All through 1853 these parleyings were kept secret, and in the meantime the Czar had failed in his rôle of tempter. In the interval the Sultan, who perhaps had gained some inkling of what was going on, suddenly yielded to Austria’s demand that he should withdraw certain troops that had been harassing Montenegro, and thereby rousing the Czar’s religious zeal on behalf of his co-religionists in that province. Everything for the moment lulled his previous intention of a war against Turkey. But the Emperor Louis Napoleon had in cold blood been driving a wedge into the peace of the world by reviving a treaty of 1740, which had given to Latin monks a key to the chief door of the Church of Bethlehem, as well as the keys to the two doors of the Sacred Manger, and also the right to place a silver star adorned with the arms of France in the Sanctuary of the Nativity. That the Churches should fight for the key to the supposed birthplace of the Prince of Peace is indeed grotesque. But the old temple had in His day become a den of thieves; and even the new temple, built through His own loving sacrifice, is ever being put to uses that are childish and greedy. It is not difficult to understand that, by means of this treaty, awakening the vanity and greed that cloak themselves under more decent feelings in such rivalries, Louis Napoleon made his profit for the moment out of the powers of evil. The Czar’s jealousy for his own empire’s Greek version of the faith made the triumph of this treaty wormwood to him and to his people. “To the indignation,” Count Nesselrode writes, “of the whole people following the Greek ritual, the key of the Church of Bethlehem has been made over to the Latins, so as publicly to demonstrate their religious supremacy in the East.” ... “A crowd of monks with bare foreheads,” says Kinglake, “stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Czars.” The Czars did not stand alone: “some fifty millions of men in Russia held one creed, and they held it too with the earnestness of which Western Europe used to have experience in earlier times.... They knew that in the Turkish dominions there were ten or fourteen millions of men holding exactly the same faith as themselves ... they had heard tales of the sufferings of these their brethren which seemed,” they blindly thought, “to call for vengeance.”