ers have denied that,
in the extensive money privileges conceded to Constantinople, he
contemplated any but political principles. As to the first point, we
apprehend that Constantine will be found not so much to have shrunk back
in fear from installing Christianity in the seat of supremacy, as to
have diverged in policy from our modern _methods_ of such an
installation. Our belief is, that according to _his_ notion of a state
religion, he supposed himself to have conferred that distinction upon
Christianity. With respect to the endowments and privileges of
Constantinople, they were various; some lay in positive donations,
others in immunities and exemptions; some again were designed to attract
strangers, others to attract nobles from old Rome. But, with fuller
opportunities for pursuing that discussion, we think it would be easy to
show, that in more than one of his institutions and his decrees he had
contemplated the special advantage of the poor as such; and that, next
after the august distinction of having founded the first Christian
throne, he had meant to challenge and fix the gaze of future ages upon
this glorious pretension--that he first had executed the scriptural
injunction to make a provision for the poor, as an order of society that
by laws immutable should "never cease out of the land."

_Secondly_, Let us advert to the value and functions of Constantinople
as the tutelary genius of western or dawning Christianity.

The history of Constantinople, or more generally of the Eastern Roman
empire, wears a peculiar interest to the children of Christendom; and
for two separate reasons--_first_, as being the narrow isthmus or bridge
which connects the two continents of ancient and modern history, and
_that_ is a philosophic interest; but, _secondly_ which in the very
highest degree is a practical interest, as the record of our earthly
salvation from Mahometanism. On two horns was Europe assaulted by the
Moslems; first, last, and through the largest tract of time, on the horn
of Constantinople; there the contest raged for more than eight hundred
years, and by the time that the mighty bulwark fell (1453,) Vienna and
other cities upon or near the Danube had found leisure for growing up;
so that, if one range of Alps had slowly been surmounted, another had
now slowly reared and embattled itself against the westward progress of
the Crescent. On the western horn, _in_ France, but _by_ Germans, once
for all Charles Marte