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 tha