Several of the early chapters are devoted to an attempt to minimise the difficulties of those religious persons who feel oppressed by the immensity and complexity of the material universe as revealed by modern astronomy; and by the almost infinite insignificance of man and his dwelling-place, the earth, in comparison with it, an insignificance vastly increased if not only the planets of the solar system, but also those which circle around the myriads of suns, are also theatres of life. And these persons are further disquieted because the very same facts are used by sceptics of various kinds in their attacks upon Christianity. Such writers point out the irrationality and absurdity of supposing that the Creator of all this unimaginable vastness of suns and systems, filling for all we know endless space, should take any _special_ interest in so mean and pitiful a creature as man, the imperfectly developed inhabitant of one of the smaller worlds attached to a second or third-rate sun, a being whose whole history is one of war and bloodshed, of tyranny, torture, and death; whose awful record is pictured by himself in such books as Josephus' _History of the Jews_, the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, and even more forcibly summarised in that terrible picture of human fiendishness and misery, _The Martyrdom of Man_; while their character is indicated by one of the kindest and simplest of their poets in the restrained but expressive lines:-- 'Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn.' It is for such a being as this, they say, that God should have specially revealed His will some thousands of years ago, and finding that His commands were not obeyed, His will not fulfilled, yet ordained for their benefit the necessarily unique sacrifice of His Son, in order to save a small portion of these 'miserable sinners' from the natural and well-deserved consequence of their stupendous follies, their unimaginable crimes? Such a belief they maintain is too absurd, too incredible, to be held by any rational being, and it becomes even less credible and less rational if we maintain that there are countless other inhabited worlds.