252 THE HISTORY OE THE ORDER OE [book II.

parts, lying quite open; the Saracens having razedeverything like a fortification in them after takingAcre. And might then have visited JEmmaus, aliasNicopolis , with an intention of taking up their poorabandoned garrison, but it was much too late; noHospitallers to take—nothing but a ruin of someyears, yet not by Saracens, but God, evidently byan earthquake or other natural subversion!

If the khan was, as is said, a person of extra-ordinary intelligence, and an assiduous reader ofthe Cyropediad, and the life of Alexander, and thatthose princes were his models, no wonder he pre-ferred Christianity to Mahometanism; for he couldnot but observe that what is against Nature mustbe false. All beneficent natural changes are slowand gradual, as the corn, the tree, the humancreature. With what invisible slowness does theflower produce the fruit, and this enlarge andripen! The line of separation you can never find.As the oak is in the acorn, so the grown-up maleor female is in the infant. It is but a fair, slowdevelopment, without any change of essence, andrequires years. But unnatural things are, for themost part, sudden and violent, and, nearly always,wicked or disastrous, like earthquakes or hurricanes.From the creation, the imperceptible progress whichhas now produced Christianity, has been going on,