all used there--in making a mere robber's den, which might
all have been spent in giving employment and sustenance to whole
provinces of poor starving Russians. Consider those tens of
thousands of men, labouring day and night for months at those deadly
earthworks, whose strong arms might have been all tilling God's
earth, and growing food for the use of man. And then see the waste,
the want, the misery which that one place, Sevastopol, has caused
upon God's earth.

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