Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/27

Rh U S K U S U 17 councillor for Ireland, and in the same year was summoned to England by the king that he might more readily carry on a work he had already begun upon the antiquity of the British churches. While he was detained on this business the archbishop of Armagh died in January 1624, and the king at once nominated Usher to the vacant primacy; but severe illness and other causes impeded his return to Ireland until August 1626. For many years Archbishop Usher was actively em ployed both in the government of his diocese and in the publication of several learned works, amongst which may be specified Emmanuel (a treatise upon the Incarnation), published in 1638, and Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Anti- quitates, in 1639. In 1634 he took part in the convocation which drafted the code of canons that formed the basis of Irish ecclesiastical law till the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, and defeated the attempt of Brain- hall, then bishop of Derry and later his own successor in Armagh, to conform the Irish Church exactly to the doctrinal standards of the English. He put the matter on the ground of preserving the independence of the Irish Church, but the real motive at work was to maintain the Calvinistic element introduced in 1615. In 1640 he paid another visit to England on one of his usual scholarly errands, meaning to return when it was accomplished. But the rebellion of 1641 broke out while he was still at Oxford, and he never saw his native country again. He published a collection of tracts at Oxford in that year, inclusive of a defence of Episcopacy and of the doctrine of non-resistance. One blot on his memory is thai, being one of the five prelates whom Charles I. consulted whether he could conscientiously assent to the Act of attainder against the earl of Strafford after having pledged his word to him for his safety, Usher joined in the casuistical advice given by all except Juxon, who alone told the king that his pledged word could not be lawfully broken. All Usher s property in Ireland was lost to him through the rebellion, except his books and some plate and furniture, but he was assigned the temporalities of the vacant see of Carlisle for his support. In 1643 he was offered a seat in the As sembly of Divines at Westminster, but declined it publicly in terms which drew upon him the anger of the House of Commons, and an order for the confiscation of his library was averted only by the interposition of Selden. He quitted Oxford in 1645 and went into Wales, where he remained till 1646, when he returned to London, and was in 1647 elected preacher to the Society of Lincoln s Inn, an office he continued to hold till a little before his death. During his residence in Wales a hyper- Calvinistic work entitled A Body of Divinity ; or the Sum and Substance of the Christian Religion, was published under his name by J )ownham ; and, though he repudiated the authorship in a letter to the editor, stating that the manuscript from which it was printed was merely a commonplace-book into which he had transcribed the opinions of Cartwright and other English divines, often disapproving of them and finding them dissonant from his own judgment, yet it has been persistently cited ever since as Usher s genuine work, and as lending his authority to positions which he had long abandoned, if he ever maintained them. In 1648 he had a conference with Charles I. in the Isle of Wight, assisting him in the abortive negotiations with Parliament on the question of Episcopacy. In 1650-54 he published the work which at the time and for more than a century after wards was accounted his most important production, the Annales Veteris et Novi Testament^ in which he propounded a scheme of Biblical chronology which held its ground until disproved by very recent advances in scholarship, and whose dates were inserted by some unknown authority in the margin of reference editions of the authorized ver sion. He was to some extent favoured by Cromwell after he became lord protector, who seems to have promised Usher a pension and a grant for twenty-one years of the lands belonging to the see of Armagh; but there is no proof that either was actually carried out. In 1655 Usher published his last work, De Grxca LXX. Interpretum Ver- sione Syntagma. He died on 20th March 1656, in Lady Peterborough s house at Reigate in Surrey. His body was buried in Westminster abbey, in the chapel of St Erasmus. To one daughter who survived him he left his library, and she sold it to the officers and soldiers of Cromwell s army in Ireland, who deposited it in Dublin castle, whence it was removed at the Restoration and given, according to Usher s original purpose, by direction of Charles II. to the library of Trinity College, of which it still forms a part. Usher s works are very numerous, and were first collected by Elrington and Todd, Dublin, 1847, in 17 vols. (R. F. L.) USKUP, USKUB, or SKOPLIE, a town of European Turkey, capital of the sanjak of the same name and of the vilayet of Kossova, on the upper Vardar river, about 160 miles north-west of Saloniki. It occupies a pictur esque and important strategic position near the southern foot of the Skhar-dagh (Scodrus), which connects the Balkan range in the east with the Bosnian and Albanian highlands in the west, and forms the water-parting be tween the streams flowing north to the Danube and those going south to the vEgean. Here also converge the ethno logical domains of the Albanians and Slavs (Servians, Bosnians, and Bulgarians), so that the population, estimated at 28,000, is of a somewhat mixed character. Uskup has some flourishing industries, such as leather and metal-work, weaving and dyeing, and is the centre of a rich agri cultural district growing large quantities of fruits and cereals. It is the residence of the provincial governor, the seat of a Greek archbishop, and one of the chief stations on the main line of railway which runs from Saloniki up the Vardar valley to Bosnia. It communicates with the Simnitza valley and with Prisren by practicable roads running north and north-west over the encircling ranges. Uskup retains in a slightly modified form the ancient name of Skupi (Skopi), a city of Pseonia (north Macedonia), forming a northern outpost of Greek and Roman culture towards Dardania and Dacia Aureliani. USURY. An ancient legal conception, it has been said, corresponds not to one but to several modern concep tions ; and the proposition is equally true when economic is substituted for legal. Until quite recent times the term &quot; usury &quot; covered a number of essentially different social phenomena. &quot;Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother, usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury. Unto a stranger tliou mayest lend upon usury ; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the Lord thy God may bless thee&quot; (Deut. xxiii. 19, 20). In this sentence we find in terest of all kinds blended together, and the natural economic tendencies directly counteracted by the moral and religious law. At the present day, &quot;usury,&quot; if used in the old sense of the term, would embrace a multitude of modes of receiving interest upon capital to which not the slightest moral taint is attached. The man who does not in some shape or other lend his capital upon &quot; usury &quot; is, in the modern world, generally considered as lacking in his duty to himself or his family. The change in the moral attitude towards usury is perhaps best ex pressed by saying that in ancient times so much of the lend ing at interest was associated with cruelty and hardship that all lending was branded as immoral (or all interest was usury in the moral sense), whilst at present so little lending takes place, comparatively, except on commercial principles, XXIV. - - 3