Apology for our incredulity. 177 complacent, and smiling. As it is to-day so was it yesterday, so has it always been, so will it continue to be. We cannot bring into harmony things which are in their nature so essentially dissonant. It is impossible to serve at the same time God and Mammon, Christ and Belial. But if Dr. Döllinger has no consistent aim in his work, and though it is easy to us to see whence the confusion of his treatise has arisen, he still has a wish. What, then, would he have? This; that we should abandon the errors of Dissent, the divisions incidental to the freedom of the Protestant Religion, and choose the better part of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. To obviate some of our objections, we are assured that the power of the Pope is limited to moral agency, and can only be exerted in accordance with the decisions of councils and the canons of the Church. Heaven forgive us that we can think of nothing but wolves in sheep's clothing when we hear such discourse, especially when we hear a Pope Leo the Great so unctuously and benignantly assuring us, in the very face of the facts which a thousand times deny it, The mildness of the Church contents itself with the 'sacerdotal judgment, and desires no blood-stained vengeance.' We confess it is beyond us to write about such things. The Popes renounce every power they have ever claimed. Pius the Ninth assures us that he has no concernment with our civil laws, and has no desire to abridge the political liberty we enjoy. We are glad to hear it. He will have one source of disquietude the less, for assuredly he will never have the chance to meddle. Nay, to all these overtures of peace, these invitations to return, these warnings against schism, these assurances of the supreme and abiding glories of Catholicism, we count it a sufficient answer to remember the rather hard-mouthed wisdom: We 'trusted you once, and you most cruelly deceived us; the fault ( was yours. If we trust you again, the fault will be ours.' No doubt some of these most specious promises would be keptkept after the fashion which has so long been known to the Vicars of Christ-kept, as Paul Sarpi's dagger-wound was given, more Romano. What that fashion has been, that it is. Potentates who can quote The Prince and the Gospels with equal facility must excuse us for not trusting them. A Church which blesses a Borgia, and curses a Savonarola, must not wonder that we prefer our own so-called schism to its so-called union. And an advocate who has an eloquent explanation and a voluminous excuse for such like things, should not think it unreasonable if we respect the logic of facts even more than the logic of his own glowing rhetoric. He is a better man than his cause, little as he is willing to think so. We shall not say outright that we dis NO. LXXI. N believe his assurances, that we fear his friends would not feel bound by his promises, and might play us false; but shall quote for him a paragraph from a history with which we cannot suppose him to be unfamiliar. It will need no oracle to read our riddle. When that exemplary Vicar of Christ, Sixtus the Fourth, was wreaking his private vengeance on the Colonnas, and was at the same time plundering them of their estates, there happened this incident:He seized on their domain of Marino, and 'causing the prothonotary Colonna to be attacked in his own 'house, took him prisoner, and put him to death. The mother 'of Colonna came to St. Celso, in Banchi, where the corpse lay, and lifting the severed head by its hair, she exclaimed, "Behold the head of my son! Such is the truth of the Pope. He promised that my son should be set at liberty if Marino were delivered into his hands. He is possessed of Marino, "and, behold, we have my son-but dead. Thus does the Pope "keep his word."' 6.66 We willingly add as a postscript, that Mr. MacCabe's translation of Dr. Döllinger's work is admirably done. It reads well, and is thoroughly trustworthy, though here and there is a word or a phrase which might advantageously be altered. He should certainly have used rather more freedom in correcting his author's few errors, and should quite as certainly not have referred English readers to pirated or otherwise dishonest editions of English works. June 19th.-The Japanese martyrs are canonized. Pax Manibus. The Consistory has been assembled; the Pope has pronounced his allocution; and Europe is once more, and by supreme authority, admonished of atheism, revolution, and general collapse and conflagration. But of all this superlatively shrill and shrieking oration what is the manifest lesson? That the temporal power is regarded by the Pope and his advisers as indispensable; that it is dear as the apple of the eye, is something like the heart's blood of the whole system; that to this venerable and priestly conclave the ideal of civil society is that of a theocracy in which Pius the Ninth and his successors should be the theocrats! Wherefore we quote to ourselves a well-known Horatian ode, Justum ac tenacem, and follow it with the reflection, Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat. Who is the Quem his Holiness may decide at pleasure. (179) ART. VIII.-The Turkish Empire in its Relations with Christianity and Civilization. By RICHARD ROBERT MADDEN, Fel. R.C.S. Eng., M.R.I.A., Author of Travels in Turkey,' 'Infirmities ' of Genius,' &c. London: Newby. 1862. IT is distressing to see an author wandering through literary life with intellectual aspirations above his intellectual condition. It has been Mr. Madden's aim, in most of his works, to soar into the lofty regions of philosophical inquiry. Unfortunately, he has never learnt where his forte lies, and where his weakness lies. He would make a fair statistician, at least, if he subjected his facts to a somewhat more careful scrutiny. But of philosophical induction he has not the faintest notion. He sets himself a thesis with so obscure a perception of its purport, that he obviously knows not, from first to last, what he is himself aiming to establish. He drifts through his subject like a mariner on the ocean, who has a chart indeed before him, but no compass, and, after innumerable involutions of navigation, finds himself to his surprise on the very shore from which he had originally set sail. Thus, in Mr. Madden's last chapter we see no appreciable advance from the positions taken up in his first; although we pass in the interval through a long array of irrelevant facts and inappropriate statistics, which tell us (whenever they are accurate) just what we knew before, but certainly fail to expound the relations of the Turkish Empire with either civilization or Christianity. It is clear, however, what Mr. Madden's opinions are, and what he would wish to show if he could. He considers civilization, as he understands the term, incompatible with Turkish rule and Mahometan institutions; and he looks on the Ottoman Empire as doomed to a speedy fall, which the intervention of the Western Powers can but temporarily arrest. This conclusion may be perfectly just; but it expresses, to a certain extent, an opinion so widely entertained that it hardly reflects much originality on Mr. Madden. We shall here take up this subject as a political rather than as a philosophical one. We start accordingly with the practical question, 'What is to be done with Turkey?' with which our author finishes his lengthy discussion. It is quite unnecessary to follow him through the dreary annals of Turkish oppression and misrule in past ages, which form the bulk of his volumes, and from which he is no more logically entitled to determine the character and capacities of the Turkish Empire now, than a Mahometan would be justified in deducing the character of Christianity in the present century from the horrors of the Albigensian crusades. To determine, therefore, 'what is to be done with Turkey?' we must study, for the most part, at least, Turkey as it is. . The Mr. Madden announces his practical aim to be that of confuting those who have asserted the new birth of the Turkish Empire, and its capacity to return, under European reforms, to its former prosperity. This is an equally interesting and momentous question. But, unhappily, Mr. Madden has no notion who and what his adversaries on this question are. champions of Turkish renascence are really represented by statesmen of experience, such as Lord Palmerston, and by enterprizing travellers like Mr. Layard. But Mr. Madden thinks he finds them among latitudinarians, free-thinkers, and broad churchmen! Ill as we have always augured of this movement in the Church, we certainly never apprehended that Mahometanism was a natural development of the scepticism of nominal Christians. Yet the persons whom Mr. Madden puts forward as advanced thinkers' on Christianity and Turkish politics indiscriminately, are 'Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Baden Powell, Theodore Parker, G. N. Lewis, Mr. Martineau, Gregg, the Hennells, and last, though not least in intellect, Francis 'Newman.' It is needless to ask why Mr. Martineau is the only one of these alleged apostles of Turkish restoration who receives the prefix which ordinary courtesy expects for the living, and why the names of Sir G. C. Lewis and Mr. Greg are misspelt. It is more apposite to notice Mr. Madden's remark, that 'What 'is truly marvellous in these tendencies is that Christians, believing in their religion, read eulogiums on the character of Mohammed, apologies for, and even panegyrics on the Koran, 'without ever suspecting that the authors of these works are 'practical infidels professing Christianity, whose real objects are indirectly to disparage Christianity, and directly to accredit its 'impugners.'-(Vol. i. p. 3.) We take leave to say that we know of no panegyrist of Mahometanism or the Koran, either in politics or literature, but Mr. Monckton Milnes; and we believe that even he has long ago sown those wild oats of religious or poetical free thinking. Mr. Madden, therefore, must descend to humbler ground, and abandon the illusion that the Turkish politics of this country in 1862 bear the remotest antithesis to our national belief in the truths of Christianity. His next position then, is, that the Turkish Empire and the Mahometan religion are essentially 'barbarous,' and totally opposed to the 'civilization of Christian 'Europe. That no people under the Mahometan religion are susceptible of the development of a people who recognise Mr. Madden's hazy notions. 181 Christianity, needs not to be asserted. But Mr. Madden's mistake here lies in a confusion between such abstract terms as 'barbarism' and 'civilization.' He assumes the universal existence of a sharp contradistinction between barbarism and civilization, exactly coinciding with the boundaries of Christianity. But surely Christian States may be barbarous as well as civilized, the only invariable distinction being that Christianity, as we have said, is susceptible of a social development, of which Mahometanism is not. It would be hard to maintain that at this moment the Russians are a more civilized people than the Turks, or that they enjoy more personal liberty, or more spiritual freedom, or that they are better acquainted with the arts and sciences, which form so many tests or attributes of civilized life. Yet Mr. Madden would wish to see Turkey, as a Mahometan State, surrendered to Russia, as a Christian State, although Russia is at least as barbarous as Turkey. A writer who aspires to be a practical politician must take the world as he finds it. The Turkish Empire stands before us a vast institution, whether vigorous or decayed, stretching into three continents, and comprehending some 38,000,000 of human. beings. By the common consent of Christendom, it has been admitted into the comity of nations. It is a great fact that an immense horde of Asiatic Mahometans inhabit this empire. It is a fact also that, if we were to drive those Asiatics who inhabit Turkey in Europe into their original continent, we should not weaken but should rather strengthen them in Asia. It is a fact that we could not exterminate them even if we would; that even if their country were to become a desert, we could not repeople it; and that if we were to drive them out of Europe into Asia, we should create difficulties in Europe which no Christian Government pretends at this moment to be able to solve. We may believe that Mahometan Turkey will eventually decline and expire, but it surely demands no 'free-thinking' on the part of Christian statesmen to lead them to make the best of that which, for the present, is obviously inevitable. If we take those chapters apart which aim to deal with the political question of the day, we find that Mr. Madden totally misconceives the reasons for which the Turkish Empire has been maintained by Western Europe. He is astonished that the first Protestant Power and the first Catholic Power should have combined to support a Mahometan rule, ascribes the combination to their infidelity, and characterizes it as a repudiation of their professed religion! But we utterly deny that this country (whatever may have been the views of public men in power at the time) went to war, in 1854, with a view of supporting the |