Well did Christendom bestow the surname of the “Hammer” upon the heroic Charles! From the blows which he dealt out to those foes of Gospel civilization they reeled back, stunned into the keen conviction that for them and their hateful creed there was no home in Europe. They recrossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and, instead of the Gallic and Germanic races, sought an easier prey in the enervated communities of Oriental heathenism. Thus, instead of France and Britain and Germany, the Crescent of the False Prophet subdued, and for nearly a thousand years waved over, Egypt, Persia, Toorkistan, and India. But for the Providence which gave Charles Martel that decisive victory, Arabic had been the classical language, and Islamism the religion of our race and of Europe; and “America and the Cape, the Compass and the Press, the Steam-engine, the Telescope, and the Copernican System, might all have remained undiscovered until the present day.”
When reading these thrilling events long years since, how free I was from any anticipation that I should yet have to stand in the center of Asia, amid a similar whirl of confusion and blood, organized by that very creed, as it rose in its might to sweep the Eastern hemisphere of every vestige of the Gospel, and plant its triumphant flag on the ruins of Christianity; that it should be my lot to be lost to sight for months amid the rolling clouds of the conflict, where Henry Havelock, victorious over Nana Sahib, accomplished for Oriental Christianity what Charles Martel did a thousand years before for the same faith, in the West; that at length, emerging unscathed, I should have the high honor to be invited by them to render their thanks to God for their victory, on the last battle-field which his heroes won; and, more wonderful still, that there, amid the utter military downfall of that creed and its chief dynasty, I should be privileged to plant the standard of the Cross in the land of the Sepoy, and live to see Churches founded and native ministers raised up from the very race who sought our life and labored to destroy our faith!
How different would the East and the West have been to-day had either Martel or Havelock failed! But God is great for the
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