Thus things did but go on worse and worse for the interest of Christendom. Even the taking of Constantinople was not the limit of the Ottoman successes. Mahomet the Conqueror, as he is called, was but the seventh of the great Sultans, who carried on the fortunes of the barbarian empire. An eighth, a ninth followed. The ninth, Selim, returned from his Eastern conquests with the last of the Caliphs in his company, and made him resign to himself the prerogatives of Pontiff and Lawgiver, which the Caliph inherited from Mahomet. Then came a tenth, the greatest perhaps of all, Soliman the Magnificent, the contemporary of the Emperor Charles, Francis the First of France, and Henry the Eighth of England. And an eleventh might have been expected, and a twelfth, and the power of the enemy would have become greater and greater, and would have afflicted the Church more and more heavily; and what was to be the end of these things? What was to be the end? why, not a Christian only, but any philosopher of this world would have known what was to be the end, in spite of existing appearances. All earthly power has an end; it rises to fall, it grows to die; and the depth of its humiliation issues out of the pride of its lifting up. This is what even a philosopher would say; he would not know whether Soliman, the tenth conqueror, was also to be the last; but if not the tenth, he would be bold to say it would be the twelfth, who would close their victories, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth. But what a philosopher could not say, what a Christian knows and enjoys, is this, that one earthly power there is which is something more than earthly, and which, while it dies in the individual, for he is human, is immortal in its succession, for it is divine.