If we seek the cause of these changes which fifty years have wrought in life in Constantinople, they may be summed up as the result of the constantly increasing influence of the European Powers at Constantinople and the corresponding decay of the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Mahmoud II. was one of the greatest as well as one of the most unfortunate of the sovereigns of Turkey; but he was a Sultan of the old school, whose many attempts at reform had no other object than to revive the power of Islam and restore his Empire to its former rank. He did not wish to Europeanize his people, as Peter the Great did, but simply to adopt such improvements, especially in the organization of his army, as would enable him the better to maintain himself against his European enemies. But, unhappily, he had to contend against Moslem as well as Christian foes, and to save himself from the former he had to call in the aid of the latter. His dynasty was saved by the intervention of Europe; but when Sultan Abd-ul-Medjid ascended the throne at the death of his father it was by the favour and under the protection of Europe, and from that day Turkey ceased to be the old Empire of the Ottoman Turks. Mahmoud was the last of the Sultans. Nothing remained to his successors but the shadow of a great name. Europe is undoubtedly responsible for the evils which have befallen the Empire since that day. She has neither allowed the Turks to rule in their own way, with fire and sword, as their ancestors did, nor forced them to emancipate the Christians and establish a civil government in place of their religious despotism. She has sought to maintain the Empire, but to maintain it as a weak and decaying Empire. Austria and Russia, and at times other Powers, have sought to hasten the process of disintegration, and the limits of the Empire have been gradually narrowed until they now approach the capital itself. The Turks are abused for their stupidity, as if it were all their fault; and no doubt they have done and are doing many unwise things; but after all they are not to be too harshly condemned. They have probably done what seemed to them wise and politic, and they have often outwitted the keenest statesmen; but they have been doomed by Europe to struggle against the inevitable. Turkey can never again be what she was fifty years ago, and as a Mohammedan despotism, ruled by Turks alone, she can never become a great or even a civilized Power and command the respect of Europe. She must soon disappear. But with the full emancipation of the Christians, the abolition of the present system of religious government, and the support of Western Europe, she might settle the Eastern Question for herself, win the loyal support of her own subjects and the respect of the world.
An Eastern Statesman.
MIRACLES, PRAYER, AND LAW.
I N the following remarks I assume the existence of God, All-knowing and All-powerful; and of a spirit in men which is not matter. I do not say that either is demonstrated or can be demonstrated, still less do I presume to define either, but I address only those who already assent to both.
Many, however, of those who give such assent are troubled about the ways of God and the nature of man's relation to Him. On the one hand is the Bible, which declares that all things on earth as well as in heaven are regulated by Divine will at every moment, which records frequent miracles, and which bids men ask from Him whatsoever they would, in absolute confidence that they shall have their desires. On the other hand stands the Book of Nature, as Divine as that of Revelation, being in fact another revelation of God, which tells of an unchanging sequence of events, of laws incapable of modification by isolated acts of will, laws which, indeed, if subject to such modification, would fall into disorder. Which of these revelations shall they believe? Or can they be reconciled so that both are credible?
The tendency of recent belief in those who have studied the Book of Nature, and perhaps most decidedly in those who have only turned some of its pages, is that the two revelations are irreconcilable. The immutability of Nature's laws is to them a gospel taught by every stone, by every plant, by every animated being. All that they have learnt to know of matter rests on the assurance that its properties are absolutely fixed. The progress of science, of art, of civilization, of the human race, depends on the fact that what has been found to be true will be always true, that there is an ordered sequence of events which may be trusted to be invariable, to which we must conform our lives if we would be happy, and which, if we cross it in ignorance or defiance, will revenge the outrage by inevitable penalties. Those laws, which some call of matter, may by others be called laws of God, and the most devout minds find in their fixity only a confirmation of their faith in His unchanging promises. But if thus fixed, it seems to many who are devout as well as to many who are sceptical, that it becomes impossible to believe that their Author should ever set them aside by what are called miracles; still less that He should bid men pray for events which are, in fact, not regulated by wish or will, but by what has gone before up to the beginning of time. To meet this dilemma there seem to such minds only two courses, either to believe that Scripture is not the word of a God at all, or to give to its language an interpretation which is not the natural sense of the words, and which was certainly not meant or understood by those who first wrote or first heard it.
Yet it is not possible to abandon the conviction that the words and the acts of God cannot really be at variance. Before surrendering His words contained in the Scripture, as either spurious or misunderstood, no effort can be too often reiterated to show them to be compatible with what we have learned of His works. I propose to make one more such effort, based on the closest examination of what both really tell, or imply.
Let us first understand accurately what it is we are to deal with, both as facts and as expressed in language. The inquiry is to be limited (with exceptions which will be noted as they occur) to the laws of matter. It will be assumed that matter exists as our ordinary perceptions inform us, but if it shall hereafter be proved to be only a form of motion, or of force, the arguments will still be applicable. By laws, we shall understand what in a different expression we call the properties of matter. The advantage of thus explaining law is that it excludes some other senses of a vague and misleading character, while it includes the sense in which alone law can properly be applied to physical nature. Thus, the law of gravity is the same thing as the property of matter which we call weight, and if there be any matter or ether which is imponderable, then the law of gravity does not apply to it. So the law of attraction, in its different forms, expresses the property of cohesion, and of capillary ascent, and so on; the law of chemical affinities expresses the property of the combination of one species of matter with another in definite proportions; the laws of sound, light, or electricity express the properties of vibrations, either of air or of subtler forms of matter, as they affect our senses. In thus limiting the meaning of law, it is therefore obvious that we embrace all which the materialist can desire to include when he insists that law is permanent and unchangeable.