rth in order to obtain, if possible, new members for
the league? But Germany was difficult to rouse. The dissensions among
Protestants were ever inviting the assaults of the Papists. Its multitude
of sovereigns were passing their leisure moments in wrangling among
themselves as usual on abstruse points of theology, and devoting their
serious hours to banquetting, deep drinking, and the pleasures of the
chase. The jeremiads of old John of Nassau grew louder than ever, but his
voice was of one crying in the wilderness. The wrath to come of that
horrible Thirty Years' War, which he was not to witness seemed to inspire
all his prophetic diatribes. But there were few to heed them. Two great
dangers seemed ever impending over Christendom, and it is difficult to
decide which fate would have been the more terrible, the establishment of
the universal monarchy of Philip II., or the conquest of Germany by the
Grand Turk. But when Ancel and other emissaries sought to obtain succour
against the danger from the south-west, he was answered by the clash of
arms and the shrieks of horror which came daily from the south-east. In
vain was it urged, and urged with truth, that the Alcoran was less cruel
than the Inquisition, that the soil of Europe might be overrun by Turks
and Tartars, and the crescent planted triumphantly in every village, with
less disaster to the human race, and with better hope that the germs of
civilization and the precepts of Christianity might survive the invasion,
than if the system of Philip, of Torquemada, and of Alva, should become
the universal law. But the Turk was a frank enemy of Christianity, while
Philip murdered Christians in the name of Christ. The distinction imposed
upon the multitudes, with whom words were things. Moreover, the danger
from the young and enterprising Mahomet seemed more appalling to the
imagination than the menace, from which experience had taken something of
its terrors, of the old and decrepit Philip.

The Ottoman empire, in its exact discipline, in its terrible
concentration of purpose, in its contempt for all arts and sciences, and
all human occupation save the trade of war and the pursuit of military
dominion, offered a strong contrast to the distracted condition of the
holy Roman empire, where an intellectual and industrious people,
distracted by half a century of religious controversy and groaning under
one of the most elaborately perverse of all the political systems ever
invent