332 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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. Typi- 

 cal 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: Sal- 

 masius 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 author- 

 ship — he was, in the matter of usance for money, too much en- 

 tangled 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 cer- 

 tain natural and practical grounds. 



In Germany the struggle lasted longer. Of some little sig- 

 nificance, 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 ex- 

 ample 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, acute- 



