Partly owing to the impossibility of a return to the Old Covenant, partly out of a spirit of contradiction to the new party, he opposed the fanatics’ demand that the Mosaic law should be introduced as near as possible entire, and the Imperial, Roman law abrogated as heathenish and the Papal, Canon law as anti-Christian. Duke Johann, the Elector’s brother, was soon half won over to these fantastic ideas by the Court preacher, Wolfgang Stein, but Luther and Melanchthon succeeded in making him change his mind.[256] The necessity Luther was under of opposing the Anabaptists here produced its fruits; his struggle with the fanatics preserved him from the consequences of his own personal preference for the social regulations of the Old Covenant.
In what difficulties his Old-Testament ideas on polygamy involved him the history of the bigamy of Philip of Hesse has already shown.[257] Had such ideas concerning marriage been realised in society the revolution in the social order would indeed have been great.
Luther’s esteem for the social laws of the Old Testament finds its best expression in his sermons on Genesis, which first saw the light in 1527.
He says, for instance, of the Jewish law of restitution and general settlement of affairs, in the Jubilee Year: “It is laid down in Moses that no one can sell a field in perpetuity but only until the Jubilee Year, and when this came each one recovered possession of his field or the property he had sold, and thus the lands remained in the family. There are also some other fine laws in the Books of Moses which well might be adopted, made use of and put in force.” He even wishes that the Imperial Government would take the lead in re-enacting them “for as long as is desired, but without compulsion.”[258]
His views on interest and usury were likewise influenced by his one-sided reading of certain Old- and New-Testament statements.
Usury and Interest
On the question of the lawfulness of charging interest Luther not only laid down no “new principles” which might have been of help for the future, but, on the contrary, he paved the way for serious difficulties. He was not to be moved from the traditional, mediæval standpoint which viewed the charging of any interest whatever on loans as something prohibited. His foe, Johann Eck, on the other hand, in a Disputation at Bologna, had defended the lawfulness of moderate interest.[259]
After having repeatedly attacked by word and pen usury and the charging of any interest[260]—led thereto, as he says, by the grievous abuses in the commercial and financial system, he published in 1539 his “An die Pfarherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen,” whence most of what follows has been taken. As it was written towards the end of his life, we may assume it to represent the result of his experience and the final statement of his convictions.
In this writing, after a sad outburst on the increase of usury in Germany, he begins his “warnings” by urging that “the people should be told firmly and plainly concerning lending and borrowing, and that when money is lent and a charge made or more taken back than was originally made over, this is usury, and as such is condemned by every law. Hence those are usurers who charge 5, or 6, or more on the hundred on the money they lend, and should be called idolatrous ministers of avarice or Mammon, nor can they be saved unless they do penance.… To lend is to give a man my money, property or belongings so that he may use them.… Just as one neighbour lends another a dish, a can, a bed, or clothes, and in the same way money, or money’s worth, in return for which I may not take anything.”[261]
The writer of these words, like so many others who, in his day and later, still adhered to the old canonical standpoint, failed to see, that, as things then were, to lend money was to surrender to the borrower a commodity which was already bringing in some return, and that, in consequence of this, the lender had a right to demand some indemnification. As this had not generally speaking been the case in the Middle Ages, the prohibition of charging interest was then a just one. Nevertheless, within certain limits, it was slowly becoming obsolete and, as the economic situation changed for that of modern times and money became more liquid, the more general did lending at interest become.