Now you may ask me, what were Christians doing in Europe all this while? What was the Holy Father about at Rome, if he did not turn his eyes, as heretofore, on the suffering state of his Asiatic provinces, and oppose some rampart to the advance of the enemy upon Constantinople? and how has he been the enduring enemy of the Turk, if he acquiesced in the Turk's long course of victories? Alas! he often looked towards the East, and often raised the alarm, and often, as I have said, attempted by means of the powers of Christendom, what his mission did not give him arms to do himself. But he was impeded and embarrassed by so many and such various difficulties, that, if I proposed to go through them, I should find myself engaged in a history of Europe during those centuries. I will suggest some of them, though I can do no more. 1. First of all, then, I observe generally, that the Pope, in attempting to save Constantinople and its Empire, was attempting to save a fanatical people, who had for ages set themselves against the Holy See and the Latin world, and who had for centuries been under a sentence of excommunication. They hated and feared the Catholics, as much as they hated and feared the Turks, and they contemned them too, for their comparative rudeness and ignorance of literature; and this hatred and fear and contempt were grafted on a cowardly, crafty, insincere, and fickle character of mind, for which they had been notorious from time immemorial. It was impossible to save them without their own cordial cooeperation; it was impossible to save them in spite of themselves.