POLITICAL ECONOMY.
From the many questions on which the supporters of right reason in Political and Social Science have only conquered conscientious opposition after centuries of war, I select the taking of interest on loans; in hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the Bible as a scientific text-book been more prolonged or injurious. [132]
Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be that it has been believed in the Church "always, everywhere, and by all," then on no point may a Christian of these days be more sure than that every savings-institution, every loan and trust company, every bank, every loan of capital by an individual, every means by which accumulated capital has been lawfully lent, even at the most moderate interest, to make the masses of men workers rather than paupers, is based on deadly sin.
The fathers of the Christian Church received from the ancient world a strong prejudice against any taking of interest whatever; in Greece, Aristotle had condemned it; in Rome it was regarded during many generations as a crime. [133]
But far greater, in the early Church, was the influence of certain texts in the Old and New Testaments. Citations from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Ezekiel, and St. Luke, were universally held to condemn all loans at interest. [134]
On these texts the doctrine and legislation of the universal Church, as regards interest for money, were based and developed. The fathers of the Eastern Church, and among them St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, and St. Gregory Nazianzen; the fathers of the Western Church, and among them Tertullian, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, joined most earnestly in this condemnation. St. Chrysostom says: "What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable agriculture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity." St. Jerome threw the argument into the form of a dilemma, which was used as a weapon against money-lenders for centuries. [135]
This entire agreement of the fathers of the Church led to the crystallization of the hostility to interest-bearing loans into numberless decrees of popes and councils, and kings and legislatures, throughout Christendom, during more than fifteen hundred years; and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. In the ninth century, Alfred, in England, confiscated the estates of money-lenders, and denied them burial in consecrated ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church only grew more and more severe. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, was especially strenuous in denouncing loans at interest; and, in 1179, the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that every impenitent money-lender should be excluded from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial!
In the thirteenth century this mistaken idea was still more firmly knit into the thought of the Church by St. Thomas Aquinas; hostility to loans at interest had been poured into his mind, not only from the Scriptures, but from Aristotle.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Council of Vienne, presided over by Pope Clement V., declared that, if any one "shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heretic fit for punishment." [136]
The economical and social results of this conscientious policy were exceedingly unfortunate. Money could only be loaned, in most countries, at the risk of incurring odium in this world and damnation in the next; hence there was but little capital and few lenders; hence came enormous rates of interest; thereby were commerce, manufactures, and general enterprise dwarfed, while pauperism flourished.
But even worse than this were the moral results. For nations to do what they believe is evil, is only second in bad consequences to their doing what is really evil: all lending and borrowing, even for the most legitimate purposes and at the most reasonable rates, tended to debase the character of both borrower and lender. [137] And these moral evils took more definite shapes than might at first be thought possible. Sismondi, one of the most thoughtful of modern political philosophers and historians, declares that the prohibition of interest for the use of money in Continental Europe did very much to promote a passion for luxury and to discourage economy; the rich who were not engaged in business finding no easy way of employing their savings productively. [138]
These evils became so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest efforts were made to induce the Church to change its position.
The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson. His general learning had made him Chancellor of the University of Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading theologian and orator at the Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him "The Imitation of Christ." Shaking off theological shackles, he declared: "Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty to steal, waste their goods, and sell, at a low price, their personal and real property." [139]
But this idea was at once suppressed by the Church—buried beneath citations from Scripture, the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even in the most active countries there seemed no hope. In England, under Henry VII., Cardinal Morton, the lord-chancellor, addressed Parliament, asking them to take into consideration loans of money at interest, and the result was a law which imposed on lenders at interest a fine of a hundred pounds, besides the annulment of the loan; and, to show that there was an offence against religion involved, there was added a clause "reserving to the Church, notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same." [140] Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of Europe, and, as a climax, just as the trade and commerce and manufactures of the modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series of voyages of discovery, by such as Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was strengthened by a decree from Pope Leo X. [141]
But this mistaken policy was not confined to the older Church. The Reformed Church was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther: "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange, is not to do a charity, but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." [142]
The English Reformers showed the same tendency. Under Henry VIII., the law of Henry VII. against taking interest had been modified; but the revival of religious feeling under Edward VI. caused, in 1552, the passage of the "Bill of Usury." In this it is said: "Forasmuch as usury is by the Word of God utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and detestable, as in divers places of the Holy Scriptures it is evident to be seen, which thing by no godly teachings and persuasions can sink into the hearts of divers greedy, uncharitable, and covetous persons of this realm, nor yet by any terrible threatenings of God's wrath and vengeance," etc., etc., it is enacted that whosoever shall thereafter lend money "for any manner of usury, increase, lucre, gain, or interest, to be had, received, or hoped for," shall forfeit principal and interest, and suffer imprisonment and fine at the king's pleasure. [143]
But, most fortunately, it happened that Calvin turned in the right direction, and there was developed among Protestants the serviceable fiction that "usury" means illegal or oppressive interest. Under cover of this fiction commerce and trade revived rapidly in Protestant countries, though with occasional checks from exact interpreters of Scripture.
But, in the older Church, the more correct though less fortunate interpretation of the sacred texts relating to interest continued. When it was attempted in France, in the seventeenth century, to argue that "usury" means oppressive interest, the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne declared that usury is the taking of any interest at all, no matter how little, and the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel was cited to clinch this judgment.
Another attempt to ease the burden on industry and commerce was made by declaring that "usury means interest demanded not as matter of favor but as matter of right." This, too, was solemnly condemned by Pope Innocent XI.
Again the army of right reason pressed forward, declaring that "usury is interest greater than the law allows." This, too, was condemned, and the declaration that "usury is interest on loans not for a fixed time" was condemned by Pope Alexander VII.
Still the attacking forces pressed on, and among them, in the seventeenth century, in France, was Richard Simon: he attempts to gloss over the strict interpretation of Scripture in this matter by an elaborate treatise: he is immediately confronted by Bossuet.
It seems hardly possible that one of the greatest intellects of a period so near us could have been so doubly deceived. Yet Bossuet, the glory of the French Church, one of the keenest and strongest of thinkers, not only mingled Scripture with astronomy, and opposed the Copernican theory, but also mingled Scripture with political economy, and denounced the lending of money at interest. He declared that the Scriptures, the councils of the Church from the beginning, the popes, the fathers, all interpreted the prohibition of "usury" to be a prohibition of any lending at interest, and Bossuet demonstrated this interpretation as the true one. Simon was put to confusion, and his book condemned. [144]
There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. The prohibition of this, one of the most simple and beneficial principles in political and economical science, was affirmed not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of the Church (six of them general councils), and by seventeen popes, to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law. [145]
But about the middle of the eighteenth century the evil could be endured no longer—a way of escape must be found. The army opposed to the Church had become so formidable, that the Roman authorities saw that a concession must be made. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; in it were concentrated twenty years' study and thought of a great thinker on the necessities of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions, and it was translated into every civilized language; this work attacked, among other abuses, the position of the Church regarding interest for money.
The Church authorities had already taken the alarm. Benedict XIV. saw that the best thing for him—nay, the only thing—was a surrender under form of a compromise. In a brief he declared substantially that the law of the Church was opposed to the taking of interest on loans; and then, after sundry non-committal and ambiguous statements, he hinted that there were possible exceptions to the rule.
Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for "convenience in argument," while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church, this casuistry of Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Adam Smith, Bentham, and their disciples, pressed on, and science won for mankind another great victory.
Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of scientific truth appeared among some over-zealous religionists. When the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself with sundry new casuistries against those who held to its earlier decisions, provincial doctors in theology protested indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers, saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. And even as late as 1830, when the Roman court, though declining to commit itself on the doctrine involved, decreed that confessors should no longer disquiet lenders of money at legal interest, the old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbé Laborde, Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbé Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbé Dennavit declared that he refused absolution to those who took interest, and to priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient. [146]
But the peace on this question is too profound to be disturbed by such outcries. The Torlonia family at Rome, to-day, with its palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favor, all won by lending money at interest, and by devotion to the Roman See, is a growth on ramparts long since surrendered and deserted.