Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys. The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands of the choicest of their own flesh and blood. I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the Cæsars, that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity--for the captivity of the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom--has gone on now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now, as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land. And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British interests,” “imperial interests”--the interest perhaps of the usurer wrung from the life-blood of his victim--demand that we should do all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage