Such is the contrast between beneficent business and maleficent business.  The good business employs men, feeds them, clothes them, shelters them, generously distributes among them the goods that nourish life; the bad business contrives to levy tribute on the resources out of which they are fed and clad and nourished, and thus enriches itself by impoverishing the life of the multitude.

And I suppose that we should all find, whether we are engaged in what is called business or not, that the work which we are doing, the way in which we are spending our time and gaining our income, is tending either to the enlargement and increase of the life of those with whom we have to do or to the impoverishment and destruction of their life; and that this is the final test by which we must be judged—­are we producers of life or destroyers of life?  Is there more of life in the world—­more of physical and spiritual life—­because of what we are and what we do, or is the physical and spiritual vitality of men lessened by what we are and what we do?  Are we helping men to be stronger and sounder in body and mind and soul for the work of life, or are we making them feebler in muscle and will and moral stamina?

When Jesus Christ came into the world the civilization prevailing—­if such it could be called—­was under the dominion of those who came to steal and to kill and to destroy.  Rome was the world, and the civilization of Rome, with all its splendor, was at bottom a predatory civilization.  It overran all its neighbors that it might subjugate and despoil them; its whole social system was based on a slavery in which the enslaved were merely chattels; the life of its ruling class was fed by the literal devouring of the lives of subject classes.  Of course, this civilization was decadent.  That terrible decline and fall which Gibbon has pictured was in full progress.  It was in the midst of this awful scene that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.  Can anyone doubt that His heart was full of divine compassion for those who were trampled on and preyed upon by the cruel and the strong, for those whose lives were consumed by the avarice and greed of their fellows?  What did He mean when, at the beginning of His ministry in the synagog where He had always worshiped, He took in his hand the roll of the prophet Isaiah and read therefrom:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”—­adding as He sat down, under the gaze of the congregation, “To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears”?  What could He have meant but this, that it was His mission to change the entire current and tendency of human life; to put an end to the plunderers and devourers; to chain the wolfish passion in human hearts which prompts men to steal