ence Hall of his forefathers, where millions have bowed down before them in such abject homage! that I should be there to see him, the last of their line, descending from that throne and $900,000 per annum to a felon's doom and the deck of a convict ship, to breathe out the remnant of his miserable life upon a foreign shore; and then after his departure to behold, as I did, that costly Khass given over to the spoiler's hand, rifled by the English soldiers of its last ornaments, and ruined forever!
Truly has it been said that ofttimes “fact is stranger than fiction;” and the assertion has seldom received more impressive illustrations than are found in the wonderful scenes which I witnessed in the Court of Delhi at the close of 1857.
In reading that stirring account of the great victory won for Christianity near Poictiers on the 3d of October, A. D. 732—when the brave Charles Martel, at the head of his Christian warriors, had to meet Abder Rahman and his Arabian cavalry, 375,000 strong, and there to decide whether Europe should henceforth be Christian or Moslem—one almost trembles as he thinks what would have been the result had Charles failed that day! The hosts of the Arabian Antichrist had already extinguished the seven Churches of Asia, almost swept North Africa of its Christianity, had passed the pillars of Hercules and conquered Spain, crossed the Pyrenees, and were now descending into France and Germany with the intention of completing the circuit of the Mediterranean, and making Europe as Mohammedan as they had made Asia Minor and Palestine. Christendom was terrified, for the Christian Church seemed pressed to the verge of ruin. On the issue of that morning, so far as human eye can penetrate the future, it was then and there to be decided whether Paris and London, and, by consequence, New York and Boston, were to be like Bagdad, Constantinople, and Damascus: whether, instead of the spires of our churches and the sound of our Sabbath bells, our race was to receive, at the sword's point, another faith, whose outward expression would be the Mosque and the Minaret, and the Muezzin's cry calling “the faithful” to the Koran and its prayers!
