its Christianity, is gone. I feel very sure that the sense of a Divine Presence has never utterly forsaken, and does not forsake, any host of Christian men fighting by land or sea: or that, if it do, their arms become palsied, and they become the shame of their enemies. They may act very inconsistently with this profession; the inconsistency no doubt weakens the reality of it; but it is not a mere profession. Asking the help of God may be a poor formality to easy, luxurious men; those who are on the eve of battle, who are standing between life and death, have no time for words unless they mean something. And they have a signification as of old, otherwise a feeble force would not be able to put a greater one to flight, supported by all the advantages of position, and the resources of art. When our soldiers shall quite disbelieve that the same Lord who went forth with Joshua and Gideon is with them, see whether we shall have tidings of courage and triumph, and not rather of cowardice and ignominy.

V. We saw how much the office of the caliph or sovereign blended itself with Mahometan life and history, how the visible centre of the host recalled to each soldier the sense of his allegiance to Allah the Unseen King. Here, again, we are reminded of the Old Testament. David, and every true king, felt that he reigned by covenant with God, that he was the witness of Him to the people. And his people returned the feeling. Looking up to him, they felt that they were a people indeed it was not a dream; they were so

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actually; they had one heart, one with each other, one with those who had gone before them, one with those who should come after them. course such language is liable to misinterpretation. There were crimes and divisions in the times of David and Hezekiah, as at all times. Scripture does not conceal them, but declares them, and shews the punishment of them. When any evil deed was perpetrated by the king it destroyed the reverence of the people for him, and so their own unity. On the other hand, their evil condition re-acted upon him, and led him to depend more on the number of his armed men than upon the strength of Israel. These facts far from weakening the assertion I made, illustrate it. Do not they seem also to prove that these records are not merely records of the past, or of a particular nation, but that they explain the bonds by which sovereign and subjects are connected according to a divine and immutable law, in all times and in all nations? So the Mahometan

thought in his own case. Had the people whom he attacked felt the same; had there been that real vital relation between the monarch and those who paid him homage, which there was between the caliph and the soldiers of the Crescent, those soldiers would not have triumphed as they did. I am making no rash assertion; but one borne out by history. Asia was not able to resist the armies of the prophet, because there was in it no such national feeling as that which I have described. Constantinople could not ultimately resist

them, for this feeling was perishing in the Greek empire. They were resisted in Western Europe, for there a set of Christian nations had gradually grown up, believing, amidst many confusions and inconsistencies no doubt, but still practically believing, that their kings were covenant kings, reigning in the name of the Lord, as much as the kings of Judah had ever done.

These are some of the points of real affinity between Christianity and Mahometanism. I say Christianity; meaning thereby that though these principles belong to the Old Testament, and not to the New, as such, yet that Christians can adopt them and realize them, and that Jews, who seem to stand upon the ground of the Old Testament, cannot. I do not say this in reproach to them, I merely state a fact. All the most living principles of the Old Testament, those which were embodied in the history of the Jewish people, have become dead letters to their descendants. They retain the acknowledgment of the Divine unity as against anything which contradicts it, or seems to them to contradict it. But the sense of a Living Being, of One speaking, acting, ruling, this may dwell deep down in the heart of Jews; it may have been drawn out by persecution in many; but, so far as we can judge, it is always threatening to become dried in a formula among the orthodox Israelites, to lose itself in pantheistical phrases among the liberal and intellectual. The former class will readily acknowledge a Divine Book, but for the very purpose of keeping

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out the notion of any real intercourse between heaven and earth since it was closed. And yet this Book will not satisfy them; it must be stifled under Rabbinical interpretations; all its practical, homely, awful realities, must be reduced into notions, and speculations, and frivolities. The liberal class will gladly avail themselves of phrases about a living voice, that they may throw off the burden of these interpretations, and in fact of the Book which they oppress. But the living voice does not proceed from a personal being who has a right to command his creatures; there is no bowing to it as to that which must not, cannot be resisted; no acknowledgment of a high calling, no feeling of a relation to the past; only a claim to be independent, to think and feel differently from those who went before-a very natural tendency, surely, in men who have been under a grievous yoke, but offering little hope that they will be emancipated from it, or will not fall under a more grievous one still. No wonder then that the reality of the unseen should be lost in that very worship which was established as the witness of it, that the Jewish ceremonial should bind the spirit to earth instead of raising it. No wonder that the most vulgar of all outward things, the mere coin by help of which one is exchanged for another, should have become the great object of heart devotion. To speak of this people as not having now any sense of the relation of a people to its Sovereign, would be a mockery: that heavy loss is of course inevitable. It is far pleasanter, to remember that

the sense of a national existence, of a national calling, has, through all these centuries of degradation, not forsaken them. It has been upheld by that glorious hope of a Deliverer to come hereafter, which neither the Rabbinism of one of their schools, nor the Pantheism of another, has been able to extinguish. They had been almost six hundred years without a temple or a capital, scorned and hated by all people, when Mahomet arose; yet when he bade them join his standard as the reviver of the true faith of their fathers, as the asserter of the Lord Jehovah against his enemies, they utterly refused the invitation. He thought, and perhaps rightly, that they were too degraded to understand the words which he spoke to them, too little worshippers of Him whom their Scriptures proclaimed, to believe that He could really interfere in the affairs of the world. The prophet's first great war, therefore, was directed against them. If they yielded they were not crushed, still less converted. The belief that they belonged to the true stock of Abraham, and he at best only to an illegitimate offshoot from it, that they were children of the promises, and he was not, sustained them. Here was the one sure thing which they could hold fast, a token that the lock of hair on the head of Samson, shorn, blinded, and captive, might still grow again. There was a reality and continuity in the national feeling of the Jew which the Islamite felt he could not encounter. He acknowledged a sovereign, his empire was to spread far and