Yet the belief and hopes of our kings were never different from the
BELIEF AND HOPES OF THE SERBIAN PEOPLE.
The Serbian people have shown their individuality only in the dark time of their slavery. The saint and the heroic kings died, but their souls lived still in the hearts of their people, in the white churches they built among the green mountains, in their deeds of mercifulness and repentance. The enslaved people were conscious that there were no more kings of their own who
represented all that was the best in the Serbian soul, and that they, the people, have now themselves to represent the Serbian name, belief and hopes before God and their enemies. And they have done it.
At the time when Columbus sailed over the seas to find a new continent in the name of the most Christian King of Spain, the Serbian suffering for the Christian religion had already begun.
At the time when the famous English thinker Thomas More wrote Utopia, preaching brotherhood among men based upon religious and political freedom, the Serbs stood there without any shadow of religious and political freedom, dreaming of and singing about the human brotherhood founded only on the ruins of both tyranny and slavery.
At the time when the great Shakespeare wrote his tragedies in ink, the Serbs wrote theirs in blood.
At the time when Cromwell fought in the name of the Bible for the domestic freedom of Parliament, the Serbian leaders gathered in the lonely forests to tell each other of the crimes that they saw defiling the Cross, to confess to each other their cruel sufferings and to encourage each other to live.
At the time when Milton wrote Paradise Lost, the Serbs felt more than anybody in the world the loss of Paradise.