And consider, too, the souls of mortal men, who have been wasted there—­no man knows how many, nor will know till the judgment day.  Two hundred thousand, at the least, they say, wasted about that accursed place, within the last twelve months.  Two hundred thousand cunning brains, two hundred thousand strong right hands, two hundred thousand willing hearts:  what good might not each of those men have done if he had been labouring peacefully at home, in his right place in God’s family!  What might he not have invented, made, carried over land and sea?  None dead there but might have been of use in his generation; and doubtless many a one who would have done good with all his might, who would have been a blessing to those around him; and now what is left of him on earth but a few bones beneath the sod?  Wasted—­utterly wasted!  Oh, consider how precious is one man; consider how much good the weakest and stupidest of us all might do, if he set himself with his whole soul to do good; consider that the weakest and stupidest of us, even if he has no care for good, cannot earn his day’s wages without doing some good to the bodies of his fellow-men; and then judge of the loss to mankind by this one single siege of one single town; and think how many stomachs must be the emptier, how many backs the barer, for this one war; and then see how man wastes God’s gifts, and wastes most of all that most precious gift of all, men, living men, with minds, and reasons, and immortal souls.

And whence has all this waste come?  Simply because these Russian rulers have chosen to seek first, not God’s kingdom, but their own.  Instead of behaving like God’s ministers and God’s stewards, and asking, ‘How would God our King have us rule His kingdom?’ they have laboured for their own power, conquering all the nations round them, removing their neighbour’s landmark, and wasting the wealth of their country on armies, and fortresses, and fleets, with which they intended to conquer more and more of the earth which did not belong to them.  Because, instead of seeking God’s righteousness, and saying to themselves, ’How shall we be righteous, even as our Heavenly Father is righteous, and how shall we teach this great people to be righteous likewise?’ they have sought their own pleasure, and lived in profligacy, covetous and cheating almost beyond belief; and instead of behaving righteously to the people, or teaching them to be righteous, they have crushed down the people, stupefied and corrupted them by slavery, and maddened them by superstitions which are not the righteousness of God, till they have made them easy tools in their unjust wars, and are able to drive them, even by force, like sheep to the slaughter, to die miserably in a cause in which, even if those unhappy slaves conquered, they would only rivet their own chains more tightly, and put more power into the hands of the very rulers who are robbing them of their earnings, dishonouring their daughters, and driving off their sons to die in a foreign land.  Ah, my friends, if these men had but sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; if the great wealth, and the wonderful industry and prudence of Russia had been but spent in doing justly, and loving mercy, what a rich and honourable country of brave and industrious Christian men might Russia be; a blessing, and not a curse, to half the earth of God!