constitutes the life, and the loss of it constitutes the dissolution, of a state. In like manner, whatever avails or tends to withdraw that common possession, is either fatal or prejudicial to the social union. As regards the Ottoman power, then, we have to inquire what its life consists in, and what are the dangers to which that life, from the nature of its constitution, is exposed.

Now, states may be broadly divided into barbarous and civilized; their common possession, or life, is some object either of sense or of imagination; and their bane and destruction is either external or internal. And, to speak in general terms, without allowing for exceptions or limitations (for I am treating the subject scientifically only so far as is requisite for my particular inquiry), we may pronounce that barbarous states live in a common imagination, and are destroyed from without; whereas civilized states live in some common object of sense, and are destroyed from within.

By external enemies I mean foreign wars, foreign influence, insurrection of slaves or of subject races, famine, accidental enormities of individuals in power, and other instruments analogous to what, in the case of an individual, is called a violent death; by internal I mean civil contention, excessive changes, revolution, decay of public spirit, which may be considered analogous to natural death.

Again, by objects of imagination, I mean such as religion, true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true), divine mission of a sovereign or of a dynasty, and historical fame; and by objects of sense, such as secular interests, country, home, protection of person and property.

I do not allude to the conservative power of habit when I speak of the social bond, because habit is rather the necessary result of possessing a common object, and protects all states equally, barbarous and civilized. Nor do I include moral degeneracy among the instruments of their destruction, because this too attaches to all states, civilized and barbarous, and is rather a disposition exposing them to the influence of what is their bane, than a direct cause of their ruin in itself.

3.

But what is meant by the words barbarous and civilized, as applied to political bodies? this is a question which it will take more time to answer, even if I succeed in satisfying it at all. By "barbarism," then, I suppose, in itself is meant a state of nature; and by "civilization," a state of mental cultivation and discipline. In a state of nature man has reason, conscience, affections, and passions, and he uses these severally, or rather is influenced by them, according to circumstances; and whereas they do not one and all necessarily move in the same direction, he takes no great pains to make them agree together, but lets them severally take their course, and, if I may so speak, jostle into a sort of union, and get on together, as best they can. He does not improve his talents; he does not simplify and fix his motives; he does not put his impulses under the control of principle, or form his mind upon a rule. He grows up pretty much what he was when a child; capricious, wayward, unstable, idle, irritable, excitable; with not much more of habituation than that which experience of living unconsciously forces even on the brutes. Brutes act upon instinct, not on reason; they are ferocious when they are hungry; they fiercely indulge their appetite; they gorge themselves; they fall into torpor and inactivity. In a like, but a more human way, the savage is drawn by the object held up to him, as if he could not help following it; an excitement rushes on him, and he yields to it without a struggle; he acts according to the moment, without regard to consequences; he is energetic or slothful, tempestuous or calm, as the winds blow or the sun shines. He is one being to-day, another to-morrow, as if he were simply the sport of influences or circumstances. If he is raised somewhat above this extreme state of barbarism, just one idea or feeling occupies the narrow range of his thoughts, to the exclusion of others.

Moreover, brutes differ from men in this; that they cannot invent, cannot progress. They remain in the use of those faculties and methods, which nature gave them at their birth. They are endowed by the law of their being with certain weapons of defence, and they do not improve on them. They have food, raiment, and dwelling, ready at their command. They need no arrow or noose to catch their prey, nor kitchen to dress it; no garment to wrap round them, nor roof to shelter them. Their claws, their teeth, their viscera, are their butcher and their cook; and their fur is their wardrobe. The cave or the jungle is their home; or if it is their nature to exercise some architectural craft, they have not to learn it. But man comes into the world with the capabilities, rather than the means and appliances, of life. He begins with a small capital, but one which admits of indefinite improvement. He is, in his very idea, a creature of progress. He starts, the inferior of the brute animals, but he surpasses them in the long run; he subjects them to himself, and he goes forward on a career, which at least hitherto has not found its limit.

Even the savage of course in some measure exemplifies this law of human nature, and is lord of the brutes; and what he is and man is generally, compared with the inferior animals, such is man civilized compared with the barbarian. Civilization is that state to which man's nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and, viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of self-government out of passion, and of certainty out of opinion, and of faith out of reason. It is the due disposition of the various powers of the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the inferior, and the union of all into one whole. Aims, rules, views, habits, projects; prudence, foresight, observation, inquiry, invention, resource, resolution, perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice, benevolence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its recognized, its motive principles. Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it in its true idea, synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea, but in matter of fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far as its influence prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact, civilization is not necessarily Christianity. If we would view things as they really are, we must bear in mind that, true as it is, that only a supernatural grace can raise man towards the perfection of his nature, yet it is possible,—without the cultivation of its spiritual part, which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of apprehension, and slow of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt of faith and devotion, in comparison of objects tangible and present,—possible it is, I say, to combine in some sort the other faculties of man into one, and to progress forward, with the substitution of natural religion for faith, and a refined expediency or propriety for true morality, just as with practice a man might manage to run without an arm or without sight, and as the defect of one organ is sometimes supplied to a certain extent by the preternatural action of another.

And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization, and it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that perfection which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself reach; but a second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and remaining what it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control. Such was it, in its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome, where the perception of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated and accomplished intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward pretensions the inspired teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such is it at the present day, not only in its reception of the elements of religion and morals (when Christianity is in the midst of it as an inexhaustible storehouse for natural reason to borrow from), but especially in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its advancement and of its perfectibility.