But another of those sweeping devastators, one of those gigantic executioners, who seem to have been sent from time to time to punish the horrible profligacies of Asia, now rose upon the north. Timour Khan, the Tamerlane of European story, the Invincible, the Lord of the Tartar World, rushed with his countless troops upon the sovereignties of Western Asia. This universal conqueror crushed the Tartar dynasty of Russia, and then burst away, like an inundation, to overwhelm other lands. But the native Russians again made head against their Tartar masters, and a century and a half of sanguinary warfare followed, with various fortunes, and without any other result than blood. Without touching on topics exclusively religious, it becomes a matter of high interest to mark the vengeances, furies, and massacres, of heathenism, in every age of the world. Yet while we believe, and have such resistless reason to believe, in the Providential government, what grounds can be discovered for this sufferance of perpetual horrors? For this we have one solution, and but one: stern as the inflictions are, may they not be in mercy? may not the struggles of barbarian life be permitted, simply to retard the headlong course of barbarian corruption? may there not be excesses of wickedness, extremes of national vice, an accumulation of offences against the laws of moral nature, (which are the original laws of Heaven,) actually incompatible with the Divine mercy? Nothing can be clearer to the understanding, than that there are limits which the Divine Being has prescribed to his endurance of the guilt of man, and prescribed doubtless for the highest objects of general mercy; as there are offences which, by human laws, are incompatible with the existence of society. The crimes of the world before the flood were evidently of an intense iniquity, which precluded the possibility of purification; and thus it became necessary to extinguish a race, whose continued existence could only have corrupted every future generation of mankind. War, savage feuds, famines, and pestilences, may have been only Divine expedients to save the world from another accumulation of intolerable iniquity, by depriving nations of the power of utter self-destruction, by thinning their numbers, by compelling them to feel the miseries of mutual aggression, and even by reducing them to that degree of poverty which supplied the most effective antidote to their total corruption. Still, those sufferings were punishments, but punishments fully earned by their fierce passions, savage propensities, remorseless cruelties, and general disobedience of that natural law of virtue, which, earlier even than Judaism or Christianity, the Eternal had implanted in the heart of his creatures.