NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 325 



This -unanimity of the fathers of the Church brought about a 

 crystallization of hostility to interest-bearing loans into number- 

 less decrees of popes and councils and kings and legislatures 

 throughout Christendom during more than fifteen hundred years ; 

 and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first 

 these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon 

 find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced 

 by the Council of Aries in 314, and a modern church apologist 

 insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council 

 of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly 

 condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under 

 the sway of the Church — Justinian, in the Empire of the East ; 

 Charlemagne, in the Empire of the West ; Alfred, in England ; 

 St. Louis, in France — yielded fully to this dogma. In the ninth 

 century Alfred went so far as to confiscate the estates of money- 

 lenders, denying them burial in consecrated ground ; and similar 

 decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth cent- 

 ury the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness some- 

 what, but the Roman Church grew more severe. Peter Lombard, 

 in his Sentences, a great source of orthodox theology, makes the 

 taking of interest purely and simply theft. St. Bernard, reviv- 

 ing religious earnestness in the Church, took the same view. In 

 1179 the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that impenitent 

 money-lenders should be excluded from the altar, from abso- 

 lution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial. Pope 

 Urban III reiterated the declaration that the passage in St. Luke 

 forbade the taking of any interest whatever. Pope Alexander III 

 declared that the prohibition in this matter could never be sus- 

 pended by dispensation. 



In the thirteenth century Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially 

 severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance 

 on interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable 

 usury. This idea was still more firmly fastened upon the world 

 by the two greatest thinkers of the time: first, by St. Thomas 

 Aquinas, who knit it into the mind of the Church by the use of 

 the Scriptures and of Aristotle ; and next by Dante, who pictured 

 money-lenders in one of the ^jorst parts of hell. 



At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Council of 



tx, in Migne, tome xliii. For Lactantius, see Lact., Opera, Leyden, 1660, p. 608. For 

 Cyprian, see his Testimonies against the Jews, translated by Wallis, Book III, article 48. 

 For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ezekiel, xviii, 8, in Migne, tome xxv, pp. 1*70 et seq. For 

 Leo the Great, see his Letter to the Bishops of various provinces of Italy, cited in Jus 

 Can., cap. vii, can. xiv, qu. 4. For very fair statements of the attitude of the fathers on 

 this question, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, London, 1884, and Smith and 

 Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Hartford, 1880, in each under article 

 Usury. 



