Cross or Crescent! We of the present time can form no adequate idea of the import couched in those words in medi?val time. Strange that rivers of blood should flow in the interests of the cause of the Prince of Peace! Would the Christ,—who, dying upon the Cross prayed for his murderers,—have it so? Perhaps over his friends even more pitifully than over his erring inimical world the sublime impetration unceasingly ascends Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

And Allah “the mild, the merciful, the compassionate”—where was he that tragic Sunday morning October 7, 1571, when one hundred thousand of his followers, singularly lacking in his characteristic qualities, stood red-hand in slaughter! Alas for the ideal when fitted to the real: it is shattered; its shimmering iridescence dies down gray and dead.
To Fight or Not to Fight.

The Ottoman empire, flushed by a long series of successes under Solyman the Magnificent, had grown insolently aggressive. The memory of Tours and of Belgrade no longer acted as a deterrent to the fierce victors of Constantinople; their eyes were ever turned longingly toward western Europe, and their dreams were of bloodshed and victory.

The island Cyprus belonged to Venice, but its situation made it highly desirable as an Ottoman possession; and upon the old principle that might makes right—a principle unfortunately ever retaliatively new—the Turkish forces besieged Cyprus. The[93] town Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, fell an easy prey, and the atrocities committed on the defenceless inhabitants horror-thrilled the Christian world. Later the town Famagosta after a prolonged and obstinate resistance was captured but under circumstances of peculiar malignity. In the words of Prescott: “While lying off Cephalonia Don John received word that Famagosta, the second city of Cyprus, had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and this under circumstances of unparalleled perfidy and cruelty. The place, after a defence that had cost hecatombs of lives to the besiegers, was allowed to capitulate on honorable terms. Mustapha, the Moslem commander, the same fierce chief who had conducted the siege of Malta, requested an interview at his quarters with four of the principal Venetian captains. After a short and angry conference, he ordered them all to execution. Three were beheaded. The other, a noble named Bragadina, he caused to be flayed alive in the market place of the city. The skin of the wretched victim was then stuffed: and with this ghastly trophy dangling from the yard-arm of his galley, the brutal monster sailed back to Constantinople, to receive the reward of his services from Selim (son and successor of Solyman).”

Submit to that? Wait apathetically for the Turks to come to Venice, Rome, Madrid and do in like manner? Well, no; not in the real, whatever may be the ideal. What then? Why, Fight.

Non-resistance: and if thine enemy smite thee upon the cheek, turn to him the other also; and if he take thy coat give to him also thy cloak; love your enemies; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you: and as result, what? Crucifixion. A nation of Christs would be put to death as unjustly as was the Christ of Calvary.

Fortunately or unfortunately—we know not which it may prove to be—only the Tolstoyan few will carry to their logical[94] conclusions the principles of non-resistance; and few, if any, even of the Tolstoyan few, will abide by these conclusions and stand calm, kind, compassionate, even under the fatal final Injustice. The great body of men, of today as of every other day of the long ages of time, defend their rights; and if that defence means that blood must flow,—then let it flow. And all the more freely will blood flow and all the more sternly indomitable will be the strife when men feel themselves justified as they strike the blow; when they feel themselves called upon to conquer or to die for a cause that they hold just; when they fight elated and fortified with the assurance that they stand as bulwarks warding off the concrete embodiment of all that they hold evil from all that they hold dear and good.

“The bravest are the tenderest,

The loving are the daring.”

Some of the bravest and the tenderest of men have trodden knee deep in human blood. There have been wars just and inevitable; and what has been may again be. We hope not; we dream not; the Peace Palace of the Hague looms spectrally on the future horizon; we are looking that way: and at times this Peace Palace seems assertively real—ready to cope with armaments and with red-hot wrongs; but again it rises fancifully and floats evanescently away and fades on a gray sky. Is it Mirage?
The Christian Knight.

Next in moral excellence to the Christian martyr is undoubtedly the Christian knight.

Chivalry—fair flower of Feudalism, night blooming cereus wide opening in white splendor exuding fragrance in somber medi?val midnight! King Arthur and his Table Round; knights errant done to death by Don Quixote and yet victors even over the smile; Chevalier Bayard, the knight without fear[95] and without reproach; Richard C?ur de Lion, the Black Prince, Lohengren, Parsifal, Siegfried, Don John of Austria—are flowerets of that Flower caught wax-white in amber and fixed fadelessly.

In all the sweep of history from Egypt to the hour, there is nothing nobler than the ideal Christian knight. To stand in awe of the omnipotent God; to go about the world redressing human wrongs; to love with young-world love bashfully reverent, constrained to win the world and lay it humbly at her feet; to reverence truth and to scorn with scorn unutterable all the thousand and one manifestations of the lie; to be loyal to king and country and God; to be gentle, courteous, kind to all life from highest to lowest; to stand face-front to the oncoming forces of evil and in that fight grimly to conquer or die: there is nothing nobler.

And yet not for all the glory of Don John, ideal Christian knight and hero of Lepanto, would I have one little stain of human blood on my white hands.

“New occasions teach new duties;

Time makes ancient good uncouth.”—Lowell.

Nevertheless he who would sympathetically and justly depict the past should be capable of entering into and all round estimating that ancient good now grown uncouth. And whatever the best men of any given age or time or clime unanimously hold as best must, in the deep heart of things, be best for that age or time or clime. The knight, the hero, the Crusader, the victor over the Saracens seemed best to the best men of the Middle Age.

Pope Pius V. earnestly advocated the cause of Venice. He appealed to the Christian monarchs of Europe to join with the Holy See in a League having for its object the total overthrow of the Ottoman empire. He urged the aggressive policy of the[96] Turks under Solyman the Magnificent and his unworthy son and successor Selim II.; he vividly portrayed the atrocities of Turkish conquest and the blight upon civilization that ever unerringly followed in the wake of the Crescent; and he endeavored by all means in his power to arouse in the hearts of the children of the Church the spirit that had made possible the First Crusade.

All Europe at this time mourned its Christian captives who were languishing in Turkish dungeons or wasting away as galley slaves. Twelve thousand of these Christian captives were chained to the oars as galley slaves on the Moslem ships while the fight Lepanto was raging; their liberation and restoration to freedom formed the purest joy-pearl in the gem casket of that joyous victory.

Cyprus had just fallen into the hands of the Turks amid scenes of unparalleled barbarity: and against the Turk as the destroyer of civilization and the menace of Christendom all eyes were directed, all hearts beat with desire to avenge, slay, destroy: and all these feelings found outlet, and culmination and gratification in the battle of Lepanto, under Don John of Austria, the Christian knight.
Ocean Encounters.

Ocean instability, ocean vastness, ocean majestic indifference to the pigmy life and death struggles of men throw a magnetic glow over sea fights.

When the bay of Salamis changed gradually from greenish gray to red; when the Ionian sea slowly purpled off Actium, crimsoning the frightened barge of Cleopatra and of love maddened Anthony; when the waters at the entrance of the gulf Lepanto grew blood-red fed by trickling streams from five hundred galleys: did ocean care? The Titanic sinks and the billows[97] dash high in foam play, they descend sportively with her into her grave hole, they arise and roll on: the Volturno blazes on a background of black sky, a foreground of flame-lit angry rolling waves: and does ocean care?

Don John arranged his battle line in a semi-circular stretch of about one mile embracing the entrance to the gulf of Lepanto (now Gulf Corinth). The Turkish fleet lay concealed somewhere on the water of the gulf and must come out at the entrance and fight openly or remain bottled up in the gulf until forced out by starvation. Don John knew his adversary, ............