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 T