There was as little affectation of sanctity in his
dress or living as there was effort in his eloquence.{5}
In his youth he had been one of the most austere
of men; at the age of twenty-one, renouncing
bright prospects of the world, he had devoted
himself to prayer and study of the Scriptures.
He had retired to the mountains near Antioch,{10}
his native place, and had lived among the monks.
This had been his home for six years, and he had
chosen it in order to subdue the daintiness of his
natural appetite. "Lately," he wrote to a friend
at the time,—"lately, when I had made up my{15}
mind to leave the city and betake myself to the
tabernacle of the monks, I was forever
inquiring and busying myself how I was to get a
supply of provisions; whether it would be possible
to procure fresh bread for my eating, whether{20}
I should be ordered to use the same oil for my
lamp and for my food, to undergo the hardship
of peas and beans, or of severe toil, such as
digging, carrying wood or water, and the like; in
a word, I made much account of bodily comfort." [30] {25}
Such was the nervous anxiety and fidget of mind
with which he had begun: but this rough
discipline soon effected its object, and at length, even
by preference, he took upon him mortifications
which at first were a trouble to him. For the{30}
last two years of his monastic exercise, he lived
by himself in a cave; he slept, when he did sleep,
without lying down; he exposed himself to the
extremities of cold. At length he found he was
passing the bounds of discretion, nature would{5}
bear no more; he fell ill, and returned to the
city.
A course of ascetic practice such as this would
leave its spiritual effects upon him for life. It
sank deep into him, though the surface might{10}
not show it. His duty at Constantinople was to
mix with the world; and he lived as others,
except as regards such restraints as his sacred
office and archiepiscopal station demanded of
him. He wore shoes, and an under garment;{15}
but his stomach was ever delicate, and at meals
he was obliged to have his own dish, such as it
was, to himself. However, he mixed freely with
all ranks of men; and he made friends,
affectionate friends, of young and old, men and women,{20}
rich and poor, by condescending to all of every
degree. How he was loved at Antioch, is shown
by the expedient used to transfer him thence to
Constantinople. Asterius, count of the East, had
orders to send for him, and ask his company to a{25}
church without the city. Having got him into
his carriage, he drove off with him to the first
station on the highroad to Constantinople, where
imperial officers were in readiness to convey him
thither. Thus he was brought upon the scene of{30}
those trials which have given him a name in history,
and a place in the catalogue of the Saints.
At the imperial city he was as much followed, if
not as popular, as at Antioch. "The people
flocked to him," says Sozomen, "as often as he
preached; some of them to hear what would{5}
profit them, others to make trial of him. He
carried them away, one and all, and persuaded
them to think as he did about the Divine Nature.
They hung upon his words, and could not have
enough of them; so that, when they thrust and{10}
jammed themselves together in an alarming way,
every one making an effort to get nearer to him,
and to hear him more perfectly, he took his seat
in the midst of them, and taught from the pulpit
of the Reader." [31] He was, indeed, a man to make{15}
both friends and enemies; to inspire affection,
and to kindle resentment; but his friends loved
him with a love "stronger" than "death," and
more burning than "hell"; and it was well to be
so hated, if he was so beloved.{20}
[31] Hist. viii. 5.
Here he differs, as far as I can judge, from his
brother saints and doctors of the Greek Church,
St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzen. They were
scholars, shy perhaps and reserved; and though
they had not given up the secular state, they were{25}
essentially monks. There is no evidence, that I
remember, to show that they attached men to
their persons. They, as well as John, had a
multitude of enemies; and were regarded, the
one with dislike, the other perhaps with contempt;{30}
but they had not, on the other hand,
warm, eager, sympathetic, indignant, agonized
friends. There is another characteristic in
Chrysostom, which perhaps gained for him this great
blessing. He had, as it would seem, a vigor,{5}
elasticity, and, what may be called, sunniness of
mind, all his own. He was ever sanguine,
seldom sad. Basil had a life-long malady, involving
continual gnawing pain and a weight of physical
dejection. He bore his burden well and{10}
gracefully, like the great Saint he was, as Job bore his;
but it was a burden like Job's. He was a calm, mild,
grave, autumnal day; St. John Chrysostom was
a day in spring-time, bright and rainy, and
glittering through its rain. Gregory was the full{15}
summer, with a long spell of pleasant stillness, its
monotony relieved by thunder and lightning.
And St. Athanasius figures to us the stern
persecuting winter, with its wild winds, its dreary
wastes, its sleep of the great mother, and the{20}
bright stars shining overhead. He and
Chrysostom have no points in common; but Gregory was
a dethroned Archbishop of Constantinople, like
Chrysostom, and, again, dethroned by his
brethren the Bishops. Like Basil, too, Chrysostom was{25}
bowed with infirmities of body; he was often ill;
he was thin and wizened; cold was a misery to
him; heat affected his head; he scarcely dare
touch wine; he was obliged to use the bath;
obliged to take exercise, or rather to be{30}
continually on the move. Whether from a nervous or
febrile complexion, he was warm in temper; or
at least, at certain times, his emotion struggled
hard with his reason. But he had that noble
spirit which complains as little as possible; which
makes the best of things; which soon recovers{5}
its equanimity, and hopes on in circumstances
when others sink down in despair....
II
Whence is this devotion to St. John
Chrysostom, which leads me to dwell upon the thought of
him, and makes me kindle at his name, when so{10}
many other great Saints, as the year brings round
their festivals, command indeed my veneration,
but exert no personal claim upon my heart?
Many holy men have died in exile, many holy
men have been successful preachers; and what{15}
more can we write upon St. Chrysostom's
monument than this, that he was eloquent and that he
suffered persecution? He is not an Athanasius,
expounding a sacred dogma with a luminousness
which is almost an inspiration; nor is he{20}
Athanasius, again, in his romantic life-long adventures,
in his sublime solitariness, in his ascendancy over
all classes of men, in his series of triumphs over
material force and civil tyranny. Nor, except
by the contrast, does he remind us of that{25}
Ambrose who kept his ground obstinately in an
imperial city, and fortified himself against the
heresy of a court by the living rampart of a
devoted population. Nor is he Gregory or Basil,
rich in the literature and philosophy of Greece,
and embellishing the Church with the spoils of
heathenism. Again, he is not an Augustine,
devoting long years to one masterpiece of thought,{5}
and laying, in successive controversies, the
foundations of theology. Nor is he a Jerome, so dead to
the world that he can imitate the point and wit
of its writers without danger to himself or
scandal to his brethren. He has not trampled upon{10}
heresy, nor smitten emperors, nor beautified the
house or the service of God, nor knit together the
portions of Christendom, nor founded a religious
order, nor built up the framework of doctrine, nor
expounded the science of the Saints; yet I love{15}
him, as I love David or St. Paul.
How am I to account for it? It has not
happened to me, as it might happen to many a man,
that I have devoted time and toil to the study of
his writings or of his history, and cry up that{20}
upon which I have made an outlay, or love what
has become familiar to me. Cases may occur
when our admiration for an author is only
admiration of our own comments on him, and when
our love of an old acquaintance is only our love{25}
of old times. For me, I have not written the
life of Chrysostom, nor translated his works, nor
studied Scripture in his exposition, nor forged
weapons of controversy out of his sayings or his
doings. Nor is his eloquence of a kind to carry{30}
any one away who has ever so little knowledge
of the oratory of Greece and Rome. It is not
force of words, nor cogency of argument, nor
harmony of composition, nor depth or richness of
thought, which constitute his power,—whence,
then, has he this influence, so mysterious, yet so{5}
strong?
I consider St. Chrysostom's charm to lie in his
intimate sympathy and compassionateness for
the whole world, not only in its strength, but in
its weakness; in the lively regard with which he{10}
views everything that comes before him, taken
in the concrete, whether as made after its own
kind or as gifted with a nature higher than its
own. Not that any religious man—above all,
not that any Saint—could possibly contrive to{15}
abstract the love of the work from the love of
its Maker, or could feel a tenderness for earth
which did not spring from devotion to heaven;
or as if he would not love everything just in that
degree in which the Creator loves it, and{20}
according to the measure of gifts which the Creator
has bestowed upon it, and preëminently for the
Creator's sake. But this is the characteristic
of all Saints; and I am speaking, not of what St.
Chrysostom had in common with others, but what{25}
he had special to himself; and this specialty, I
conceive, is the interest which he takes in all
things, not so far as God has made them alike,
but as He has made them different from each
other. I speak of the discriminating{30}
affectionateness with which he accepts every one for what is
personal in him and unlike others. I speak of his
versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the
sake of that portion of good, be it more or less,
of a lower order or a higher, which has severally
been lodged in them; his eager contemplation of{5}
the many things they do, effect, or produce, of
all their great works, as nations or as states;
nay, even as they are corrupted or disguised by
evil, so far as that evil may in imagination be
disjoined from their proper nature, or may be{10}
regarded as a mere material disorder apart from
its formal character of guilt. I speak of the
kindly spirit and the genial temper with which
he looks round at all things which this
wonderful world contains; of the graphic fidelity with{15}
which he notes them down upon the tablets of
his mind, and of the promptitude and propriety
with which he calls them up as arguments or
illustrations in the course of his teaching as the
occasion requires. Possessed though he be by{20}
the fire of Divine charity, he has not lost one
fiber, he does not miss one vibration, of the
complicated whole of human sentiment and affection;
like the miraculous bush in the desert, which, for
all the flame that wrapt it round, was not thereby{25}
consumed.
Such, in a transcendent perfection, was the
gaze, as we may reverently suppose, with which
the loving Father of all surveyed in eternity that
universe even in its minutest details which He{30}
had decreed to create such the loving pity with
which He spoke the word when the due moment
came, and began to mold the finite, as He
created it, in His infinite hands; such the watchful
solicitude with which he now keeps His
catalogue of the innumerable birds of heaven, and{5}
counts day by day the very hairs of our head and
the alternations of our breathing. Such, much
more, is the awful contemplation with which He
encompasses incessantly every one of those souls
on whom He heaps His mercies here, in order{10}
to make them the intimate associates of His own
eternity hereafter. And we too, in our measure,
are bound to imitate Him in our exact and vivid
apprehension of Himself and of His works. As to
Himself, we love Him, not simply in His nature,{15}
but in His triple personality, lest we become mere
pantheists. And so, again, we choose our patron
Saints, not for what they have in common with
each other (else there could be no room for choice
at all), but for what is peculiar to them severally.{20}
That which is my warrant, therefore, for particular
devotions at all, becomes itself my reason for
devotion to St. John Chrysostom. In him I
recognize a special pattern of that very gift of
discrimination. He may indeed be said in some sense to{25}
have a devotion of his own for every one who
comes across him,—for persons, ranks, classes,
callings, societies, considered as Divine works and
the subjects of his good offices or good will, and
therefore I have a devotion for him.{30}
It is this observant benevolence which gives to
his exposition of Scripture its chief characteristic.
He is known in ecclesiastical literature as the
expounder, above all others, of its literal sense.
Now in mystical comments the direct object which
the writer sets before him is the Divine Author{5}
Himself of the written Word. Such a writer
sees in Scripture, not so much the works of God,
as His nature and attributes; the Teacher more
than the definite teaching, or its human
instruments, with their drifts and motives, their courses{10}
of thought, their circumstances and personal
peculiarities. He loses the creature in the glory
which surrounds the Creator. The problem
before him is not what the inspired writer directly
meant, and why, but, out of the myriad of{15}
meanings present to the Infinite Being who inspired him,
which it is that is most illustrative of that Great
Being's all-holy attributes and solemn dispositions.
Thus, in the Psalter, he will drop David and Israel
and the Temple together, and will recognize {20}
nothing there but the shadows of those greater truths
which remain forever. Accordingly, the
mystical comment will be of an objective character;
whereas a writer who delights to ponder human
nature and human affairs, to analyze the{25}
workings of the mind, and to contemplate what is
subjective to it, is naturally drawn to investigate
the sense of the sacred writer himself, who was the
organ of the revelation, that is, he will investigate
the literal sense. Now, in the instance of St. {30}
Chrysostom, it so happens that literal exposition
is the historical characteristic of the school in
which he was brought up; so that if he commented
on Scripture at all, he anyhow would have
adopted that method; still, there have been
many literal expositors, but only one{5}
Chrysostom. It is St. Chrysostom who is the charm of
the method, not the method that is the charm
of St. Chrysostom.
That charm lies, as I have said, in his habit and
his power of throwing himself into the minds{10}
of others, of imagining with exactness and with
sympathy circumstances or scenes which were
not before him, and of bringing out what he has
apprehended in words as direct and vivid as the
apprehension. His page is like the table of a{15}
camera lucida, which represents to us the living
action and interaction of all that goes on around
us. That loving scrutiny, with which he follows
the Apostles as they reveal themselves to us in
their writings, he practices in various ways{20}
towards all men, living and dead, high and low,
those whom he admires and those whom he weeps
over. He writes as one who was ever looking
out with sharp but kind eyes upon the world of
men and their history; and hence he has always{25}
something to produce about them, new or old,
to the purpose of his argument, whether from
books or from the experience of life. Head and
heart were full to overflowing with a stream of
mingled "wine and milk," of rich vigorous thought{30}
and affectionate feeling. This is why his manner
of writing is so rare and special; and why, when
once a student enters into it, he will ever
recognize him, wherever he meets with extracts from
him.
Letters of Chrysostom, written in Exile
"To Olympias
"Why do you bewail me? Why beat your breast,{5}
and abandon yourself to the tyranny of despondency?
Why are you grieved because you have failed in
effecting my removal from Cucusus? Yet, as far as your own
part is concerned, you have effected it, since you have
left nothing undone in attempting it. Nor have you any{10}
reason to grieve for your ill success; perhaps it has seemed
good to God to make my race course longer that my
crown may be brighter. You ought to leap and dance and
crown yourself for this, viz., that I should be accounted
worthy of so great a matter, which far exceeds my merit.{15}
Does my present loneliness distress you? On the
contrary, what can be more pleasant than my sojourn here?
I have quiet, calm, much leisure, excellent health. To
be sure, there is no market in the city, nor anything
on sale; but this does not affect me; for all things, as if{20}
from some fountains, flow in upon me. Here is my lord,
the Bishop of the place, and my lord Dioscorus, making
it their sole business to make me comfortable. That
excellent person Patricius will tell you in what good
spirits and lightness of mind, and amid what kind{25}
attentions, I am passing my time."—Ep. 14.
The same is his report to his friends at Cæesarea,
and the same are his expressions of gratitude
and affection towards them. The following is
addressed to the President of Cappodocia:{30}
"To Carterius
"Cucusus is a place desolate in the extreme; however,
it does not annoy me so much by its desolateness as it
relieves me by its quiet and its leisure. Accordingly, I
have found a sort of harbor in this desolateness; and
have set me down to recover breath after the miseries{5}
of the journey, and have availed myself of the quiet to
dispose of what remained both of my illness and of the
other troubles which I have undergone. I say this to
your illustriousness, knowing well the joy you feel in
this rest of mine. I can never forget what you did for{10}
me in Cæsarea, in quelling those furious and senseless
tumults, and striving to the utmost, as far as your powers
extended, to place me in security. I give this out
publicly wherever I go, feeling the liveliest gratitude to you,
my most worshipful lord, for so great solicitude towards{15}
me."—Ep. 236.
"To Diogenes
"Cucusus is indeed a desolate spot, and moreover
unsafe to dwell in, from the continual danger to which
it is exposed of brigands. You, however, though away,
have turned it for me into a paradise. For, when I{20}
hear of your abundant zeal and charity in my behalf,
so genuine and warm (it does not at all escape me, far
removed as I am from you), I possess a great treasure
and untold wealth in such affection, and feel myself
to be dwelling in the safest of cities, by reason of the{25}
great gladness which bears me up, and the high
consolation which I enjoy."—Ep. 144.
Diogenes was one of the friends who sent him
supplies: he writes in answer:
"You know very well yourself that I have ever been{30}
one of your most warmly attached admirers; therefore
I beg you will not be hurt at my having returned your
presents. I have pressed out of them and have quaffed
the honor which they did me; and if I return the things
themselves, it has been from no slight or distrust of you,
but because I was in no need of them. I have done the
same in the case of many others; for many others too,
with a generosity like yours, ardent friends of mine, have{5}
made me the same offers; and the same apology has set
me right with them which I now ask you to receive. If
I am in want, I will ask these things of you with much
freedom, as if they were my own property, nay with
more, as the event will show. Receive them back, then,{10}
and keep them carefully; so that, if there is a call for
them some time hence, I may reckon on them."—Ep. 50.
As a fellow to the above, I add one of his
letters:
"To Carteria
"What are you saying? that your unintermitting{15}
ailments have hindered you from visiting me? but you
have come, you are present with me. From your very
intention I have gained all this, nor have you any need
to excuse yourself in this matter. That warm and true
charity of yours, so vigorous, so constant, suffices to{20}
make me very happy. What I have ever declared in
my letters, I now declare again, that, wherever I may be,
though I be transported to a still more desolate place
than this, you and your matters I never shall forget.
Such pledges of your warm and true charity have you{25}
stored up for me, pledges which length of time can never
obliterate nor waste; but, whether I am near you or far
away, ever do I cherish that same charity, being
assured of the loyalty and sincerity of your affection for
me, which has been my comfort hitherto."—Ep. 227.{30}
"To Olympias
"It is not a light effort," he says (Ep. 2), "but
it demands an energetic soul and a great mind to
bear separation from one whom we love in the
charity of Christ. Every one knows this who
knows what it is to love sincerely, who knows
the power of supernatural love. Take the blessed
Paul: here was a man who had stripped himself{5}
of the flesh, and who went about the world
almost with a disembodied soul, who had
exterminated from his heart every wild impulse, and
who imitated the passionless sereneness of the
immaterial intelligences, and who stood on high{10}
with the Cherubim, and shared with them in their
mystical music, and bore prisons, chains,
transportations, scourges, stoning, shipwreck, and every
form of suffering; yet he, when separated from
one soul loved by him in Christian charity, was{15}
so confounded and distracted as all at once to
rush out of that city, in which he did not find the
beloved one whom he expected. 'When I was
come to Troas,' he says, 'for the gospel of Christ,
and a door was opened to me in the Lord, I had{20}
no rest in my spirit, because I found not Titus
my brother; but bidding them farewell, I went
into Macedonia.'
"Is it Paul who says this?" he continues;
"Paul who, even when fastened in the stocks,{25}
when confined in a dungeon, when torn with
the bloody scourge, did nevertheless convert and
baptize and offer sacrifice, and was chary even
of one soul which was seeking salvation? and
now, when he has arrived at Troas, and sees the{30}
field cleansed of weeds, and ready for the sowing,
and the floor full, and ready to his hand,
suddenly he flings away the profit, though he came
thither expressly for it. 'So it was,' he answers
me, 'just so; I was possessed by a predominating
tyranny of sorrow, for Titus was away; and this{5}
so wrought upon me as to compel me to this
course.' Those who have the grace of charity
are not content to be united in soul only, they
seek for the personal presence of him they love.
"Turn once more to this scholar of charity, and{10}
you will find that so it is. 'We, brethren,' he
says, 'being bereaved of you for the time of an
hour, in sight, not in heart, have hastened the
more abundantly to see your face with great
desire. For we would have come unto you, I,{15}
Paul, indeed, once and again, but Satan hath
hindered us. For which cause, forbearing no
longer, we thought it good to remain at Athens
alone, and we sent Timothy.' What force is
there in each expression! That flame of charity{20}
living in his soul is manifested with singular
luminousness. He does not say so much as
'separated from you,' nor 'torn,' nor 'divided,'
nor 'abandoned,' but only 'bereaved'; moreover
not 'for a certain period,' but merely 'for the{25}
time of an hour'; and separated, 'not in heart,
but in presence only'; again, 'have hastened
the more abundantly to see your face.' What!
it seems charity so captivated you that you
desiderated their sight, you longed to gaze upon{30}
their earthly, fleshly countenance? 'Indeed I
did,' he answers: 'I am not ashamed to say so;
for in that seeing all the channels of the senses
meet together. I desire to see your presence;
for there is the tongue which utters sounds and
announces the secret feelings; there is the{5}
hearing which receives words, and there the eyes
which image the movements of the soul.' But
this is not all: not content with writing to them
letters, he actually sends to them Timothy, who
was with him, and who was more than any letters.{10}
And, 'We thought it good to remain alone;'
that is, when he is divided from one brother,
he says, he is left alone, though he had so many
others with him."
You may think, Gentlemen, I have been very
long in coming to the Turks, and indeed I have
been longer than I could have wished; but I
have thought it necessary, in order to your taking
a just view of them, that you should survey them{5}
first of all in their original condition. When they
first appear in history they are Huns or Tartars,
and nothing else; they are indeed in no
unimportant respects Tartars even now; but, had they
never been made something more than Tartars,{10}
they never would have had much to do with the
history of the world. In that case, they would
have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis;
they might have swept over the face of the earth,
and scourged the human race, powerful to destroy,{15}
helpless to construct, and in consequence
ephemeral; but this would have been all. But this has
not been all, as regards the Turks; for, in spite
of their intimate resemblance or relationship to
the Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential{20}
barbarism to this day, still they, or at least great
portions of the race, have been put under
education; they have been submitted to a slow
course of change, with a long history and a profitable
discipline and fortunes of a peculiar kind;
and thus they have gained those qualities of
mind, which alone enable a nation to wield and
to consolidate imperial power.
I have said that, when first they distinctly{5}
appear on the scene of history, they are
indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the
high metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a
hilly district, rich not only in the useful, but in
the precious metals. Gold is said to abound{10}
there; but it is still more fertile in veins of iron,
which indeed is said to be the most plentiful in
the world. There have been iron works there
from time immemorial, and at the time that the
Huns descended on the Roman Empire (in the{15}
fifth century of the Christian era), we find
the Turks nothing more than a family of slaves,
employed as workers of the ore and as blacksmiths
by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the course
of fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish{20}
power in Europe, with the sudden development
peculiar to Tartars, we find these Turks spread
from East to West, and lords of a territory so
extensive, that they were connected, by relations
of peace or war, at once with the Chinese, the{25}
Persians, and the Romans. They had reached
Kamtchatka on the North, the Caspian on the
West, and perhaps even the mouth of the Indus
on the South. Here then we have an
intermediate empire of Tartars, placed between the{30}
eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this sketch it has
no place, except as belonging to Turkish history,
because it was contained within the limits of
Asia, and, though it lasted for 200 years, it only
faintly affected the political transactions of
Europe. However, it was not without some sort{5}
of influence on Christendom, for the Romans
interchanged embassies with its sovereign in the
reign of the then Greek Emperor Justin the
younger (A.D. 570), with the view of engaging
him in a warlike alliance against Persia. The{10}
account of one of these embassies remains, and
the picture it presents of the Turks is important,
because it seems clearly to identify them with
the Tartar race.
For instance, in the mission to the Tartars{15}
from the Pope, which I have already spoken of,
the friars were led between two fires, when they
approached the Khan, and they at first refused
to follow, thinking they might be countenancing
some magical rite. Now we find it recorded of{20}
this Roman embassy, that, on its arrival, it was
purified by the Turks with fire and incense. As
to incense, which seems out of place among such
barbarians, it is remarkable that it is used in
the ceremonial of the Turkish court to this day.{25}
At least Sir Charles Fellows, in his work on the
Antiquities of Asia Minor, in 1838, speaks of the
Sultan as going to the festival of Bairam with
incense-bearers before him. Again, when the
Romans were presented to the great Khan, they{30}
found him in his tent, seated on a throne, to which
wheels were attached and horses attachable, in
other words, a Tartar wagon. Moreover, they
were entertained at a banquet which lasted the
greater part of the day; and an intoxicating
liquor, not wine, which was sweet and pleasant,{5}
was freely presented to them; evidently the
Tartar koumiss.[32] The next day they had a
second entertainment in a still more splendid
tent; the hangings were of embroidered silk, and
the throne, the cups, and the vases were of gold.{10}
On the third day, the pavilion, in which they were
received, was supported on gilt columns; a couch
of massive gold was raised on four gold peacocks;
and before the entrance to the tent was what
might be called a sideboard, only that it was a{15}
sort of barricade of wagons, laden with dishes,
basins, and statues of solid silver. All these
points in the description—the silk hangings, the
gold vessels, the successively increasing splendor
of the entertainments—remind us of the courts{20}
of Zingis and Timour, 700 and 900 years
afterwards.
[32] Univ. Hist. Modern, vol. iii. p. 346.
This empire, then, of the Turks was of a Tartar
character; yet it was the first step of their
passing from barbarism to that degree of civilization{25}
which is their historical badge. And it was their
first step in civilization, not so much by what
it did in its day, as (unless it be a paradox to
say so) by its coming to an end. Indeed it so
happens, that those Turkish tribes which have{30}
changed their original character and have a place
in the history of the world, have obtained their
status and their qualifications for it, by a process
very different from that which took place in the
nations most familiar to us. What this process{5}
has been I will say presently; first, however, let
us observe that, fortunately for our purpose, we
have still specimens existing of those other
Turkish tribes, which were never submitted to
this process of education and change, and, in{10}
looking at them as they now exist, we see at this
very day the Turkish nationality in something
very like its original form, and are able to decide
for ourselves on its close approximation to the
Tartar. You may recollect I pointed out to{15}
you, Gentlemen, in the opening of these lectures,
the course which the pastoral tribes, or nomads
as they are often called, must necessarily take
in their emigrations. They were forced along
in one direction till they emerged from their{20}
mountain valleys, and descended their high
plateau at the end of Tartary, and then they had
the opportunity of turning south. If they did
not avail themselves of this opening, but went on
still westward, their next southern pass would{25}
be the defiles of the Caucasus and Circassia, to
the west of the Caspian. If they did not use this,
they would skirt the top of the Black Sea, and
so reach Europe. Thus in the emigration of the
Huns from China, you may recollect a tribe of{30}
them turned to the South as soon as they could,
and settled themselves between the high Tartar
land and the sea of Aral, while the main body
went on to the furthest West by the north of the
Black Sea. Now with this last passage into
Europe we are not here concerned, for the Turks{5}
have never introduced themselves to Europe by
means of it;[33] but with those two southward
passages which are Asiatic, viz., that to the east
of the Aral, and that to the west of the Caspian.
The Turkish tribes have all descended upon the{10}
civilized world by one or other of these two roads;
and I observe, that those which have descended
along the east of the Aral have changed their
social habits and gained political power, while
those which descended to the west of the Caspian{15}
remain pretty much what they ever were. The
former of these go among us by the general
name of Turks; the latter are the Turcomans
or Turkmans.... At the very date at which
Heraclius called the Turcomans into Georgia, at{20}
the very date when their Eastern brethren
crossed the northern border of Sogdiana, an event
of most momentous import had occurred in the
South. A new religion had arisen in Arabia.
The impostor Mahomet, announcing himself the{25}
Prophet of God, was writing the pages of that
book, and molding the faith of that people, which
was to subdue half the known world. The Turks
passed the Jaxartes southward in A.D. 626; just
four years before Mahomet had assumed the royal
dignity, and just six years after, on his death,
his followers began the conquest of the Persian
Empire. In the course of 20 years they effected
it; Sogdiana was at its very extremity, or its{5}
borderland; there the last king of Persia took
refuge from the south, while the Turks were
pouring into it from the north. There was little to
choose for the unfortunate prince between the
Turk and the Saracen; the Turks were his{10}
hereditary foe; they had been the giants and
monsters of the popular poetry; but he threw
himself into their arms. They engaged in his
service, betrayed him, murdered him, and
measured themselves with the Saracens in his stead.{15}
Thus the military strength of the north and south
of Asia, the Saracenic and the Turkish, came into
memorable conflict in the regions of which I have
said so much. The struggle was a fierce one, and
lasted many years; the Turks striving to force{20}
their way down to the ocean, the Saracens to
drive them back into their Scythian deserts.
They first fought this issue in Bactriana or
Khorasan; the Turks got the worst of the fight,
and then it was thrown back upon Sogdiana{25}
itself, and there it ended again in favor of the
Saracens. At the end of 90 years from the time
of the first Turkish descent on this fair region,
they relinquished it to their Mahometan
opponents. The conquerors found it rich, populous,{30}
and powerful; its cities, Carisme, Bokhara, and
Samarcand, were surrounded beyond their
fortifications by a suburb of fields and gardens, which
was in turn protected by exterior works; its plains
were well cultivated, and its commerce extended
from China to Europe. Its riches were{5}
proportionally great; the Saracens were able to extort
a tribute of two million gold pieces from the
inhabitants; we read, moreover, of the crown
jewels of one of the Turkish princesses; and of
the buskin of another, which she dropt in her{10}
flight from Bokhara, as being worth two
thousand pieces of gold.[34] Such had been the prosperity
of the barbarian invaders, such was its end; but
not their end, for adversity did them service, as
well as prosperity, as we shall see.{15}