conscience, give the hand of political brotherhood to a government, the whole code of which is based upon the words of an impostor who has superseded Christ. At the same time we cannot accuse England of securing the favour of Turkey at the expense of the Christians who are subjected to Mahomedan rule. There never was a more unjust reproach than that raised by certain religionists against England, that she appears at the court of the Sultan as a Christian power taking the side of the oppressor against his Christian subjects. Navarino is a witness to the reverse.

Be the cause of the Greek nation good or bad, none have been its warmer or more sincere supporters than the English. So powerful an element in our motives for the support of Greece, was the desire to emancipate Christianity from a Mahomedan yoke, that, in order to attain this end, England ran the risk of weakening, by the emancipation of Greece, the bulwark which she found in Turkey against the advances of Russia. And for a long series of years no part of the policy of England has been more unvarying than her resolution, expressed by deeds, to employ her just influence at the Porte in the most unwearied and enlightened disinterestedness, by embracing—often at great sacrifices and risks, and with singular success—every opportunity to plead the cause of the Christian population in the East, although belonging to a different section of the Church from her own. In this respect she may well bear comparison with any other power, especially with one which, although it seeks to Wind the pious by vaunting itself the protector of Oriental Christianity, has done little or nothing for the co-religionists of its own subjects, save to entice them, through a proposed ecclesiastical union, into a political subjugation which they abhor.

But this leads us to speak of Russia, the new protector of Oriental Christians. If the other European governments had in due time, either independently or in concert with England, lifted as constant and sincere a protest as hers at the court of Turkey against the wrongs of these Christians, and had required with one voice that the government should administer its laws impartially to all its subjects, irrespective of their creed, we might have heard less of this new protectorate, and should, by an act of justice and mercy, have foreclosed the present flimsy pretexts of Russia. But the weakness of Christian zeal, our indifference between Christ and Belial, and the absence of Christian concord, have prevented this. And by our “lâches” we have furnished the pretexts against which we now exclaim. But let us consider for a moment who the helper and helped are. Even granting that the professions of Russia were true in the letter, there is surely no one so blindly charitable as to believe that, however sincere the ill-informed masses in Russia may be in the fanatical excitement to which they have been goaded, the Czar or his advisers have either tears of compassion on their eyelids or indignation in their hearts, at the wrongs of Oriental Christians. Without entering into the maze of diplomacy, or attempting to interpret treaties intentionally Delphic, it may suffice to observe, that the general plea now urged by Russia formed no part of her original demands, but was resorted to lest those should be satisfied. The Czar has two characters. He is, in the first place, the spiritual head of the Russian Church. But he is not, and knows that he is not, the spiritual head of the whole Greek Church; still less of the Armenians, Nestorians, or any other Oriental body of Christians; and least of all of those united to Rome. Each Oriental Church has its own proper patriarch or other supreme head. And the Czar has no more right, on any religious ground, to throw down the gauntlet as the champion of those other Churches, than the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. That they are