Scientific anticipations are commonly either truisms or failures; failures, if, as is usually the case, they are made upon insufficient data; and truisms, if they succeed, for conclusions, being always contained in their premisses, never can be discoveries. Yet, as mixed mathematics correct, without superseding, the pure science, so I do not see why I may not allowably take a sort of pure philosophical view of the Turks and their position, though it be but abstract and theoretical, and require correction when confronted by the event. There is a use in investigating what ought to be, under given suppositions and conditions, even though speculation and fact do not happen to keep pace together.
As to myself, having laid down my premisses, as drawn from historical considerations, I must needs go on, whether I will or no, to the conjectures to which they lead; and that shall be my business in this concluding discussion. My line of argument has been as follows:—First, I stated some peculiarities of civilized and of barbarian communities; I said that it is a general truth that civilized states are destroyed from within, and barbarian states from without; that the very causes, which lead to the greatness of civilized communities, at length by continuing become their ruin, whereas the causes of barbarian greatness uphold that greatness, as long as they continue, and by ceasing to act, not by continuing, lead the way to its overthrow. Thus the intellect of Athens first was its making and then its unmaking; while the warlike prowess of the Spartans maintained their pre-eminence, till it succumbed to the antagonist prowess of Thebes.
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I laid down this principle as a general law of human society, open to exceptions and requiring modifications in particular cases, but true on the whole. Next, I went on to show that the Ottoman power was of a barbarian character. The conclusion is obvious; viz., that it has risen, and will fall, not by anything within it, but by agents external to itself; and this conclusion, I certainly think, is actually confirmed by Turkish history, as far as it has hitherto gone. The Ottoman state seems, in matter of fact, to be most singularly constructed, so as to have nothing inside of it, and to be moved solely or mainly by influences from without. What a contrast, for instance, to the German race! In the earliest history of that people, we discern an element of civilization, a vigorous action of the intellect residing in the body, independent of individuals, and giving birth to great men, rather than created by them. Again, in the first three centuries of the Church, we find martyrs indeed in plenty, as the Turks might have soldiers; but (to view the matter humanly) perhaps there was not one great mind, after the Apostles, to teach and to mould her children. The highest intellects, Origen, Tertullian, and Eusebius, were representatives of a philosophy not hers; her greatest bishops, such as St. Gregory, St. Dionysius, and St. Cyprian, so little exercised a doctor’s office, as to incur, however undeservedly, the imputation of doctrinal inaccuracy. Vigilant as was the Holy See then, as in every age, yet there is no Pope, I may say, during that period, who has impressed his character upon his generation; yet how well instructed, how precisely informed, how self-possessed an oracle of truth, nevertheless, do we find the Church to be, when the great internal troubles of the fourth century required it! how unambiguous, how bold is the Christianity of the great Pontiffs, St. Julius, St. Damasus, St. Siricius, and St. Innocent; of the great Doctors, St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine! By what channels, then, had the divine philosophy descended down from the Great Teacher through three centuries of persecution? First through the See and Church of Peter, into which error never intruded (though Popes might be little more than victims, to be hunted out and killed, as soon as made), and to which the faithful from all quarters of the world might have recourse when difficulties arose, or when false teachers anywhere exalted themselves. But intercommunion was difficult, and comparatively rare in days like those, and of nothing is there less pretence of proof than that the Holy See, while persecution raged, imposed a faith upon the ecumenical body. Rather, in that earliest age, it was simply the living spirit of the myriads of the faithful, none of them known to fame, who received from the disciples of our Lord, and husbanded so well, and circulated so widely, and transmitted so faithfully, generation after generation, the once delivered apostolic faith; who held it with such sharpness of outline and explicitness of detail, as enabled even the unlearned instinctively to discriminate between truth and error, spontaneously to reject the very shadow of heresy, and to be proof against the fascination of the most brilliant intellects, when they would lead them out of the narrow way. Here, then, is a luminous instance of what I mean by an energetic action from within.