1.
There is a certain remarkable parallel and contrast between the fortunes of these two races, the Seljukian and the Ottoman. In the beginning of the twelfth century, the race of Seljuk all but took Constantinople, and overran the West, and did not; in the beginning of the fifteenth, the Ottoman Turks were all but taking the same city, and then were withheld from taking it, and at length did take it, and have it still. In each case a foe came upon them from the north, still more fierce and vigorous than they, and humbled them to the dust.
These two foes, which came upon the Seljukian Turks and the Ottoman Turks respectively, are names by this time familiar to us; they are Zingis and Timour. Zingis came down upon the Seljukians, and Timour came down upon the Ottomans. Timour pressed the Ottomans even more severely than Zingis pressed the Seljukians; yet the Seljukians did not recover the blow of Zingis; but the Ottomans survived the blow of Timour, and rose more formidable after it, and have long outlived the power which inflicted it.
Zingis and Timour were but the blind instruments of divine vengeance. They knew not what they did. The inward impulse of gigantic energy and brutal cupidity urged them forward; ambition, love of destruction, sensual appetite, frenzied them, and made them both more and less than men. They pushed eastward, westward, southward; they confronted promptly and joyfully every peril, every obstacle which lay in their course. They smote down all rival pride and greatness of man; and therefore, by the law (as I may call it) of their nature and destiny, not on politic reason or far-reaching plan, but because they came across him, they smote the Turk. These then were one class of his opponents; but there was another adversary, stationed against him, of a different order, one whose power was not material, but mental and spiritual; one whose enmity was not random, or casual, or temporary, but went on steadily from age to age, and lasts down to this day, except so far as the Turk's decrepitude has at length disarmed anxiety and opposition. I have spoken of him already; of course I mean the Vicar of Christ. I mean the zealous, the religious enmity to every anti-Christian power, of him who has outlasted Zingis and Timour, who has outlasted Seljuk, who is now outlasting Othman. He incited Christendom against the Seljukians, and the Seljukians, assailed also by Zingis, sunk beneath the double blow. He tried to rouse Christendom against the Ottomans also, but in vain; and therefore in vain did Timour discharge his overwhelming, crushing force against them. Overwhelmed and crushed they were, but they revived. The Seljukians fell, in consequence of the united zeal of the great Christian commonwealth moving in panoply against them; the Ottomans succeeded by reason of its deplorable divisions, and its decay of faith and heroism.