right for such of my descendants as ascend the throne to slay their brothers, lest the world be disturbed. It will be their duty so to act." Throughout his life the Sultan showed himself alike cruel and faithless. When the Venetian garrison of Eubœa surrendered under a pledge of safety, he had them all tortured to death in the fashion of an Indian savage. After the conquest of Constantinople he had his table decorated with the still-bleeding heads of a family of Greek nobles. Such was the man who was to establish Turkish rule in the capital of Eastern Christendom, and whose descendants reign there still.

The first year of Mahomet's reign was devoted to preparations for the siege of Constantinople. He specially applied himself to providing new and formidable artillery, for which end he used the skill of a renegade Christian. Within the devoted city the Emperor Constantine Palalogus left nothing undone for the safety of his people, but his efforts were baffled by the schismatic bigotry of the majority of his subjects. A few years before, at the Council of Florence, in 1440, the representatives of the Greek Church had formally returned to catholic union; but even in the deadly peril now approaching, the largest part of the population and clergy of Constantinople rejected the measure. Constantine was denounced as a heretic when he called the people to arms, and only six thousand Greek soldiers could be raised in the great city in its critical hour. The Grand Duke Notaras, the commander of this force, did not hesitate to declare he would rather see the Sultan's turban than the Pope's tiara in his native city. Some Spanish and Italian volunteers, and a small detachment of veterans sent by the Sovereign Pontiff, were the chief force to dispute with the Turk the fate of Constantinople.

The siege was begun in April by an army reckoned at from seventy to two hundred thousand Turks. The Christian forces were only nine thousand, but they did their duty like men, drove back one general assault, and kept the Sultan at bay for nearly two months. On the 24th of May Mahomet sent a final summons to surrender, and Constantine replied that he would die before he yielded his native city. A final assault was made five days later. The Grand Duke, even then, refused to supply artillery to the Genoese auxiliaries, and the brunt of the defence was borne by the Latin soldiers. After a heroic struggle, force prevailed. The Emperor was cut down in the breach and the barbarian hordes poured into the city. A general massacre followed, until the greed of the Turkish warriors began to prevail over their cruelty, and the Greek population was gathered for slavery or ransom. Mahomet rode in after a few hours' carnage and entered the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, where he mounted the high altar and

ordered a muezzin to call the Moslems to the noon prayer from the top of Saint Sophia. The Cathedral of Justinian, the first church of the Christians of the East, was handed over to Mahometan worship. The Sultan ordered his soldiers to be recalled to their ranks. Constantinople was now his own, and he did not wish its wealth to fall to other robbers. He spoke words of pro. tection towards the conquered, and he showed their meaning by acts. Notaras, the highest in rank of the Grecian nobles and the commander of the city troops, had not fallen like the Emperor and the Latin soldiers. He had retired to his house, and he was now to learn what his choice of the Mahometan turban rather than the Papal tiara meant. The Sultan sent for him, and after some words of encouragement and fair promises asked the names of the leading Grecian nobles. The Grand Duke gave them, and with a savage laugh the Sultan repeated them to his. soldiery, with the announcement that he would pay a thousand sequins for each of their heads. Notaras was dismissed for the time, and Mahomet entered the deserted palace of the Cæsars, where he gave himself up to brutal orgy. At night, when drunk with wine, he ordered the child of the Grand Duke to be brought in as an object for his brutal lust. Notaras at last recovered some sense of duty and boldly refused to obey. He and his family were immediately beheaded, and the gory heads set on the Sultan's table as a fitting ornament of victory and Moslem clemency. The Turk was lord in Constantinople.

BRYAN J. CLINCH.

IT

CHRISTIAN FAITH AND MODERN SCIENCE.

T has been the lot of Divine Truth, ever since it came into the world, to find itself in opposition, at one time or another, with all the world's greatest forces-political power, public opinion, human passion in all its forms; knowledge, finally, human knowledge, the most formidable power of all.

It is with this last that Religion has had mainly to contend during the present century, and under peculiarly unfavorable conditions; for while, on the one hand, the great Christian schools of the Old World were broken up by a series of political revolutions, secular science developed with amazing rapidity, adding year after year to its conquests, and winning to itself the admiration and trust of the whole civilized world. As a consequence, the supreme and universal homage which former ages were wont to pay to Religion has been succeeded in our time by a divided allegiance. Many, indeed, are as true to the faith now as at any other period. But many more are shaken in their loyalty; not a few have completely renounced it and turned to Science as to a new revelation that has opened to man unknown worlds, extended his empire in almost every direction, and added indefinitely to the comforts and enjoyments of his daily life. Truly, Science is the idol of the day. Its name is the greatest of all to conjure with. What Science smiles on obtains a ready acceptance; what she ignores can with difficulty get a hearing; what she decidedly objects to cannot, humanly speaking, expect to prevail. Hence the eagerness with which the defenders of Religion strive to win her sympathies, or at the least to remove all appearance of antagonism, while the chief concern of her adversaries is to prove that between Science and Faith no genuine agreement is possible.

Of course all Christians know that between true science and religion, properly understood, there can be no real conflict. Both proceed from God; both are the expression of His mind, and His words can never be in opposition with His works. But between what is taught in the name of Science and what is held in the name of Religion, the conflict is not only possible but real and frequent. Nor are the responsibilities all on one side, for the feeling of distrust is mutual, theologians often watching too suspiciously the efforts of scientific investigation, while many scientists are much too ready to disregard all religious teaching and resent any questioning of their conclusions on religious grounds.

It is among the latter that are found the most dangerous assail

ants of religion in our day. Some combat it only when it crosses their path and interferes with the special courses of thought which they pursue. In others we find a deep and general antipathy which leads them to take up whatever line of argument is most likely to prove effective and to fling at religion anything that can hurt. Such was Voltaire in the last century; such is Ingersoll in ours. Such Dr. Draper, of New York, who, more than twenty years ago, forsook the natural sciences, in which he had acquired a name, to write a so-called "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" for which he was neither prepared nor fitted. Violent and vulgar in tone, incorrect in language, transparently ignorant in many of the questions he undertakes to deal with, he offers a striking contrast with another opponent, Huxley, whose brilliant qualities of thought and style, coupled with the keenest wit, have made one of the most dangerous contemporary adversaries of all kinds of religion. The Christian apologist can well afford to neglect Dr. Draper; he cannot overlook Huxley. But if he wishes to find, summed up in an ingenious and striking shape, the objections that have been urged with most success against supernatural belief during the present century, he need go no farther than the work of Dr. Andrew D. White, late President of Cornell University, entitled "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom."

I.

Though quite recently published (1896), Dr. White's book can scarcely be called new. The chapters of which it is composed have steadily succeeded each other for several years in the pages of the Popular Science Monthly, and in the present work they are simply put together with a short introduction and some slight additions and alterations.

As a picture of the progress of the human mind in many directions, the book is full of interest. Nothing is more curious than to observe the workings of men's thoughts in presence of the problems of Nature with which they were confronted from the beginning. The principle of causality, once awakened, extends gradually to everything that shows a beginning or a change. The mind of the race, especially in its early stages, is, like the mind of a child, full of questionings, but easy to satisfy. It is with a continual smile that one reads at the present day of the notions that prevailed for long ages regarding the structure of the earth, the nature of the heavenly bodies, and of the manner in which the more striking phenomena of the visible world were accounted for. Theories, speculations, guesses, often of the crudest kind, empty formulas supplied the place of modern observation and induction;

and minds, sagacious and powerful in other spheres, acquiesced in them in the most childlike fashion. They were satisfied, for instance, to be told that if we see the flash of lightning before we hear the accompanying roll of thunder, it is because the sense of sight is nobler than that of hearing. Bede's conception of the Universe, representing the firmament as spherical in form and of a subtle and fiery nature, the upper heavens, where the angels reside, being tempered with ice, lest they should inflame the lower elements, while lower down a supply of water, referred to in Genesis i. 7, serves to allay the fire of the stars,—this conception, with its innumerable developments and complications borrowed from the ancients, satisfied men's minds for hundreds of years.

Dr. White's book abounds in particulars of this kind drawn from the most varied sources and spreading over the whole field of human knowledge-geology, astronomy, medicine, geography, philology, social science, etc. Taken as a whole, it forms a striking picture of the weakness of man's first attempts to solve the enigmas of nature, and shows how hard it has been for the most enlightened and gifted to pierce the crust of prejudice under which their contemporaries continued to entertain the most arbitrary and often the silliest notions. In this light the work might well be called "A History of Human Obtuseness and Credulity." But it was not as a psychological study nor as a description of human discovery, like Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences," that the book was meant by its author. Under a historical form it is avowedly a polemical work, having for its purpose to show how much Science has had to suffer, not from human ignorance or human folly, but from Religion and its representatives; and at the same time, how badly both have fared for having attempted to impede her irresistible progress. This is the conclusion to which each chapter leads in succession, and hence the title of the book: "Warfare of Science with Theology," than which none could be more appropriate, unless it had been "The Total Discomfiture and Defeat of Religion by Modern Science." To such a title Dr. White would, of course, object. He claims, in fact, to write in the interest of religion no less than of science, and no doubt a book very interesting and equally welcome to both sides could be written on the same general lines-but not by Dr. White. He is a believer in science, and in little more. He tells us, indeed, in his preface that he was bred a churchman, that many of his friends, as well as his dearest relatives, were deeply religious, and that he himself is a great lover of the externals of religion-ecclesiastical architecture, church music, and the like. But he claims no more, and no more can be expected in one who dismisses as legendary some of the most important facts of the Old and New Testament,