bound when existing as the four sultanies, so the loosing of them would suggest that the restraint was taken off from them all alike and at the same time; which was the fact when their common foes, the Crusaders, had finally left the battle-fields of Asia.

The preparation also "to slay the third part of men" belonged alike to all the sultanies; since during the period of the preparation to the time in which they were loosed to slay, they were a mutual aid to each other, and during the oppressions of the Crusades their combined power was needed for mutual preservation from extinction.

It does not hence seem of much force to urge inasmuch as the Turkish branch of the great monarchy of the Euphrates mainly effected the overthrow of Greece, that therefore the other branches could not have been included in the processes of the long-continued preparation.

It is quite obvious, on the contrary, that the four sultanies mutually sustained each other amid the wars that threatened their total ruin as separate or as confederate states; and hence the processes of the preparation, the binding and the loosing, belong alike to the four, and it is proper and natural so to speak of them.

CHAPTER XX.

THE CRUSADES-THEIR CAUSES AND ENDS.

"Hail, Calvary, thou mountain hoar,
Wet with our Redeemer's gore!
Ye trampled tombs, ye fanes forlorn,
Ye stones by tears of pilgrims worn!
Your ravish'd honours to restore,

Fearless we climb this hostile shore!"

WARTON.

THE Turks, in the zeal of recent converts and in the cruelty of slaves just risen to be masters, exceeded the Saracens in intolerance and oppression, demanded of the pilgrims in the holy city impossible sums, dragged their patriarch by the hair of his head on the pavement, and turned the plains of Asia into a highway for their robber-bands. Princes, nobles, the ministers of religion and trains of unarmed peasants, on their way to the holy sepulchre, were alike pillaged, beaten, slain, and sometimes their stomachs ripped open and examined for treasures supposed to have been swallowed.

There was in the Turkish accession to Mo

hammedanism a revival of the zeal and cruelty of the tiger Caled, and of those that followed him in "the paths of blood." The time however for their peculiar mission had not yet arrived. They were anticipating it by centuries. They must therefore back again to their enclosures, lose Palestine and Peninsular Asia, and struggle in vain to burst their bonds or break from the frail barriers of the Euphrates, until the time appointed.

In God's providential government of the world, his care for his church is ever a controlling consideration.

When her safety is endangered, the caverns and gorges of the Alps become the hollow of his hand in which he hides her. His seal is placed upon the forehead of his people, and his protective shield hangs at the gate of the monastery as soon as they enter there. An invisible rampart surrounds Philadelphia, because she shelters those who kept the word of his patience. His people are in the valleys, and a vast army falls without hand, and flies in hopeless disarray from the banks of the Rhone.

And to that same tender care of his church, so obvious in the past and so cheering in our anticipations of the future, are we to look for the causes of the Crusades.

The voice of Peter the Hermit, summoning the fierce chivalry of the North to the rescue of the holy sepulchre, was the voice of God, commanding those who would have been sure to have arrested his gracious work in blood to a distant land, to gratify there their love of war, to expend there their martial rage on the turbulent sultanies, and finally to disappear there themselves, and bury their hosts forever in the oblivion of the desert.

There is a choice in approaching or liable evils, and in the selection from among which of one rather than another a providential intelligence discovers its wisdom.

An apostate is also often a persecuting church, the implacable foe of Zion. But, evil and destructive though it be, yet there are occasional mitigations, periods of intervening repose, and here and there a ray of a pure and sanctifying light. But a false system of faith, such as that of the Arabian prophet, is a ruin that leaves behind it no trace of that Christianity which it wholly exterminates.

Catholic Europe, as compared with Britain and the United States, is one among the dark places of the earth; still, an intenser darkness broods over Mohammedan countries.

To bind these angels, therefore, within the

limits of their original dominions, was the will and the work of a protective Providence. God waits not till the myriads of the Turkish horse slake their thirst in the rivers and fountains of the Alps, ere he rouses to the defence of his bride in the wilderness. He anticipates and turns away the threatened ruin by turning the tide of battle to the East.

This event, then, is invested with a peculiar interest not only in itself, as it is a history of remarkable occurrences, but also with a relative interest, as it is the next step in the series of those processes by which the church is preserved from extermination, and by means of which she is enabled to spread through Europe the imperishable elements of the great Reformation.

In A.D. 1095 Peter the Hermit visited Jerusalem, and saw and felt the brutal violence of the Turks with emotions of unutterable horror. The patriarch also recounted the trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, of bonds and exactions, to which his suffering flock had been subjected under the new regime. He witnessed also, with his own eyes, the tomb of Jesus defaced, the church of the resurrection violated, and the pilgrims perishing in want and misery around him.