It will not, therefore, do for us, like children, to beat the object on which we have wounded ourselves, or bite the rod with which we are chastised. But, it may be asked, Are we to forget the zeal of Sobieski, and treat the Turk, not as an enemy and a persecutor, but as a brother? The answer is plain. Not as a brother Christian, but as a brother man. The fact that God has used the Turk to chastise Christendom, and suffered him to plant his temple of falsehood on the sites of the Jewish and the Christian fanes, ought, indeed, to make us search into the reason of the punishment, but does not alter the position or rights of the instrument employed. We dare not treat the Turk as an apostate because he has been the scourge of backsliders, or as a man without rights because his power has been used against us. We may lament the rise of a new heathen delusion; but we have no right to exclude the deluded from the rights of man. We may lament that a territory redeemed from the ocean of paganism has been again submerged; but if the right of conquest is admitted in the law of Christendom, we cannot disown it in the law of the world. The Eastern Empire itself gained its place by conquest. And, granting the validity of its territorial rights so acquired, it alone was entitled, and, if it could rise again, would be entitled, to vindicate these. Supposing that the Turk had no title to Turkey, surely England, France, Russia and Austria, have as little right to expel him as he to be there. And the fact that they are Christian nations invests them with no new rights or political privilege. The providence of God has indeed so ordered that a knot of states in one quarter of the globe have in common embraced Christianity, and thereby risen to the head of the nations: and in many points of view, Christendom, as a collective whole, does form and can act as a corporate unity, or commonwealth.