going by the name of Eblis; they rebelled in refusing to worship Adam at the command of God, and were expelled from heaven. The Koran also professes to give their pretence for refusing to obey; they considered Adam as their inferior, because he was formed from clay, and they from fire. Besides these, Mahomet incorporated into his supernatural world the popular belief which in the West has peopled the earth and air with fairies, elves, sprites, and local demons. These are the genii of The Arabian Nights, and the innumerable other tales of diablerie in which Oriental romance so much delights. These genii possess bodies less spiritual than the angels and devils, but less gross than the clay-formed bodies of men. They eat, drink, and multiply; and perpetually interfere in the affairs of humanity.

The prophetical office holds a prominent place in the creed of Mahometans. They have varying traditions as to the number of prophets who have been divinely commissioned to instruct and reform the world; some making them amount to 124,000; others to nearly double the number. Of these, 313 have been apostles, or teachers of true doctrine; and six have introduced new dispensations: Adam, Noe, Abraham, Moses, our Blessed Lord, and finally the arch-deceiver himself.

The Koran teaches a general resurrection at the end of time; to include angels, genii, men, and animals, and the body as well as the soul. The mode of proceeding with the judgment, which immediately follows, is one of the most extraordinary of Mahomet's inventions, and shows his skill in turning the worst passions of man to account in the very construction of a system of religion. The good works of each man will be weighed in one scale, and his bad ones in another; and according as the balance turns, even by the hair's-breadth, so will be his eternal destiny determined. Here, however, a new element is introduced. Every one is to take vengeance upon every one who has injured him during his lifetime, by the following ingenious process. The injured person receives a portion of the good works of the person who has wronged him, and places them to his own account before God; and the balance is then finally struck. We see the natural working of this hideous invention, in the exquisite pleasure with which a Mahometan anticipates the burning in hell of any one with whom he quarrels. If any two gratifications can be called especially "sweet" to fallen man, they are revenge and lust; and both of these Mahomet contrived to enlist in his service, by promising them a gratification after death. This mortal revenge, moreover, he did not reserve exclusively to rational beings. All animals are to take vengeance upon one

another, and then, every one of them, be turned into dust. The wicked, finally, including not only the human race, but those of the genii who would not believe in Mahomet, with Eblis and all the devils, are cast into the intense fire and cold of hell; while the believing genii accompany the good to Paradise. All alike, however, have to cross a certain bridge, finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword. The good cross it in safety, the wicked fall from it into the hell which yawns beneath.

The Mahometan Paradise is pure sensuality, the extent of its enjoyment being apportioned to the respective degrees of merit of those who enter. The meanest, however, will have eighty thousand beautiful youths for servants, and seventytwo beautiful girls (houries) for wives; besides, if he wishes it, the wives he had on earth, and if these latter are so fortunate as to accompany him; for Mahomet declares that in a certain vision which he had of hell, he perceived that the greater part of the inhabitants were women.* Every body will be clad in the most superb dresses, and pass his existence in feasting on the most delicious dainties without surfeit, and drinking the most delicious wines without intoxication, in a country of transcendent beauty, and amidst the sounds of ravishing music.

The chief points of Mahometan devotion are four: prayer, which Mahomet ordered to be performed five times a day, and to be accompanied with ablutions; almsgiving, partly as enjoined by the law, and partly voluntary in amount; the fast of the month Ramadan, during which they neither eat nor drink from sunrise to sunset; and a pilgrimage to Mecca, once (if possible) during a man's life. He forbade the use of wine and gaming; he allowed his followers four wives at a time, with permission to make up the number from their female slaves, and a great freedom of divorce; and he condemned the use of images and pictures.

A tremendous force was given to the whole system by the assertion of a Divine commission to propagate this religion by the sword; eternal life being promised to all who fell in fighting against those whom Mahomet called "unbelievers." The revelation was declared to be final; and its profession was made essential to the enjoyment of any of the privileges of freedom and citizenship. Every people that embraced it became nationally Mahometan; and every idea that might clash with the Koran was crushed without remorse, as utterly hateful.

We must do him the justice to add, that in his corresponding vision of heaven he perceived that the greater part of its inhabitants were from the poor.

Such was this monstrous portent, as it sprung to life, and was organised by the extraordinary abilities of the impostorprophet. That it should have proved in its results more cruel, more impure, more bigoted, and less powerful to enforce its professed restraints on human passion, than it showed itself in its first commencement, was but the necessary consequence of the deceit which was its origin and life. It availed nothing that in many things it copied or resembled the Jewish law, and corrected the far greater atrocities of Paganism; for the Jewish law was already superseded by Christianity; and in blaspheming Christ, Mahomet was as truly the instrument of the devil, as if he had taught the grossest idolatry and superstition, and the most disgusting of Pagan impurities.

Such now it remains, even in its days of decrepitude. And being what it is, it is clearly impossible that it can retain its supremacy or vitality in any nation where modern civilisation finds an entrance. That very exclusiveness which once constituted its motive-power is now its deadly disease. Those very ideas and rules of morality which originally gave it so plausible an appearance in the presence of the boundless license of Paganism, stand in the directest conflict with those ideas which Christianity has communicated to modern civilisation, even when Christian faith and Christian devotion are altoge-. ther lost. Its very prohibition of images and pictures would alone suffice to make a union between European cultivation and the dominance of the Koran a practical impossibility. Its restrictions are as abhorrent to Christian liberty, as its permissions are offensive to Christian duty. Turkey, therefore, when she ceased to be strictly and solely Mahometan, began the excavation of the mine which must shiver her into a thousand fragments. Its explosion can only be a matter of time. The chambers are hollowed out, the powder is buried, the fuse is now in process of laying; and, perhaps when we least are looking for it, the earth will be rent by the bursting flames, and the bloody despotism of four centuries be laid low in its own ruins. May it be granted to us to see the Cross appearing triumphant aloft above the prostrate remains of its hereditary foe!

As we have already intimated, we cannot but expect that the present war will actually produce the catastrophe. The friendship of France and England must prove as fatal to Turkey as the hostility of Nicholas; and heartily we rejoice in the prospect that, at the moment of dissolution, France and not Russia will be the ally of England in the possession, or rather in occupation of the Sultan's dominions. As for supposing that England, with only secular motives to guide her,

VOL. II.-NEW SERIES.

will be content to go on expending blood and taxes for the sole pleasure of keeping the Czar from laying his hands on the Turks, the expectation is visionary. We shall do in Turkey what we have repeatedly done in the farther East, -interfere, advise, lend money, and finally appropriate our debtor's effects. France will do the same, not only from national motives, but because Catholicism has a positive and effective influence on her councils. In the minds of thousands, nay, millions of Frenchmen, the Holy Land is a prize more worth a war than any merely commercial or military acquisition. The French Catholic, too, and every Catholic throughout Christendom, must hope for the day when the blasphemies of Mahomet shall be wiped away from the walls of Santa Sophia, and that venerable temple be made once more a Christian church. Who can forget, that the very last time that Mass was celebrated in Santa Sophia, the Holy Sacrifice was a Catholic Mass, and that the infatuated Greeks fled from the church in schismatic frenzy, at the prospect of the submission of their nation to the hated supremacy of Rome? Why should we not indulge in at least some faint hope for the speedy, perfect, and final reconciliation of Santa Sophia to the centre of unity; and pray that the new crusade may plant the Cross at once on Constantinople and Jerusalem ?

If France and England but remain united, we have little fear that such will be the result. England wants Egypt, as her highway to India; France would take Asiatic Turkey, including the Holy Land. That Russia may get nothing, we fervently hope; and some arrangement might be made with Austria for a fair apportionment of the provinces both north and south of the Danube. Constantinople itself is the difficulty. We could wish, perhaps, that France alone should possess it; though possibly the interests of religion would be best furthered by the carrying out of the scheme so often talked of, in its erection (with a certain portion of territory) into a free city like Hamburg and others in the north of Germany, under the guarantee of France, England, and Austria; and including the entire abolition of the Koran as a national law. The regeneration of Constantinople under the Code Napoléon would be a spectacle worth living to see. Viewing the question merely from the secular point of view, of all nations in Europe none are so qualified as the French to administer the government of a mixed population in a state of transition such as is already found in Constantinople; while none could vie with them as skilful conservators and restorers of those architectural glories which recal the past in such profusion of splendour in the garden-city of Constantine.

It would be the crowning merit of the Emperor of the French, and would constitute him in a peculiar sense the successor of St. Louis, could he thus accomplish the work of the old crusaders, and restore once more the faith of Jesus Christ to its supremacy in lands so long defiled and degraded.

We fear, however, that the thread of coming events is so knotted and tangled, that no human eye can discern its course. The whole circumstances of the case are so entirely without parallel, that speculation is at fault, and can be assured of nothing beyond the fact, that Turkey is at the point of death. Many may be the complications, the misunderstandings, the heartburnings, and the quarrels, before the work is accomplished, Turkey divided, and Europe and the world at peace. Still, however obscure the future, and however distant the end, we entertain a strong conviction that the progress of the Faith will be accelerated, and that a new era is about to dawn upon the lands where the Gospel was first given to mankind.

WAS SHAKSPEARE A CATHOLIC?

IN the great question of the comparative intellectual influences of Catholicity and Protestantism, the names of Shakspeare and Spenser are generally relied upon by Protestants as decisive with regard to poetry. As to Spenser, however, he has never been a popular poet like Shakspeare, who has been the idol of the people; who has laid fast hold on their passions and feelings; and to whom they proudly appeal as a splendid specimen of the opening glory of that intellectual emancipation which is vaunted as the primary result of the Reformation. To Shakspeare, learned and unlearned among Protestants alike appeal on this great controversy, as the learned among them point to the poetry of Spenser or the prose of Bacon.

There is, however, a flagrant fallacy in this argument; which to detect simply requires the slightest attention to chronology. These illustrious men were not the first-fruits of Protestantism, but the last legacies of Catholicity. It is true, when they wrote, the country was Protestant; but it had only just become so even by law; and in fact and spirit it was scarcely so it was in a state of transition and struggle; and the struggle lasted more or less from the Reformation to the Revolution. The real question is, not what were they when they wrote, but what were they when they were edu