In the parable of the Talents, the king who was made to say, “Thou knewest that I was an hard man,” is also made to say, “Thou shouldest have given my money to the bankers that at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.” But I dare not deduce anything from this. The Parables never apply all round; they only teach one lesson at a time. He who taught the duty of prayer by means of the Parable of the unjust judge, and the duty of using present opportunity by the Parable of the unjust steward, might easily teach the duty of the use of the gifts of God, without implying that God was either a “hard man” or a usurer. All these stories may have been accompanied by some such addition as this, that if even with unjust and hard men this teaching holds, will it not be far more worth while to pray to God and to faithfully use His opportunities and His gifts?
There is, however, one passage, not in the four Gospels, but well based on tradition:—“Be honourable bankers”; and it certainly does seem strange, if the whole business of money-dealing were wrong, that that illustration of the use of spiritual capital should have been selected. The fact that usury was denounced by the Early Church may have led to the non-inclusion of this dubious text in the Canon.
Denunciations of usury are commonplaces among the Fathers of the Church. It was wholly forbidden to the clergy and sometimes to the laity. Many have been the sermons, of the fiercest character, delivered against it by the Bishops of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. John Wesley told his followers “to die sooner than put anything in pawn or borrow or lend on usury.” His rule on the subject was, however, explained later on by himself as being against “unlawful interest”; upon which Ruskin remarks: “Doubtless his disciples know what rate of interest is lawful, and what not; and also by what law it was made so; and always pause with pious accuracy at the decimal point whereat the excellence of an investment begins to make it criminal.” Nevertheless, Wesley was right.
Turning to the Greek world we find usury condemned by Solon and Lycurgus, Plato and Aristotle (“money sterile by nature”); and a Roman voice comes from Cato. From Arabia is heard the word of Mohammed. And, of great Englishmen, we find Lord Bacon, and perhaps Shakespeare, teaching the same. Concerning these it is to be noted, that being before the days of joint company ownership, their testimony was solely against private money-lending; and the one authority, John Wesley, who lived in the early days of modern business, was not against interest as such in his later years. Nor again, did these authorities attack Rent, which Ruskin is consistent in also reprobating. The landowning aristocracy, we shall remember, are to be the recipients instead of a Government annuity, as wages for their work of governing their inferiors. Amongst an agricultural, noncommercial people, the usurer is a sinister figure. This must have been the case in Palestine, and in agricultural England. To-day he is the curse of India, whose cultivators are enslaved by the money-lenders under English law. In short, we may conclude that it requires a fair field and genuine commercial habits to make interest a public benefit.
The change from the earlier to the later John Wesley is most significant. It represents the change to modern business on a large scale, which occurred during his lifetime. It is noticeable that since his time the attack on Interest has ceased, but for Ruskin, among religious teachers. As a counsel of ultimate perfection in a communist State, of course, Interest would be abolished; but most Socialists admit that it is an essential part of the institution of private property, and must stand or fall with it.
There may yet be great revolutions in our sense of duty. We may come to extend kindness to animals to the extraordinary length of not eating them. That excessive toil and numbing poverty should exist around us, may some day become a reproach to us, as we feed on the roses and lie on the lilies of life, which are often provided for us by the said labourers. By the time, then, that we come to love our neighbours as ourselves, we shall probably not be anxious to take advantage of our position of being a little beforehand with the world, of having money to lend; and may even sink the time advantage thereby at our disposal; and not take interest. But we shall be different then; and so will the world we live in. It is a kind of altruism which absolutely needs a fit environment. If the cessation of income from investments belongs to the Christianity which is to come, before this faith shall have been realized we shall have pooled our property into a common store, and the question of private investment will have fallen to the ground. Only among the Doukhobors has this kind of Christianity yet notably realized itself, and great is their well-being. But we must go on like Ruskin and take our Interest for the present.
The real trouble is not in the interest, but in the great fortunes. That an upper limit for wealth would be a blessing to the rich, and a solid gain to the nation at large, has long been my conviction. Ruskin says it is also his “long fixed conviction that one of the most important conditions of a healthful system of social economy, would be the restraint of the properties and incomes of the upper classes within certain fixed limits. The temptation to use every energy in the accumulation of wealth being thus removed, another and a higher ideal of the duties of advanced life would be necessarily created in the national mind. By withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed limits of wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success, and earlier marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would become possible to the young; while the older men of active intellect, whose sagacity is now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own meanest interest, would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves in the superintendence of public institutions or furtherance of public advantage. And out of this class it would be found natural and prudent always to choose the members of the legislative body of the Commons; and to attach to the order also some peculiar honours, in the possession of which such complacency would be felt as would more than replace the unworthy satisfaction of being supposed richer than others, which to many men is the principal charm of their wealth. And although no law of this purport would ever be imposed on themselves by the actual upper classes, there is no hindrance to its being gradually brought into force from beneath, without any violent or impatient proceedings.”[97]
As a type of Ruskin’s satirical humour in controversy we will indulge ourselves with an extract from his argument with the late Bishop of Manchester on usury. Ruskin publicly challenged Dr. Fraser to the encounter. The Bishop had somewhat sensibly remarked that religious sanctions ought not to be imposed in cases which they never originally contemplated, referring to Leviticus on usury. Ruskin replies:
“I do not know whether by the phrase, presently after used by your Lordship, ‘religious sanctions,’ I am to understand the Law of God which David loved and Christ fulfilled, or whether the splendour, the commercial prosperity, and the familiar acquaintance with all the secrets of science and treasures of art, which we admire in the City of Manchester, must in your Lordship’s view be considered as ‘cases’ which the intelligence of the Divine Lawgiver could not have originally contemplated. Without attempting to disguise the narrowness of the horizon grasped by the glance of the Lord from Sinai, nor the inconvenience of the commandments which Christ has directed those who love Him to keep, am I too troublesome or too exigent in asking from one of those whom the Holy Ghost has made our overseers, at least a distinct chart of the Old World as contemplated by the Almighty, and a clear definition of even the inappropriate tenor of the orders of Christ; if only that the modern scientific Churchman may triumph more securely in the circumference of his heavenly vision, and accept more gratefully the glorious liberty of the free thinking children of God?”