confounded; the ties of nature were cut asunder; and the inexorable soldier was careless of the father's groans, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the children,* No tongue can describe the misery caused by some hundreds of thousands of merciless beings, thus satiating their avarice, lust, and cruelty, for three long days and nights. The Sultan, it is said, heard their cries in his camp, and they lulled him to sleep the dogs ran into the fields howling with terror, or leaped into the sea.

This great and sad event is thus beautifully noticed by Mr. Hallam. "Before Mahomet the Second planted his cannon against the walls of Constantinople, he had completed every smaller conquest, and deprived the expiring empire of every hope of succour or delay. It was necessary that Constantinople should fall, but the magnanimous resignation of her emperor bestows an honour upon her fall which her prosperity seldom earned. The long deferred but inevitable moment arrived, and the last of the Cæsars folded round him the imperial mantle, and remembered the name which he represented, in the dignity of heroic death. It is thus that the intellectual principle, when enfeebled by disease or age, is said to rally its energies in the presence of death, and pour the radiance of unclouded reason around the struggles of dissolution."+ It is thus to carry the idea to its highest limit and most correct bearing-it is thus that the principle of Christian faith

* Gibbon.

† On the Middle Ages, Vol. II.

P. 193.

oftentimes, when the body is enfeebled by disease or age, rallies its energies in the presence of death, and the radiance of unclouded bliss shines around the struggles of dissolution.

"For the power of the horses is in their tails, for their tails are like serpents having heads, and with them they injure." (ver. 19.)

In the fifth trumpet, the locusts, or Saracens, which they represent, are said to wound with their tails only; here the horses, or the Turks which they typify, wound both with the mouth and with the tail. The great work being executed, for which the Turkish armies had been loosed and prepared in the overwhelming destruction of Constantinople, whose fortifications, which had stood for so many ages against hostile violence, had now been dismantled and overthrown by Ottoman cannon, we are next told, that not only was her empire thus subverted, but that "her religion was trampled in the dust by the Moslem conquerors." Before the final departure of the former woe, the poisonous spirit of the Saracens had been imbibed by those who were appointed by God to succeed them in bringing about the infliction of the miseries of the sixth trumpet.

"The first of the Seljukian sultans was conspicuous for his zeal and faith; and the whole body of the Turkish nation embraced with fervour and sincerity the religion of Mahomet :" and thus, in like

* See ch. viii. † Gibbon, ch. lvii.

Bishop Newton.

manner, was their power in their tails: thus, in like manner, did they not only injure, or hurt with their mouth-their lion's mouth, out of which issued fire, and smoke, and brimstone; but they most grievously oppressed by their religion. And this, it is well known, the Turks have done in an equal degree with the Saracens. Many indeed of the Greek church remained, and are still remaining, among them; but they are made to pay dearly for the exercise of their religion; are subjected to a capitation tax, which is most rigorously exacted from all above fourteen years of age; are burthened besides with the most heavy and arbitrary tax upon every occasion; are compelled to the lowest and most servile drudgery; are abused in their persons and property; have not only the mortification of seeing some of their friends and kindred daily apostatize to the ruling religion; but had even their children taken from them to be educated therein, of whom the most robust and hardy were trained to the soldiery, and the more weakly and delicate were castrated for the Seraglio."*

The remaining fragments of the Eastern empire were in due time overrun by the Turks, who, from time to time, spread their devastations and conquests to the very verge of the Latin kingdoms, even to the besieging, on several occasions, of Vienna, the capital of the Western empire. As they were, however,

in these attempts exceeding their prescribed bounds, they were, at length, finally stopped by Prince Eugene, in the fatal battle of Zenta, on the Teiss, in Hungary, fought A. D. 1697, two hundred and forty-four years after the fall of Constantinople. The results of this conflict were as disastrous to the Mahometan Turkish invaders, in the proportion of numbers killed, as the great battle of Tours had been to those of the Saracens under the former woe ;* and it so far broke their power, that, although there have been, from time to time since this period, wars between them and the Western nations, they have generally been to the advantage of the latter. It, in short, confined them in a great measure to their own proper limits; and the peace of Carlowitz, consequent upon it, deprived the Sultans of nearly one half of their possessions in Europe; and from this diminution of territorial sovereignty, the Ottoman empire, which once threatened universal subjugation, ceased to be formidable to Christendom."+ Since this time their power has been on the decline; and, "in the present day," to adopt the language of another eminent historian, "we anticipate, with an assurance which none can deem extravagant, the approaching subversion of the Ottoman power, which has long been nodding to its fall, and totters at every blast from the north." This being the opinion, not only of Mr. Hallam, but of most intelligent persons,

* Ch. viii. p. 163. Hallam.

+ Cox's History of the House of Austria.

K

it is not extravagant to believe, that that fall may take place at the termination of the period, as set forth in this prophecy; and which termination, reckoning 391 years ("the hour, and the day, and the month, and the year,") from the fall of Constantinople on the 29th May 1453, will happen in June 1844.

It has been before proved, that the little horn of Mahometanism, in a former prophecy, will be "broken without hand," in this same year, (see Dissertation, chap. xi. pp. 305, 306;) in referring to which, I would observe, that all the distinguishing peculiarities which are there predicted of this imposture, have most prominently appeared in the character and principles of the two great people with whose history it is identified, and the outline of which is contained in this and the former chapter; as well as in its most prominent 'principles, with those of every other nation and people that have professed it.

"And the rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils,* and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood; which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts."

The rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues, were the inhabitants of the Western Empire, or the Ten Latin kingdoms,—the Saracenic plague being stopped from being fatal to this part of the

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Dæmonology, or the worship of departed saints, or beings made into Romish Saints, &c. &c.