iving; 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
consumed 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.

I say since this date, because then it was that Togrul Beg finally
opened the gates of the North to those descents, which had taken place
indeed at intervals before, but then became the habit of centuries. In
vain was the power of his dynasty overthrown by the Crusaders; in vain
do the Seljukians disappear from the annals of the world; in vain is
Constantinople respited; in vain is Europe saved. Christendom in arms
had not yet finished, it had but begun the work, in which it needed the
grace to persevere. Down came the savage hordes, as at first, upon
Sogdiana and Khorasan, so then upon Syria and its neighbouring
countries. Sometimes they remain wild Turcomans, sometimes they fall
into the civilization of the South; but there they are, in Egypt, in the
Holy Land, in Armenia, in Anatolia, forming political bodies of long or
short duration, breaking up here to form again there, in all cases
trampling on Christianity, and beating out its sacred impression from
the breasts of tens of thousands. Nor is this all; scarcely is the race
of Seljuk quite extinct, or rather when it is on its very death-bed,
after it had languished and shrunk and dwindled and flickered and kept
on dying through a tedious two hundred years, when its sole remaining
heir was just in one obscure court, from that very court we discern the
birth of another empire, as dazzling in its rise, as energetic and
impetuous in its deeds as that of Togrul, Alp, and Malek, and far more
wide-spreading, far more powerful, far more lasting than the Seljukian.
This is the empire of the great (if I must measure it by a human
standard) and glorious race of Othman; this is the dynasty of the
Ottomans or Osmanlis; once the admiration, the terror of nations, now,
even in its downfall, an object of curiosity, interest, anxiety, and
even respect; but, whether high or low, in all cases to the Christian
the inveterate and hateful enemy of the Cross.

1.

There is a certain remarkable parallel and contrast between the fortunes
of these two races, the Seljukian and the Ottoman. In the be