rations of Zingis and Timour.

Or I might, in like manner, still more obviously insist on their system
of compulsory conversion, which, from the time of the Seljukian Sultans
to the present day, have raised the indignation and the compassion of
the Christian world; how, when the lieutenants of Malek Shah got
possession of Asia Minor, they profaned the churches, subjected Bishops
and Clergy to the most revolting outrages, circumcised the youth, and
led off their sisters to their profligate households;--how, when the
Ottomans conquered in turn, and added an infantry, I mean the
Janizaries, to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from
first to last, for near five hundred years, of boys, all born Christian,
a body of at first 12,000, at last 40,000 strong, torn away year by year
from their parents, circumcised, trained to the faith and morals of
their masters, and becoming in their turn the instruments of the
terrible policy of which they had themselves been victims; and how, when
at length lately they abolished this work of their hands, they ended it
by the slaughter of 20,000 of the poor renegades whom they had seduced
from their God. I might remind you how within the last few years a
Protestant traveller tells us that he found the Nestorian Christians,
who had survived the massacres of their race, living in holes and pits,
their pastures and tillage land forfeited, their sheep and cattle driven
away, their villages burned, and their ministers and people tortured;
and how a Catholic missionary has found in the neighbourhood of Broussa
the remnant of some twenty Catholic families, who, in consequence of
repudiating the Turkish faith, had been carried all the way from Servia
and Albania across the sea to Asia Minor; the men killed, the women
disgraced, the boys sold, till out of a hundred and eighty persons but
eighty-seven were left, and they sick, and famished, and dying among
their unburied dead. I could of course continue this topic also to any
extent, and draw it out as an illustration of the words of the Prophet
which I have quoted. But I prefer to take those words literally, as
expressive of the desolation spread by an infidel foe over the face of a
flourishing country; and then I shall be viewing the Turkish rule under
an aspect addressed to the senses, not admitting of a question,
calculated to rouse the sensibilities of Christians of whatever caste of
opinion, and explanatory by itself of the determ