And to prove the truth of what he said, he told us briefly what had happened to a certain Christian gentleman almost at that very time, the strangest case that had ever occurred even there, where astonishing and marvellous things are happening every instant.
They put a chain on me, more as a mark of this than to keep me safe, and so I passed my life in that bano with several other gentlemen and persons of quality marked out as held to ransom; but though at times, or rather almost always, we suffered from hunger and scanty clothing, nothing distressed us so much as hearing and seeing at every turn the unexampled and unheard-of cruelties my master inflicted upon the Christians. Every day he hanged a man, impaled one, cut off the ears of another; and all with so little provocation, or so entirely without any, that the Turks acknowledged he did it merely for the sake of doing it, and because he was by nature murderously disposed towards the whole human race.
For very long after they became
Christian the Saxons kept their old pagan ways of thought, and Caedmon, when he came to sing of holy things, sang as a minstrel might.
Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer.
Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves.
So the chief of police ordered a gallows to be erected, and sent criers to proclaim in every street in the city that a
Christian was to be hanged that day for having killed a Mussulman.
The medieval lack of historic sense gives to all the plays the setting of the authors' own times; Roman officers appear as feudal knights; and all the heathens (including the Jews) are Saracens, worshippers of 'Mahound' and 'Termagaunt'; while the good characters, however long they may really have lived before the
Christian era, swear stoutly by St.
He told them that in the sight of all indifferent men, and in the sense of the laws of society, they had lived all this while in a state of sin; and that it was true that nothing but the consenting to marry, or effectually separating them from one another, could now put an end to it; but there was a difficulty in it, too, with respect to the laws of
Christian matrimony, which he was not fully satisfied about, that of marrying one that is a professed
Christian to a savage, an idolater, and a heathen--one that is not baptized; and yet that he did not see that there was time left to endeavour to persuade the women to be baptized, or to profess the name of Christ, whom they had, he doubted, heard nothing of, and without which they could not be baptized.
At the same time the servant informed Isaac, that a Nazarene (so they termed
Christians, while conversing among themselves) desired to speak with him.
"Wasn't it you (and didn't we all appreciate it in you?) who forgave everything, and moved simply by
Christian feeling was ready to make any sacrifice?
I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for they are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a
Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness.
And how will
Christian rejoice to hear of this happy transformation of his old antagonist!