Armenians and Greeks. Above all, it has no spirit of progress: its false origin is here avenging itself: there is about it (to adopt the fine suggestion of Möhler) a spiritual and intellectual poverty, which betrays the limited and finite conceptions of a merely human author; whereas Christianity, in the manner in which it becomes all things to all men;' in its ceaseless adaptation to the changing needs of the most varied ages, climes, and races, partakes of the Divine and infinite Spirit of its Founder, and is exuberant with the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.'

:

Mahometanism knows nothing of the might of meekness since it once gained an army of supporters, it has never exhibited to the world the spectacle of a suffering body: it has had indeed its fervid soldiers, but no real martyrs. What again (a crucial text this for a religion), what has it done for women? Granting that Mahomet in some degree exalted their condition among the Arabs, we need only glance at the accounts of Turkish harems, to feel convinced that Kadijah, and Ayeshah, and Fatima, have not been reproduced, nor even imitated, by the later daughters of the Moslem. The continuance of polygamy at all would prove fatal to its universality, perhaps even if Christianity were not at hand to confront it. It can never satisfy the needs of woman's heart.

But Islam will not perish till its work is done; and what is that work to be? A profound question, which meets with very contrary replies. Professor White, in a sermon appended to his Bampton Lectures,' spoke hopefully of the chances of converting Moslems, as distinguished from votaries of Buddhism or Brahmanism; Mr. Forster maintains that it must eventually prepare the way for the missions of the Cross, and claims the support of Mede and Warburton for his opinion; Möhler, who regarded the subject from a point of view the most opposite to that of Mr. Forster, yet displays in many respects a truly surprising amount of agreement with his views, and is sanguine that Mahometanism in Africa (where it has won converts by fair persuasion as well as by the sword), is doing the work which Judaism was at first divinely commissioned to effect, that of preparing the way for a purer faith in hearts as yet hard and stubborn, and incapable of its reception; so that one day the true labourers shall find a harvest ready for their reaping, and the Gospel speed thither on its way rejoicing, and Mahomet prove the servant of Christ.

Cf. on these points, Lectures on the Turks, pp. 242, 243. Lord Lindsay (Progression by Antagonism), Mr. Maurice, Möhler, and others, question, and not without reason, how far intellectual development was ever a bona fide result of Islamism.

Visions these so bright and winning, so consonant to the glory of Christ's religion, so worthy of the triumphs of Him who is ever justified in His sayings, and overcomes when He is judged, and overruleth all to good, that we almost shrink from venturing even to hint a doubt of their correctness. We wish to believe them true; we dare not call them false: but it must be, though with regret, remarked, that they do not yet seem to have been ratified by the stern reality of facts. Rather do we fear, with Archdeacon Grant, that the system of the false Prophet offers the most formidable obstruction to the faith of Christ, from the fact of its being, as it is, a counterfeit of the truth itself."1 Such fear is increased by the accounts of missionaries of the extreme difficulty of converting a Mahometan. One of our own Church to whom we have already alluded, told us, that though he would rejoice in hearing of any idolaters whom the Gospel could not reach turning Mahometans; yet that where the Malay (who is at present the Mussulman missionary) confronts the Christian priest, the only chance, humanly speaking, of the latter making a convert lay in his anticipating the teacher of Mahometanism. We do not wish, however, hastily to prejudge the somewhat peculiar case of Africa. Blessed indeed were it, if these sanguine expectations should prove true!

We have spoken chiefly of the Arab, or Saracen, Mahometans; whom we imagine to be the finest specimens of Mussulmans. But if there be a race, who have seldom, if ever, fought against. pagan idolatry, but constantly against the Cross; who, though truthful, dignified, and amiable in repose, are cruelty personified. when once aroused to deeds of blood; who are, as a nation, at once most proud and most depraved; under whose blighting yoke the most fertile portions of God's earth lie desolate and withering,2-how, it may well be asked, should Christians feel towards such a race? They may succour them if oppressed, for the Gospel teaches us to befriend all such; they must keep all promises, not in themselves sinful,3 for the good man observes his plighted word, though it be to his own hindrance;' they must pray, earnestly and lovingly pray, especially on the anniversary of the Crucifixion, that He, the Crucified, would

.

1 Bampton Lectures, Lect. vii. p. 227.

2 It is with extreme reluctance that we omit the inimitably beautiful passages, upon this part of the subject, contained in 'Lectures upon the History of the Turks,' (p. 138, et seq.) Dr. Newman may be naturally suspected of partiality, where he compares Italy with Turkey, but we can safely affirm that he has, in this respect, under-stated rather than over-stated his case.

3 Cf. Dr. Newman's Preface.

have mercy upon them, that, being acknowledged by them in part, He may be acknowledged by them altogether, and may lead them, with all other misbelievers, into His flock; but really to sympathise with them is impossible. What pagan, what Mahometan race has shed the blood of so many thousands of Christ's people?

'The Saracens even, who gave birth to an imposture, withered away at the end of 300 or 400 years, and had not the power, though they had the will, to persevere in their enmity to the Cross. The Tartars had both the will and the power, but they were far off from Christendom, or came down in ephemeral outbreaks, which were rather those of freebooters than persecutors, or were directed as often against the enemies of the Church, as against her children: but the unhappy race of whom I am speaking, from the first moment they appear in the history of Christendom, are its unmitigated, its obstinate, its consistent foes. They are inexhaustible in numbers, pouring down upon the south and west, and taking one and the same terrible mould of misbelief, as they successively descend. They have the populousness of the north, with the fire of the south; the resources of Tartars, with the fanaticism of Saracens. And when their strength declines, and age steals upon them, there is no softening, no misgiving; they die and make no sign. In the words of the Wise Man, Being born, they forthwith "ceased to be; and have been able to show no mark of virtue, but are con"sumed in wickedness." God's judgments, God's mercies, are inscrutable; one nation is taken, another is left. It is a mystery, but the fact stands; since the year 1048, the Turks have been the great Antichrist among the races of men.'1

Not, we hope and trust, from any lack of patriotism, but in a spirit of truest love for our mother country, we may be permitted to regret that any circumstances should have rendered an armed alliance with Turkey so imperative.

The present war is essentially against Russian ambition; it is only accidentally in behalf of the Crescent: that it may be overruled to the establishment of the Cross again in Čonstantinople is at least a subject of patriotic and Christian hope.

Already, indeed, that admiration for Turks, of which we spoke at the commencement of this article, is beginning to evaporate. There can be no doubt that, as has been happily said, the Turk receives Christian succour-the succour of Giaours (men, that is, without souls) as he calls them,--in the same spirit as he might eat swine's flesh to save himself from starving. But if any of our readers shrink from accepting sketches of Turkish character at our hands, and would fain look into the subject for themselves, thus much of advice we may beg them to accept, namely, that they would be extremely cautious in

1 Dr. Newman, pp. 127, 128.

trusting books of travel and the like, written since the war has broken out. Hardly any, not even Mr. Curzon's, are free from the evident mark of the pressure of the times. How different the tone of tourists but a short season before! Look at the graceful pages of Wayside Sketches; or, Seven Years' Wanderings among the Greeks and Turks.' Look at-but perhaps Mr. Thackeray is too professed a satirist for us to speak of his Cornhill to Cairo'-look at, then, the able pages of Mr. Bayle St. John's Turks in Europe.' Consider, for they are well worth considering (as suggestive of thoughts in danger of being ignored at present) the following words from such a man as Niebuhr:

In those happier times, when the Turkish empire was verging, without any hindrance, to its dissolution and ruin, through its own barbarism and wickedness; and when the Christians under its yoke were taking advantage of the growing sluggishness, rapacity, and shortsightedness of their tyrants, to lay the foundations of freedom for their posterity, which must have been attained but that the malice of fiends has converted the noblest hopes into the agonies of despair;—in those happier times, when much that was great and excellent was surviving here and there in that unfor tunate country unobserved, and thus escaped being crushed and destroyed; some bands of free-spirited men retired from various parts of Epirus to the mountains of Suli. There was formed that people, whose heroism and misfortunes have left the Messenians far behind it, and the extermination of which, through the agency of the Franks, will draw down the curses of posterity on our age, long after all the guilty have been called before the judg ment-seat of God.'1

All Europe is now condemning with the just voice of indignant reprobation the cruelties practised in the battle-field by the Russians, who are, thus far, more guilty than their Turkish opponents, in that Christianity should have taught them better things. We are not apologists for Russian barbarity in the soldier, any more than for Russian ambition in the Emperor; but our notices of Mahometanism would be most unfair and incomplete, if, after having allowed the most that can be said on behalf of Mahomet and his disciples in Asia and Africa, we should omit to touch upon the history of their anti-Christian deeds in Europe. A summary of a portion (and only a portion) of those deeds has been executed for us in a manner so far above anything that we can pretend to, that we cannot resist quoting it at some length :

'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 the 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.

'I might allude, if I dare, but I dare not, nor does any one else 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 is 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 if 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 within 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 springtime, not 900 were left them when the crops were ripe for the sick'e.'1

The same writer reminds us of some particulars of facts which some persons among us seem bent upon forgetting or explaining away :—

*How, when the Ottomans added an infantry-I mean the Janissaries-to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from first to last, for near 500 years, of boys, all born Christians, a body of at first 12,000, at last 40,000 strong, torn away, year by year, from their parents, circumcised, trained, corrupted 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 the 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 massacre of their race, living in holes and pits, their pastures and tillage land forfeited, their sheep and cattle driven away, their villages burned, their ministers and people tortured; and how a Catholic missionary has found in the neighbourhood of Broussa the remnant of some

Lectures on Hist. of Turks, pp. 135, 136.