though it is manifest that such part of the value of improvements as is due to their location in the midst of a dense population, is justly the property of the population, and that increments in values caused by the gathering of a community, belong to the community.

Closely connected with the subject of rents is that of "interest." A perfectly plain duty is here laid upon those who undertake the obedience of Christ. By no Christian or moral principle can "interest" be justified. As a matter of abstract justice, it might conceivably be maintained that the lender should pay the borrower. In the wear and tear of the world, amid the deterioration to which all property is subject, it is an advantage to be able to hand over to another, for safe-keeping, wealth for which I have no present use, in the certainty of receiving it again undiminished after months or years. It is plainly unjust that my neighbour should accomplish this service for me, ⚫ and yet be called upon further to pay me for allowing him to do it.

The practice of exacting rent for the use

of money is opposed not alone to every instinct of honour, but to justice. The dislike of its proper name, usury, is an indication that its shamefulness is instinctively recognized. It is only since the beginning of the commercial era that behind a euphonic name has been tolerated a practice which the absolute consensus of Christian thought reprobates. In no previous age has the Church had anything but the fiercest denunciation for it. In line with Greek philosophy, Hebrew legislation and even Roman jurisprudence, (neither the Law of the Twelve Tables nor the Institutes of Justinian countenanced it ;) with the ethics of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, with the words of Jesus 15 and of His Apostles, the whole line of Church Fathers and decree after decree of Church Councils forbid it. I assert that the entire body of Christian teachers speaks here with one voice. There is no character whom the Fathers so abhor and detest as they do the usurer. "If thou wert an interest-taker," exclaims St. Augustine, 16"thou wouldst be rebuked by the Church, confuted by the word of God, all

66

thy brethren would execrate thee." How detestable, odious and execrable a thing it is, I believe even usurers themselves know.' St. Chrysostom is continually thundering at the enormity of selling a kindness; he struggles for words with which to denounce what the Fathers regard as the last pitch, the last extremity of inhumanity." "Nothing, nothing is baser than usury; nothing more cruel. Why, the calamities of others are this person's traffic; he makes gain of his brothers' distresses, and demands wages for being kind.” Replying to the old and slender argument in which the fruitfulness of capital is alleged, he wants to know if the lender is not ashamed of the very folly of the thing. For what could be more foolish, unless one were to expect increase without land, rain or plough?" St. Basil likewise demolishes the pretence that money can beget money, set up by those who plant without land, reap without seed." The great Cappadocian, whose stern sense of right and keen logic have singled him out for denunciation by the modern money power as the primitive social

ist, admits that there is possible "a breed of barren metal." 'It may well be called a generation—a generation of vipers, evil offspring of evil parentage." The idea that good can come out of lending for "interest" surpasses, he declares, the riddle of Sampson. 'Out of the inhuman come forth humanity? Men do not gather grapes of thorns, figs of thistles, nor humanity of Twelve per cent. men! usury. Ten per cent. men! I shudder to mention them. They are exactors by the month, like the demons who produce epilepsy, attacking the poor as the changes of the moon come round!"

Of later representative Christians," Bishop Jewell, after defining usury, describes its effects in language which is recalled by the disinterested conclusions of that most grim and terrible of contemporary treatises, Mr. Brooks Adams's Law of Civilization and Decay. The exaction of "interest" is, says the Bishop,

66

such a kind of bargaining as no good man, or godly man, ever used;

such a kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God's judgment have always abhorred and condemned. It is a

monster in nature; the overthrow of mighty kingdoms; the destruction of flourishing states; the decay of wealthy cities; the plague of the world, and the misery of the people. It is theft; it is the murdering of our brethren; it is the curse of God, and the curse of the people. Tell me, thou wretched wight of the world, thou unkind creature, which art past all sense and feeling of God; which knowest the will of God and doest the contrary: how darest thou come into the church? It is the church of that God which hath said, Thou shalt take no usury'; and thou knowest He hath so said. How darest thou read or hear the word of God? It is the word of that God which condemneth usury; and thou knowest He doth condemn it. How darest thou come into the company of thy brethren ?"

And of faithful priests of God in modern times, who have dared declare the law of His Church, one, preaching in Lombard Street itself, has used such words as these:

"I do openly declare that every minister and every churchwarden throughout all Eng