In this light, the Crusades, by whatever zeal for God called forth, exhibited, apart from all their attendant moral evils, an evident obliteration of moral duty by fancied religious obligation, and a trampling on natural rights in search of a spiritual object, wrongly apprehended and wrongly pursued. The deliverances of Europe by Martel on the one hand, and Sobieski on the other, from subjection to Mahomedan rule, although they effected so signal a rescue for the faith, derived their justification, as political events, not from the fact that the oppressive power was Mahomedan, but from the simple fact that it was an oppressive power. The anomalous situation of the Pope, as being at once a claimant of œcumenic supremacy and one of the temporal heads of Europe, has shown itself in the anomalous attitude which he has assumed towards the Turk. As long as he was true to his own principles he never consented to stand in diplomatic relations to the Porte. In assuming to act as the sole spiritual and temporal head of all Christendom, he refused to acknowledge a heathen intruder into his supposed domain. But the wrong way in which he expressed this refusal was, by withholding, as a temporal sovereign, that diplomatic recognition to which the Sultan, as another temporal sovereign, no longer at war with him, was entitled. And the recognition which he has lately given was the result, not of true insight into the distinction between his own spiritual and temporal characters, but of decaying zeal for God. His former motive was a right one; but the conduct which it dictated was mistaken. With the failure of the motive his conduct has changed. But his insight is not improved. The Christian nations of Europe, even those that acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope, withheld their diplomatic recognition of Turkey, not on purely religious grounds, but because Turkey remained, as it were, habitually a politically inimical power. Gradually the enmity subsided. And, in consequence, although the religious obligation, if true, remains in its full force, every Christian government now finds itself in diplomatic relations with the Porte, on the simple ground of secular parity among civilized nations, be they English, Russian, Chinese, Persians, or Turks.