We have thus in our first chapter glanced at the scene of crime and abomination which Europe through long ages presented, still daring to clothe itself in the fair majesty of the Christian name. It is a melancholy field of speculation—but our business is not there just now; we must hasten from it, to that other field of sorrow and shame at which we also glanced. For fifteen centuries, during which Christianity had been promulgated, Europe had become little aware of its genuine nature, though boastful of its profession; but during the latter portion of that period its nations had progressed rapidly in population, in strength, and in the arts of social life. They had, amid all their bickerings and butcherings, found sufficient leisure to become commercial, speculative, and ambitious of still greater wealth and power. Would to God, in their improvements, they could have numbered that of religious knowledge! Their absurd crusades, nevertheless, by which they had attempted to wrest the Holy City from the infidels to put it into the possession of mere nominal Christians, whose very act of seizing on the Holy Land proclaimed their ignorance of the very first principles of the divine religion in whose cause they assumed to go forth—these crusades, immediately scandalous and disastrous as they were, introduced them to the East; gave them knowledge of more refined and immensely wealthy nations; and at once raised their notions of domestic luxury and embellishment; gave them means of extended knowledge; and inspired them with a boundless thirst for the riches of which they had got glimpses of astonishment. The Venetians and Genoese alternately grew great by commerce with that East of which Marco Polo brought home such marvellous accounts; and at length, Henry of Portugal appeared, one of the noblest and most remarkable princes in earth’s annals! He devoted all the energies of his mind and the resources of his fortune to discovery! Fixing his abode by the ocean, he sent across it not merely the eyes of desire, but the far-glances of dawning science. Step by step, year by year, spite of all natural difficulties, disasters and discouragements, he threw back the cloud that had for ages veiled the vast sea; his ships brought home news of isle after isle—spots on the wide waste of waters, fairer and more sunny than the fabled Hesperides; and crept along the vast line of the African coast to the very Cape of Hope. He died; but his spirit was shed abroad in an inextinguishable zeal, guided and made invincible by the Magnet, “the spirit of the stone,” the adoption of which he had suggested.[1]—At once arose Gama and Columbus, and as it were at once—for there were but five years and a few months between one splendid event and the other,—the East and the West Indies by the sea-path, and America, till then undreamed of, were discovered!