the reason of the punishment, but does not alter the position or rights of the instrument employed. We dare not treat the Turk as an apostate because he has been the scourge of backsliders, or as a man without rights because his power has been used against us. We may lament the rise of a new heathen delusion; but we have no right to exclude the deluded from the rights of man. We may lament that a territory redeemed from the ocean of paganism has been again submerged; but if the right of conquest is admitted in the law of Christendom, we cannot disown it in the law of the world. The Eastern Empire itself gained its place by conquest. And, granting the validity of its territorial rights so acquired, it alone was entitled, and, if it could rise again, would be entitled, to vindicate these. Supposing that the Turk had no title to Turkey, surely England, France, Russia and Austria, have as little right to expel him as he to be there. And the fact that they are Christian nations invests them with no new rights or political privilege. The providence of God has indeed so ordered that a knot of states in one quarter of the globe have in common embraced Christianity, and thereby risen to the head of the nations: and in many points of view, Christendom, as a collective whole, does form and can act as a corporate unity, or commonwealth.

It may well be questioned, however, whether the boasted balance of power in Europe, and even the Holy Alliance, have not tended to impair national integrity by unwarranted interference. Each Christian monarch has none over him hut Christ. All others are but his brethren. Their totality has no authority over him in his own kingdom. And although each nation may justly protest, as each householder may, against those acts of another which affect its just interests, and ought to do its best, by remonstrance, in the cause of truth; yet no nation derives a right from its imagined spirituality or orthodoxy to dictate the internal administration of another; and, as with individuals, so no aggregate of nations has, as a European Peace Society, a right to prescribe to any one nation terms which it shall observe on pain of war, unless that nation has consented to such arbitration. But be this as it may, if the Christian commonwealth is to exhibit its corporate action, either by waging Quixotic war on the heathen, or by the united repulse of an inroad on that part of its sacred territory which any one State may own and can forfeit, or by creating itself a premature arbiter over the possession of the earth, or by so trampling on the integrity of heathen nations, as to violate the rights of men in order to maintain the integrity of the Church and vindicate the rights of God—it had better never have existed than perpetrate such a confusion of things heavenly and earthly, and thus build up religion on the ruins of justice. Christ came not to destroy but to fulfil. This applies to the law of nature, as truly as to the law of Moses. Fallen though man be, and prone to evil, there is a conscience of right and wrong, as between man and man, in every clime and creed. And the first duty of those who would enlighten the consciences of men by heavenly truth, is to see that they do not claim or take license to outrage the first principles of natural justice. The rights of heathen men and states, (nay, of apostates,) in things pertaining to this world, are as sacred as those of Christians. Faith in Christ is (save by special covenant) the condition of no Monarch’s tenure, of no State’s existence. And if the Turk, as a man, has as good a right as a Christian to breathe the air, Turkey, as a state, has as good a claim to subsist and be recognised by other states as England or China has. Its right would not be strengthened by its conversion, and is not impaired by its infidelity. The spiritual, although superior to the natural, does not abolish or