ment had, for shameful lucre, sold their substance and their blood, and the honours of their wives and daughters.'

The British armies, under the standard of the cross in India, are indisputably the bravest and most successful of invaders; but the Government under which they act is weakly inconsistent, and betrays the cause of the religion whose ensign it uprears in the conflict. The original governors were traders and smugglers in opium, with the Christian ensign displayed aloft. They derived profits from, or paid a tribute to, the idol of Juggernaut, as they might turn the balance of the account in their own favour; and while they subdued the Mahometans, they recognised their laws, and administered them according to the creed and precepts of the Koran.

* Macaulay's Essays, "Life of Warren Hastings."

CHAPTER IV.

The great idea that originated the wars emphatically called the CRUSADES.—The beginning of the Crusades.-Men were moved as objective beings, and the fear of the end of the world stimulated two classes of mind.-The issue of the Crusades was the humiliation of the Cross; the immediate consequences to Europe were beneficial in the greater activity to Mind. -But the power of the Crescent increased and extended for three centuries after the cessation of the Crusades.

IN the history of great ideas and of great events, there is a connection with fixed places on the earth's surface which can never be dissevered. Every country has its sacred spots, or its holy mountains, to which the eye of faith is turned, and from which patriotism, and all the high emotions of the soul, derive refreshment and vigour; and it appears to be the law of our nature in these matters as it is in physics, that as the distance in time increases, the intenseness of the feelings augments and heightens.

Mount Calvary, with its sepulchre, is THE most sacred spot on this globe of earth, and the death and burial that there took place 1821 years ago, were events of the most transcendent nature to the wellbeing of man. The fact that distinguishes that death, and marks it as an event different from all other deaths that ever happened, and which gives it an efficacy that is felt in time, and which will endure through eternity, is, the sepulchre is AN EMPTY ONE. We have here the physical facts of a death and a burial; but no body is

found in the sepulchre-for the sepulchre is empty, because Christ is risen.

It is not our purpose to touch on the doctrine of the crucifixion and resurrection of the Redeemer. We have only to do here with the spots where they were finished, and to refer to certain extraordinary events which occurred many centuries afterwards, and affected the condition of a large portion of mankind. Those great facts, in connection with the localities where they took place, naturally excited and kept alive a curiosity and a desire to visit the spots; and, from a very early age of the Christian era, pious persons, from various countries, performed solemn pilgrimages to Mount Calvary and its tomb. An aged lady, the mother of Constantine, moved by her piety, and stimulated by the curiosity natural to her sex, visited Jerusalem, and expressed an eager desire to see the sepulchre and to touch the true cross. As might be expected, the desire expressed by the mother of the greatest conqueror and sovereign of that age was gratified-the sepulchre was discovered, the true cross was found, and the very nails, the inscription on the cross, and the crown of thorns, were presented to the imperial mother! The pilgrimage of Helena, the supposed identification of the sacred spots, and the church built over the sepulchre, added fresh eagerness to the desires of Christians in Europe and Asia to visit Calvary. From the early part of the fourth century to the present time, visits have not ceased to be paid by pilgrims from all countries, and frequently amidst privations and dangers; and the truth of ecclesiastical history cannot be impeached in its relation of the avaricious and pious frauds which, in every age, have been committed at the holy sepulchre. It may be well to point out here a want of picturesque representation, or rather of truthful keep

ing, in the form in which the sepulchre is exhibited to the eye of the pious but credulous pilgrim. The new tomb which Joseph of Arimathea had hewn out of the rock, and in which no body had yet lain, was situated in a garden in the place where the Saviour was crucified.* It thus appears that a garden was the scene of his last suffering, as it had been of the night of the agony of the bloody sweat. But the pious credulity and the monkish taste of the possessors of the sacred spots, have placed the sepulchre under the floor of a church, into which the worshipper has to descend as into a vault, and, by the dim glimmer of lamps, instead of the glory of the daybreak of the first morning of the week, may contemplate "the place where the Lord lay."

Even the infidels, under whose power Jerusalem and its sacred localities were subjected, respected the holy places, and afforded protection to the Christian pilgrims who resorted thither. But in the eleventh century a military revolution changed the masters of the celebrated city, and the pilgrims suffered unwonted hardships, and increased rates of taxation for their privileges. Discontent was produced, and complaints were made, and at length the sympathy and indignation of every people in Europe were roused: the first raised in favour of the Christian pilgrims; and the second against the infidels who oppressed and insulted them. One remarkable man, known in the history of the wars of the cross as Peter the Hermit, undertook the pilgrimage of all Europe to preach the deliverance of Christians from the oppression of the Turks, and the recovery of the holy sepulchre. The effect of the preaching of that enthusiastic monk was most extraordinary. He went through the principal

* John xix. 41.

countries of Europe, and probably to all of them. The people were moved and excited, as by the sound of the trumpet, or as if they had heard the call of the angel of the sepulchre, "Come, see the place where the Lord lay!"* And when vast multitudes of people from those countries had assembled at Clermont, where the Pope addressed them, they responded to his command, to march to the Holy Land and rescue the sepulchre, by a unanimous shout of "God wills it! God wills it!" The details of the history of the crusades are so generally known, and so much has been written on the subject, that all that we have to do here, in illustration of the cross as an ensign of war, is to refer to those remarkable expeditions as instructive instances of the movement of great multitudes of men as objective beings. The sensory of every individual was impressed and affected by external objects every way calculated to excite his imagination and inflame his passions. His subjective qualities were for the time subdued and lost, and he was led or driven wherever a master-spirit pointed or guided the way. The subjective spirits who planned the movements, and calculated the results of enthusiasm and passion, perhaps, did not actually join the armed multitudes. At all events, history relates that, after the first outbursts from Europe, and when disasters had cooled the mind, the popes again stimulated fresh wars. They were terrible wars, and never before did the world see such carnage and destruction committed under the Christian sign. Besides the crosses woven on the banners, and painted on the shields, Pope Urban the Second had commanded-"Let such as are going to fight for Christianity put the form of the cross upon

* Matt. xxviii. 6.