Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/346

332 to the law allowing interest until a proviso was inserted that "nothing in this law contained shall be construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience." The old view cropped out from time to time in various public declarations. Among these was the book of John Blaxton, an English clergyman, who in 1634 published his Usury Condemned. In this, he defines usury as the taking of any interest whatever for money, citing in support of this view six archbishops and bishops and over thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church—some of their utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the habit of taking interest: "This canker that hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and will strike us."

But departures from the strict scriptural doctrines regarding interest soon became frequent in Protestant countries. They appear to have been first followed up with vigor in Holland. Various theologians in the Dutch Church attempted to assert the scriptural view by excluding bankers from the holy communion, but the commercial vigor of the republic was too strong: Salmasius led on the forces of right reasoning brilliantly and by the middle of the seventeenth century the question was settled rightly in that country. This work was 'aided, indeed, by a far greater man—Hugo Grotius; but here was shown the power of an established dogma. Great as Grotius was—and though it may well be held that his book on War and Peace has wrought more benefit to humanity than any other attributed to human authorship—he was, in the matter of usance for money, too much entangled in theological reasoning to do justice to his cause or to himself. He declared the prohibition of interest to be scriptural, but resisted the doctrine of Aristotle, and allowed usance on certain natural and practical grounds.

In Germany the struggle lasted longer. Of some little significance, perhaps, is the demand of Adam Contzen, in 1629, that lenders at interest should be punished as thieves; but by the end of the seventeenth century Puffendorf and Leibnitz had gained the victory.

Protestantism, open as it was to the currents of modern thought, could not long continue under the dominion of ideas unfavorable to economic development, and perhaps the most remarkable example of this was presented early in the eighteenth century by no less strict a theologian than Cotton Mather. In his Magnalia he argues against the whole theological view with a boldness,