A gipsy asked a king: Of how much value are your riches? The king replied: Not more than your freedom. The smile of the king is medicine for a poor man, the laugh of the king is an offence for the mourning one. A king who fears God has pity for the people, but a king who fears the people has pity for himself. The face of a good king lends splendour to his crown, and the crown of a bad king lends splendour to his face. The sins of the people can only sooner bring the king before God, but the sins of the king can push the people to Satan's house. The belief of our kings was the same belief which Saint Sava preached, their hopes were his hopes. God is the eternal and powerful king of the world; Christ is the way of salvation from sin; good must be in the end victorious over evil. That was the belief and hope of our kings. Was it not likewise the belief and hope of King Ethelbert, of Saint Oswald and Edward the Confessor? Did not Richard the Lion-hearted struggle for the same belief and hope in Palestine, which was at his time as far as a voyage around this planet to-day? Is not this same belief and hope the corner stone of Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's, of this church and of every church on this island, and of every great and beautiful deed that you inherited from your ancestors? Yet the belief and hopes of our kings were never different from the BELIEF AND HOPES OF THE SERBIAN PEOPLE. The Serbian people have shown their individuality only in the dark time of their slavery. The saint and the heroic kings died, but their souls lived still in the hearts of their people, in the white churches they built among the green mountains, in their deeds of mercifulness and repentance. The enslaved people were conscious that there were no more kings of their own who represented all that was the best in the Serbian soul, and that they, the people, have now themselves to represent the Serbian name, belief and hopes before God and their enemies. And they have done it. At the time when Columbus sailed over the seas to find a new continent in the name of the most Christian King of Spain, the Serbian suffering for the Christian religion had already begun. At the time when the famous English thinker Thomas More wrote _Utopia_, preaching brotherhood among men based upon religious and political freedom, the Serbs stood there without any shadow of religious and political freedom, dreaming of and singing about the human brotherhood founded only on the ruins of both tyranny and slavery. At the time when the great Shakespeare wrote his tragedies in ink, the Serbs wrote theirs in blood. At the time when Cromwell fought in the name of the Bible for the domestic freedom of Parliament, the Serbian leaders gathered in the lonely forests to tell each other of the crimes that they saw defiling the Cross, to confess to each other their cruel sufferings and to encourage each other to live.