1201. Yet if a man be considered as an instrument in attaining certain beneficent ends, without which those ends could not be accomplished, then human exertion is reasonable, in whatever way it can be productive of good. 1202. How can any being who contemplates the wonderful power displayed in the creation, hesitate to perceive that if the divine Architect desired that all men should coincide in their modes of worship, he would have furnished them sufficient evidence of his will, and disposed their minds to receive the desired impression? 1203. Nevertheless, his measures are represented as the inverse of these. It is represented that a creed which he wished all men to embrace was promulgated in an obscure part of an obscure country, under the yoke of heathen despotism, in a language unknown to any other people. It was so promulgated that the great majority of mankind were entirely out of the reach of its influence, and have remained so for nearly two thousand years. Moreover, those who have been made acquainted with Christianity are unable to agree in what it consists. 1204. As I have already urged, if we were to judge of the extention of Christianity by the number of Christians who do not in practice violate the precepts of Christ, it might be a question whether the name of Christendom is applicable to any part of the world. _On the massacre at Sinope, as a probable consequence of Religious Fanaticism and Intolerance._ 1205. As in consideration of the idolatry of the Amalekites the Israelites were, according to the Bible, authorized to extirpate that nation, for a wrong done to Israel some hundred years before, may not the Russians imagine themselves justified for the massacre of Sinope? (1 Sam. xv.)