Yet while the political recognition of Turkey is right, there may be wrong grounds for doing a right thing—a right thing may be overdone—and the diplomatic relations of a Christian with a heathen nation ought, from the nature of things, never to be so intimate as those with a Christian government. In these respects England does seem to have erred. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact, that the almost unbroken amity of England with Turkey has arisen from our commercial and territorial jealousy of other powers—that self-interest has reconciled us to intimate contact with those who count all Christians “dogs”—and that to talk continually of “our good friend and staunch ally, the Turk,” argues either a blunting of our spiritual aversion to a blasphemous form of Paganism, or a lulling of conscience for mammon’s sake. Nor is it an uninstructive example of the truth, that brethren at strife are the most irreconcileable of all men (Prov. xviii. 10); that the same nation which shrinks with sacred horror and blind alarm from diplomatic relations with Rome, (not on the ground that Rome should not be, or is not, an European state, but on the ground that the head of that state is at the same time usurping a false spiritual place,) should, without any qualm of conscience, give the hand of political brotherhood to a government, the whole code of which is based upon the words of an impostor who has superseded Christ. At the same time we cannot accuse England of securing the favour of Turkey at the expense of the Christians who are subjected to Mahomedan rule. There never was a more unjust reproach than that raised by certain religionists against England, that she appears at the court of the Sultan as a Christian power taking the side of the oppressor against his Christian subjects. Navarino is a witness to the reverse.