"Very true," said the judge, "but since then the Christian world has had the benefit of nearly twenty centuries of growth under the instructions of Christ. Men have grown less animal, more intellectual; less brutal, more spiritual. The passions and appetites that once seemed uncontrollable have come more and more under restraint under the influence of generations of right living. Men nowadays endure physical discipline from which the ascetics of Christ's time, or even of the middle ages, would have shrunk with fear. The world is lamentably full of wickedness and weakness, but it has now what it did _not_ have when Moses gave his law--it has in every community one or more men who show by right living what a perfect control man may exert over his lower faculties, or, rather, over the lower developments of faculties which in the clearer light of to-day develop into noble virtues. But the stronger sins die hardest, so to-day we find, in communities where murder is unheard of, Sabbath-breaking unknown, profanity unspoken, and the greater crimes mentioned in the Decalogue seldom or never brought to light--in such localities we find the greed of gain made the excuse of unfair dealings between man and man; it stirs up strife more vicious than that which took place when the civilized world was one grand camp, and when to kill a man for his possessions was a deed praiseworthy rather than otherwise, especially when the victim might, with any excuse, be called an enemy." "One might suppose, from the judge's remarks, that the world had but one sin--and only one virtue," said Mr. Jodderel.