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 and to kill and to destroy; to
inspire them with His own divine compassion; to give life and to give
it abundantly? And is it not true that so far as men do receive of His
fulness, so far as they are brought under the control of His spirit,
they do cease to be destroyers and devourers of the bodies and souls
of their fellows, and become helpers, saviors, life-bringers? And is
not this included in His meaning when He says: "I am come that they
may have life, and that they may have it abundantly"?