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great offences" they had "provoked the wrath of the Divine Majesty," and bade them "make satisfaction by suitable penitence" or they would certainly suffer "the severest temporal punishment." Nothing but a stultifying sense of supereminence could have blinded the Pope to the irritating and mischievous effects of such language. The Grand Khan naturally answered in a cognate strain but with better logic. He told the Pope and all other Christian potentates that if they wanted peace they had better come and ask for it; he said that with regard to the Tartars being baptised and becoming Christians as the Pope declared to be essential, the Tartars failed to understand the necessity; he asserted that if men had been slain it was "because they did not obey the precepts of God and of Genghis Khan;" he opined that if God had not willed these things they could not have happened; and he concluded by observing that although the inhabitants of the West believed themselves alone to be Christians and despised others, "how were they to know on whom God might choose to bestow his favours?" Thus Pope Innocent IV. and Kuyuk Khan, writing to each other in the thirteenth century, forecast exactly the tone destined thenceforth to govern all communications between the West and the Far East,—an undisguised assumption of superiority on the part of the former, an indignant repudiation of inferiority on the part of the latter: the one convinced that