ginning of
the twelfth century, the race of Seljuk all but took Constantinople, and
overran the West, and did not; in the beginning of the fifteenth, the
Ottoman Turks were all but taking the same city, and then were withheld
from taking it, and at length did take it, and have it still. In each
case a foe came upon them from the north, still more fierce and vigorous
than they, and humbled them to the dust.

These two foes, which came upon the Seljukian Turks and the Ottoman
Turks respectively, are names by this time familiar to us; they are
Zingis and Timour. Zingis came down upon the Seljukians, and Timour came
down upon the Ottomans. Timour pressed the Ottomans even more severely
than Zingis pressed the Seljukians; yet the Seljukians did not recover
the blow of Zingis; but the Ottomans survived the blow of Timour, and
rose more formidable after it, and have long outlived the power which
inflicted it.

Zingis and Timour were but the blind instruments of divine vengeance.
They knew not what they did. The inward impulse of gigantic energy and
brutal cupidity urged them forward; ambition, love of destruction,
sensual appetite, frenzied them, and made them both more and less than
men. They pushed eastward, westward, southward; they confronted promptly
and joyfully every peril, every obstacle which lay in their course. They
smote down all rival pride and greatness of man; and therefore, by the
law (as I may call it) of their nature and destiny, not on politic
reason or far-reaching plan, but because they came across him, they
smote the Turk. These then were one class of his opponents; but there
was another adversary, stationed against him, of a different order, one
whose power was not material, but mental and spiritual; one whose enmity
was not random, or casual, or temporary, but went on steadily from age
to age, and lasts down to this day, except so far as the Turk's
decrepitude has at length disarmed anxiety and opposition. I have spoken
of him already; of course I mean the Vicar of Christ. I mean the
zealous, the religious enmity to every anti-Christian power, of him who
has outlasted Zingis and Timour, who has outlasted Seljuk, who is now
outlasting Othman. He incited Christendom against the Seljukians, and
the Seljukians, assailed also by Zingis, sunk beneath the double blow.
He tried to rouse Christendom against the Ottomans also, but in vain;
and therefore in vain did Timour discharge his overwhelming, crushing
fo