Theological Essays and Other Papers Volume I Part 9

CASE IV.

CRIMINAL PROSECUTION OF FRAUDULENT SERVANTS.

Any reader, who is not deeply read in the economy of English life, will have a most inadequate notion of the vast extent to which this case occurs. We are well a.s.sured, (for our information comes from quarters _judicially_ conversant with the question,) that in no other channel of human life does there flow one-hundredth part of the forbearance and the lenity which are called into action by the relation between injured masters and their servants. We are informed that, were every third charge pursued effectually, half the courts in Europe would not suffice for the cases of criminality which emerge in London alone under this head. All England would, in the course of five revolving years, have pa.s.sed under the torture of _subpoena_, as witnesses for the prosecution or the defence.

This multiplication of cases arises from the coincidence of hourly opportunity with hourly temptation, both carried to the extreme verge of possibility, and generally falling in with youth in the offenders. These aggravations of the danger are three several palliations of the crime, and they have weight allowed to them by the indulgent feelings of masters in a corresponding degree; not one case out of six score that are discovered (while, perhaps, another six score go undiscovered) being ever prosecuted with rigor and effect.

In this universal laxity of temper lies an injury too serious to public morals; and the crime reproduces itself abundantly under an indulgence so Christian in its motive, but unfortunately operating with the full effect of genial culture. Masters, who have made themselves notorious by indiscriminate forgiveness, might be represented symbolically as gardeners watering and tending luxuriant crops of crime in hot-beds or forcing-houses. In London, many are the tradesmen, who, being reflective as well as benevolent, perceive that something is amiss in the whole system. In part the law has been to blame, stimulating false mercy by punishment disproportioned to the offence. But many a judicious master has seen cause to suspect his own lenity as more mischievously operative even than the law's hardness, and as an effeminate surrender to luxurious sensibilities. Those have not been the severest masters whose names are attached to fatal prosecutions: on the contrary, three out of four have been persons who looked forward to general consequences--having, therefore, been more than usually thoughtful, were, for that reason, likely to be more than usually humane. They did not suffer the less acutely, because their feelings ran counter to the course of what they believed to be their duty. Prosecutors often sleep with less tranquillity during the progress of a judicial proceeding than the objects of the prosecution. An English judge of the last century, celebrated for his uprightness, used to balance against that pity so much vaunted for the criminal, the duty of 'a pity to the country.' But private prosecutors of their own servants, often feel both modes of pity at the same moment.

For this difficulty a book of Casuistry might suggest a variety of resources, not so much adapted to a case of that nature already existing, as to the prevention of future cases. Every mode of trust or delegated duty would suggest its own separate improvements; but all improvements must fall under two genuine heads--first, the diminution of temptation, either by abridging the amount of trust reposed; or, where that is difficult, by shortening its duration, and multiplying the counterchecks: secondly, by the moderation of the punishment in the event of detection, as the sole means of reconciling the public conscience to the law, and diminis.h.i.+ng the chances of impunity. There is a memorable proof of the rash extent to which the London tradesmen, at one time, carried their confidence in servants. So many clerks, or apprentices, were allowed to hold large balances of money in their hands through the intervals of their periodical settlings, that during the Parliamentary war mult.i.tudes were tempted, by that single cause, into absconding. They had always a refuge in the camps. And the loss sustained in this way was so heavy, when all payments were made in gold, that to this one evil suddenly a.s.suming a shape of excess, is ascribed, by some writers, the first establishment of goldsmiths as bankers.[Footnote: Goldsmiths certainly acted in that capacity from an earlier period.

But from this era, until the formation of the Bank of England in 1696, they entered more fully upon the functions of bankers, issuing notes which pa.s.sed current in London.]

Two other weighty considerations attach to this head--1. The known fact that large breaches of trust, and embezzlements, are greatly on the increase, and have been since the memorable case of Mr.

Fauntleroy. America is, and will be for ages, a city of refuge for this form of guilt. 2. That the great training of the conscience in all which regards pecuniary justice and fidelity to engagements, lies through the discipline and _tyrocinium_ of the humbler ministerial offices--those of clerks, book-keepers, apprentices.

The law acts through these offices, for the unconfirmed conscience, as leading-strings to an infant in its earliest efforts at walking.

It forces to go right, until the choice may be supposed trained and fully developed. That is the great function of the law; a function which it will perform with more or less success, as it is more or less fitted to win the cordial support of masters.

CASE V.

VERACITY.

Here is a special 't.i.tle,' (to speak with the civil lawyers,) under that general claim put in for England with respect to a moral pre-eminence amongst the nations. Many are they who, in regions widely apart, have noticed with honor the English superiority in the article of veneration for truth. Not many years ago, two Englishmen, on their road overland to India, fell in with a royal _cortege_, and soon after with the prime minister and the crown prince of Persia. The prince honored them with an interview; both parties being on horseback, and the conversation therefore reduced to the points of nearest interest. Amongst these was the English character. Upon this the prince's remark was--that what had most impressed him with respect for England and her inst.i.tutions was, the remarkable spirit of truth-speaking which distinguished her sons; as supposing her inst.i.tutions to grow out of her sons, and her sons out of her inst.i.tutions. And indeed well he might have this feeling by comparison with his own countrymen: Persians have no _principles_ apparently on this point--all is impulse and accident of feeling. Thus the journal of the two Persian princes in London, as lately reported in the newspapers, is one tissue of falsehoods: not, most undoubtedly, from any purpose of deceiving, but from the overmastering habit (cherished by their whole training and experience) of repeating everything in a spirit of amplification, with a view to the _wonder_ only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle.

The Turks are much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes ill.u.s.trates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of ill.u.s.trating his supposed absence of mind--viz. that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. The fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not liable to any absence at all: apparently this 'distraction' was a.s.sumed as a means of making a poor sort of sport for his friends.

Like many another man in such circ.u.mstances, he saw and entered into the fun which his own imaginary forgetfulness produced. But were it otherwise, who can believe so outrageous a self-forgetfulness as that which would darken his eyes to the very pictures of his own hearth? Were such a thing possible, were it even real, it would still be liable to the just objection of the critics--that, being marvelous in appearance, even as a fact it ought not to be brought forward for any purpose of wit, but only as a truth of physiology, or as a fact in the records of a surgeon. The _'incredulus odi'_ is too strong in such cases, and it adheres to three out of every four French anecdotes. The French taste is, indeed, anything but good in all that department of wit and humor. And the ground lies in their national want of veracity. To return to England--and having cited an Oriental witness to the English character on this point, let us now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Konigsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations--foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he p.r.o.nounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence.

General integrity could not exist, he held, without veracity as its basis; nor that basis exist without superinducing general integrity.

This opinion, perhaps, many beside Kant will see cause to approve.

For ourselves we can truly say--never did we know a human being, boy or girl, who began life as an habitual undervaluer of truth, that did not afterwards exhibit a character conformable to that beginning--such a character as, however superficially correct under the steadying hand of self-interest, was not in a lower key of moral feeling as well as of principle.

But out of this honorable regard to veracity in Immanuel Kant, branched out a principle in Casuistry which most people will p.r.o.nounce monstrous. It has occasioned much disputing backwards and forwards. But as a practical principle of conduct, (for which Kant meant it,) inevitably it must be rejected--if for no other reason because it is at open war with the laws and jurisprudence of all Christian Europe. Kant's doctrine was this; and the ill.u.s.trative case in which it is involved, let it be remembered, is his own:--So sacred a thing, said he, is truth--that if a murderer, pursuing another with an avowed purpose of killing him, were to ask of a third person by what road the fleeing party had fled, that person is bound to give him true information. And you are at liberty to suppose this third person a wife, a daughter, or under any conceivable obligations of love and duty to the fugitive. Now this is monstrous: and Kant himself, with all his parental fondness for the doctrine, would certainly have been recalled to sounder thoughts by these two considerations--

1_st_. That by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant's principle would be held a _particeps criminis_--an accomplice before the fact.

2_d_. That, in reality, a just principle is lurking under Kant's error; but a principle translated from its proper ground.

Not truth, individual or personal--not truth of mere facts, but truth doctrinal--the truth which teaches, the truth which changes men and nations--this is the truth concerned in Kant's meaning, had he explained his own meaning to himself more distinctly.

With respect to that truth, wheresoever it lies, Kant's doctrine applies--that all men have a right to it; that perhaps you have no right to suppose of any race or nation that it is not prepared to receive it; and, at any rate, that no circ.u.mstances of expedience can justify you in keeping it back.

CASE VI.

THE CASE OF CHARLES I.

Many cases arise from the life and political difficulties of Charles I. But there is one so peculiarly pertinent to an essay which entertains the general question of Casuistry--its legitimacy, its value--that with this, although not properly a domestic case, or only such in a mixed sense, we shall conclude.

No person has been so much attacked for his scruples of conscience as this prince; and what seems odd enough, no person has been so much attacked for resorting to books of Casuistry, and for encouraging literary men to write books of Casuistry. Under his suggestion and sanction, Saunderson wrote his book on the obligation of an oath, (for which there was surely reason enough in days when the democratic tribunals were forcing men to swear to an _et caetera_;) and, by an impulse originally derived from him, Jeremy Taylor wrote afterwards his _Ductor Dubitantium_, Bishop Barlow wrote his _Cases of Conscience_, &c. &c.

For this dedication of his studies, Charles has been plentifully blamed in after times. He was seeking evasions for plain duties, say his enemies. He was arming himself for intrigue in the school of Machiavel. But now turn to his history, and ask in what way any man could have extricated himself from that labyrinth which invested his path _but_ by Casuistry. Cases the most difficult are offered for his decision: peace for a distracted nation in 1647, on terms which seemed fatal to the monarchy; peace for the same nation under the prospect of war rising up again during the Isle of Wight treaty in 1648, but also under the certainty of destroying the Church of England. On the one side, by refusing, he seemed to disown his duties as the father of his people. On the other side, by yielding, he seemed to forget his coronation oath, and the ultimate interests of his people--to merge the future and the reversionary in the present and the fugitive. It was not within the possibilities that he could so act as not to offend one half of the nation. His dire calamity it was, that he must be hated, act how he would, and must be condemned by posterity. Did his enemies allow for the misery of this internal conflict? Milton, who never appears to more disadvantage than when he comes forward against his sovereign, is indignant that Charles should have a conscience, or plead a conscience, in a public matter. Henderson, the celebrated Scotch theologian, came post from Edinburgh to London (whence he went to Newcastle) expressly to combat the king's scruples. And he also (in his private letters) seems equally enraged as Milton, that Charles should pretend to any private conscience in a state question.

Now let us ask--what was it that originally drove Charles to books of Casuistry? It was the deep shock which he received, both in his affections and his conscience, from the death of Lord Strafford.

Every body had then told him, even those who felt how much the law must be outraged to obtain a conviction of Lord Strafford, how many principles of justice must be shaken, and how sadly the royal word must suffer in its sanct.i.ty,--yet all had told him that it was expedient to sacrifice that n.o.bleman. One man ought not to stand between the king and his alienated people. It was good for the common welfare that Lord Strafford should die. Charles was unconvinced.

He was sure of the injustice; and perhaps he doubted even of the expedience. But his very virtues were armed against his peace. In all parts of his life self-distrust and diffidence had marked his character. What was he, a single person, to resist so many wise counsellors, and what in a representative sense was the nation ranged on the other side? He yielded: and it is not too much to say that he never had a happy day afterwards. The stirring period of his life succeeded--the period of war, camps, treaties. Much time was not allowed him for meditation. But there is abundant proof that such time as he had, always pointed his thoughts backwards to the afflicting case of Lord Stratford. This he often spoke of as the great blot--the ineffaceable transgression of his life. For this he mourned in penitential words yet on record. To this he traced back the calamity of his latter life. Lord Stratford's memorable words--'Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of princes,'--rang for ever in his ear. Lord Stafford's blood lay like a curse upon his throne.

Now, by what a pointed answer, drawn from this one case, might Charles have replied to the enemies we have noticed--to those, like so many historians since his day, who taxed him with studying Casuistry for the purposes of intrigue--to those, like Milton and Henderson, who taxed him with exercising his private conscience on public questions.

'I had studied no books of Casuistry,' he might have replied, 'when I made the sole capital blunder in a case of conscience, which the review of my life can show.

'I did not insist on my private conscience; woe is me that I did not: I yielded to what was called the public conscience in that one case which has proved the affliction of my life, and which, perhaps, it was that wrecked the national peace.'

A more plenary answer there cannot be to those who suppose that Casuistry is evaded by evading books of Casuistry. That dread forum of conscience will for ever exist as a tribunal of difficulty. The discussion must proceed on some principle or other, good or bad; and the only way for obtaining light is by clearing up the grounds of action, and applying the principles of moral judgment to such facts or circ.u.mstances as most frequently arise to perplex the understanding, or the affections, or the conscience.

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS.[Footnote: By George Finlae]

[1844.]

What is called _Philosophical History_ we believe to be yet in its infancy. It is the profound remark of Mr. Finlay--profound as we ourselves understand it, _i. e.,_ in relation to this philosophical treatment, 'That history will ever remain inexhaustible.'

How inexhaustible? Are the _facts_ of history inexhaustible?

In regard to the _ancient_ division of history with which he is there dealing, this would be in no sense true; and in any case it would be a lifeless truth. So entirely have the mere facts of Pagan history been disinterred, ransacked, sifted, that except by means of some chance medal that may be unearthed in the illiterate East (as of late towards Bokhara), or by means of some mysterious inscription, such as those which still mock the learned traveller in Persia, northwards near Hamadan (Ecbatana), and southwards at Persepolis, or those which distract him amongst the shadowy ruins of Yucatan (Uxmal, suppose, and Palenque),--once for all, barring these pure G.o.dsends, it is hardly 'in the dice' that any downright novelty of fact should remain in reversion for this nineteenth century. The merest possibility exists, that in Armenia, or in a Graeco-Russian monastery on Mount Athos, or in Pompeii, &c., some authors. .h.i.therto a?e?d?t?? may yet be concealed; and by a channel in that degree improbable, it is possible that certain new facts of history may still reach us. But else, and failing these cryptical or subterraneous currents of communication, for us the record is closed. History in that sense has come to an end, and sealed up as by the angel in the Apocalypse. What then? The facts _so_ understood are but the dry bones of the mighty past. And the question arises here also, not less than in that sublimest of prophetic visions, 'Can these dry bones live?'. Not only can they live, but by an infinite variety of life. The same historic facts, viewed in different lights, or brought into connection with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered by keys everlastingly varied.

To us we repeat that oftentimes it seems as though the _science_ of history were yet scarcely founded. There will be such a science, if at present there is not; and in one feature of its capacities it will resemble chemistry. What is so familiar to the perceptions of man as the common chemical agents of water, air, and the soil on which we tread? Yet each one of these elements is a mystery to this day; handled, used, tried, searched experimentally, in ten thousand ways--it is still unknown; fathomed by recent science down to a certain depth, it is still probably by its destiny unfathomable.

Even to the end of days, it is pretty certain that the minutest particle of earth--that a dew-drop scarcely distinguishable as a separate object--that the slenderest filament of a plant will include within itself secrets inaccessible to man. And yet, compared with the mystery of man himself, these physical worlds of mystery are but as a radix of infinity. Chemistry is in this view mysterious and spinosistically sublime--that it is the science of the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. With cold water (as every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the rod of Amram's son, you may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore? Simply because old things are brought together in new modes of combination. And in endless instances beside we see the same Panlike latency of forms and powers, which gives to the external world a capacity of self-transformation, and of _polymorphosis_ absolutely inexhaustible.

But the same capacity belongs to the facts of history. And we do not mean merely that, from subjective differences in the minds reviewing them, such facts a.s.sume endless varieties of interpretation and estimate, but that objectively, from lights still increasing in the science of government and of social philosophy, all the primary facts of history become liable continually to new theories, to new combinations, and to new valuations of their moral relations.

We have seen some kinds of marble, where the veinings happened to be unusually multiplied, in which human faces, figures, processions, or fragments of natural scenery seemed absolutely illimitable, under the endless variations or inversions of the order, according to which they might be combined and grouped. Something a.n.a.logous takes effect in reviewing the remote parts of history. Rome, for instance, has been the object of historic pens for twenty centuries (dating from Polybius); and yet hardly so much as twenty years have elapsed since Niebuhr opened upon us almost a new revelation, by re-combining the same eternal facts, according to a different set of principles. The same thing may be said, though not with the same degree of emphasis, upon the Grecian researches of the late Ottfried Mueller. Egyptian history again, even at this moment, is seen stealing upon us through the dusky twilight in its first distinct lineaments. Before Young, Champollion, and the others who have followed on their traces in this field of history, all was outer darkness; and whatsoever we _do_ know or _shall_ know of Egyptian Thebes will now be recovered as if from the unswathing of a mummy. Not until a flight of three thousand years has left Thebes the Hekatompylos a dusky speck in the far distance, have we even _begun_ to read her annals, or to understand her revolutions.

Another instance we have now before us of this new historic faculty for resuscitating the buried, and for calling back the breath to the frozen features of death, in Mr. Finlay's work upon the Greeks as related to the Roman empire. He presents us with old facts, but under the purpose of clothing them with a new life. He rehea.r.s.es ancient stories, not with the humble ambition of better adorning them, of more perspicuously narrating, or even of more forcibly pointing their moral, but of extracting from them some new meaning, and thus forcing them to arrange themselves, under some latent connection, with other phenomena now first detected, as ill.u.s.trations of some great principle or agency now first revealing its importance.

Mr. Finlay's style of intellect is appropriate to such a task; for it is subtle and Machiavellian. But there is this difficulty in doing justice to the novelty, and at times we may say with truth to the profundity of his views, that they are by necessity thrown out in continued successions of details, are insulated, and, in one word, _sporadic_. This follows from the very nature of his work; for it is a perpetual commentary on the incidents of Grecian history, from the era of the Roman conquest to the commencement of what Mr. Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine empire.

These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded; they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves in the embarra.s.sments of the central government, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, when arguing at one time a pestilence, at another an insurrection, or an inroad of barbarians. It is not the fault of Mr. Finlay, but his great disadvantage, that the affairs of Greece have been thus discontinuously exhibited, and that its internal changes of condition have been never treated except obliquely, and by men _aliud agentibus_. The Grecian _race_ had a primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the h.e.l.lenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded h.e.l.las into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of Greece, through all her phases and stages, was ever attempted. The greatness of her later revolutions, simply as changes, would have attracted the historian; but, as changes a.s.sociated with calamity and loss of power, they repelled his curiosity, and alienated his interest. It is the very necessity, therefore, of Mr. Finlay's position, when coming into such an inheritance, that he must splinter his philosophy into separate individual notices; for the records of history furnish no grounds for more. _Spartam, quam nactus est, ornavit_. But this does not remedy the difficulty for ourselves, in attempting to give a representative view of his philosophy. General abstractions he had no opportunity for presenting; consequently we have no opportunity for valuing; and, on the other hand, single cases selected from a succession of hundreds would not justify any _representative_ criticism, more than the single brick, in the anecdote of Hierocles, would serve representatively to describe or to appraise the house.

Under this difficulty as to the possible for ourselves, and the just for Mr. Finlay, we shall adopt the following course. So far as the Greek people collected themselves in any splendid manner with the Roman empire, they did so with the eastern horn of that empire, and in point of time from the foundation of Constantinople as an eastern Rome, in the fourth century, to a period not fully agreed on; but for the moment we will say with Mr. Finlay, up to the early part of the eighth century. A reason given by Mr. Finlay for this latter date is--that about that time the Grecian blood, so widely diffused in Asia, and even in Africa, became finally detached by the progress of Mahometanism and Mahometan systems of power from all further concurrence or coalition with the views of the Byzantine Caesar. Constantinople was from that date thrown back more upon its own peculiar heritage and jurisdiction, of which the main resources for war and peace lay in Europe and (speaking by the narrowest terms) in Thrace. Henceforth, therefore, for the city and throne of Constantine, resuming its old Grecian name of Byzantium, there succeeded a theatre less diffusive, a population more concentrated, a character of action more determinate and jealous, a style of courtly ceremonial more elaborate as well as more haughtily repulsive, and universally a system of interests, as much more definite and selfish, as might naturally be looked for in a nation now everywhere surrounded by new thrones gloomy with malice, and swelling with the consciousness of youthful power. This new and final state of the eastern Rome Mr. Finlay denominates the Byzantine empire. Possibly this use of the term may be capable of justification: but more questions would arise in the discussion than Mr. Finlay has thought it of importance to notice. And for the present we shall take the word _Byzantine_ in its most ordinary acceptation, as denoting the local empire founded by Constantine in Byzantium early in the fourth century, under the idea of a translation from the old western Rome, and overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in the year 1453. In the fortunes and main stages of this empire, what are the chief arresting phenomena, aspects, or relations, to the greatest of modern interests? We select by preference these:

I. _First_, this was the earliest among the kingdoms of our planet _which connected itself with Christianity_. In Armenia, there had been a previous _state_ recognition of Christianity.

But _that_ was neither splendid nor distinct. Whereas the Byzantine Rome built avowedly upon Christianity as its own basis, and consecrated its own nativity by the sublime act of founding the first provision ever attempted for the poor, considered simply as poor (_i.e._ as objects of pity, not as instruments of ambition).

II. _Secondly, as the great aegis of western Christendom_, nay, the barrier which made it possible that any Christendom should ever exist, this Byzantine empire is ent.i.tled to a very different station in the enlightened grat.i.tude of us Western Europeans from any which it has yet held. We do not scruple to say--that, by comparison with the services of the Byzantine people to Europe, no nation on record has ever stood in the same relation to any other single nation, much less to a whole family of nations, whether as regards the opportunity and means of conferring benefits, or as regards the astonis.h.i.+ng perseverance in supporting the succession of these benefits, or as regards the ultimate event of these benefits. A great wrong has been done for ages; for we have all been accustomed to speak of the Byzantine empire with scorn, [Footnote: _'With scorn.'_--This has arisen from two causes: one is the habit of regarding the whole Roman empire as in its 'decline' from so early a period as that of Commodus; agreeably to which conceit, it would naturally follow that, during its latter stages, the Eastern empire must have been absolutely in its dotage. If already declining in the second century, then, from the tenth to the fifteenth, it must have been paralytic and bed-ridden The other cause may be found in the accidental but reasonable hostility of the Byzantine court to the first Crusaders, as also in the disadvantageous comparison with respect to manly virtues between the simplicity of these western children, and the refined dissimulation of the Byzantines.] as chiefly known by its effeminacy; and the greater is the call for a fervent palinode.

III. _Thirdly._ In a reflex way, as the one great danger which overshadowed Europe for generations, and against which the Byzantine empire proved the capital bulwark, Mahometanism may rank as one of the Byzantine aspects or counterforces. And if there is any popular error applying to the history of that great convulsion, as a political effort for revolutionizing the world, some notice of it will find a natural place in connection with these present trains of speculation.