We have here, as you see, the Christian conception—­the very word of the Prince of Life, of Him who came that we might have life, and that we might have it abundantly.  And when His kingdom has come, this will be the end for which wealth is sought and used in every nation.

It is possible to use wealth so that it shall be productive of life; so that the entire administration of it shall tend to the enlargement and enrichment of the life of men; so that the labor which it employs shall obtain an increasing share of the goods which it produces; so that all the conditions under which that labor is performed shall be favorable to health and life and happiness; so that the spiritual life, also, of all who are employed shall be nourished by inspiring them with good-will and kindness, with the confidence in man which helps us to have faith in God.  Such an administration of wealth is perhaps the very best testimony to the reality of the truth of the Christian religion which it is possible to bear in this day and generation.  One who handles capital with this clear purpose can do more to establish in the earth the kingdom of heaven than any minister or missionary can do.

But it is possible to use wealth in the opposite way, so that it shall be destructive rather than productive of life.  A man may manage his industry in such a way that the last possible penny shall be taken from wages and added to profit; in such a way that the health of his employees shall be impaired and their happiness blighted and their hope taken, away.  He may do this while maintaining an outwardly religious behavior and giving large sums to philanthropy.  But such a handling of wealth does more to make infidels than any heretical teacher or lecturer ever did or can do.

The fact needs to be noted that all the predatory schemes by which capital is successfully inflated and nefariously manipulated, and the community is thus burdened, are deadly attacks upon the life of the people.  They filch away the earnings of the laboring classes.  They increase the cost of rent and transportation and all the necessaries of life.  They extort from the people contributions for which no equivalent has been given, of commodity or service.  Thus the burden of toil is increased and the reward of industry is lessened for all who work; the surplus out of which life would be replenished is consumed, and the amount of life in the nation at large is lessened.  Every one of those schemes of frenzied finance about which we are reading in these days is a gigantic bloodsucker, with ten million minute tentacles which it stealthily fastens upon the people who do the world’s work, and each one of the victims must give up a little of his life for the aggrandizement of our financial Titans.  When such schemes flourish, by which men’s gains are suddenly swollen to enormous proportions, somebody must be paying for it, and life is always the final payment.  It all comes out of the life of the people who are producing the world’s wealth.  The plethora of the few is the depletion of the millions.  In every great aggregation of workers, the faces of the underfed are a little paler and the pulses of the children beat a little less joyously, and the feet are hastened on that journey to the tomb—­all because of those who come to steal and to kill and to destroy.