that next to Palestine emphatically merited the appellation of THE LAND, for they were the fairest and most fertile provinces of the earth, were to become his prey: and so contemptuously would he treat them, that he would divide them gratis, as if they were worth nothing, to his rapacious followers.
And worth nothing have all these noble lands become beneath the blighting influence and the desolating sway of Mahometanism, Read what all travellers tell you of all the lands beneath the sceptre of Mahometanism, of their deplorable degradation, and then judge what the gratuitous division of them by Antichrist has wrought!
Think what Greece, what Asia Minor, what Palestine and Egypt, what Persia and Armenia were in old times, under the benignant influences of the old Greek and Roman civilization on the one hand, and of Christianity on the other; think of the glorious and splendid cities, of the cultivation that made that vast portion of the earth one garden, of the influence of the Church, that studded it over with churches and monasteries, and with a progeny of innumerable saints in all ranks of men, and you will be better able to estimate the work of physical and moral destruction achieved by the Man of Sin, and what was
