These evils seemed so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest exertions were put forth to induce the Church to change its position.
The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson. His general learning made him Chancellor of the University of Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading orator at the Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him The Imitation of Christ. Shaking off theological shackles, he declared: "Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty to steal, waste their goods, and sell at a low price their personal and real property."
But this idea was at once buried beneath citations from the Scriptures, from the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even in the most active countries there seemed to be no hope. In England, under Henry VII, Cardinal Morton, the lord chancellor, addressed Parliament, asking it to take into consideration loans of money at interest. The result was a law which imposed on lenders at interest a fine of a hundred pounds besides the annulment of the loan; and, to show that there was an offense against religion involved, there was added a clause "reserving to the Church, notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same."
Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of Europe; and just when the trade, commerce, and manufactures of the modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series of voyages of discovery by such men as Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was strengthened by a decree from no less enlightened a pontiff than Leo X.
The popular feeling warranted such decrees. As late as the end of the middle ages, we find the people of Piacenza dragging the body of a money-lender out of his grave in consecrated ground and throwing it into the Po, in order to stop a prolonged rain-storm; and outbreaks of the same spirit are frequent in other countries.[1]
- ↑ For Gerson's argument favoring a reasonable rate of interest, see Coquelin and Guil-
see Bédarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italia et en Espagne, p. 220. See also Hallam's Middle Ages, London, 1853, pp. 401, 402. For the evil moral effects of the Church doctrine against taking interest, see Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, lib. xxi, chap. xx. See also Sismondi, cited in Lecky. For the trifling with conscience, distinction between "consumptibles" and "fungibles," "possessio" and "dominium," etc., see Ashley, English Economic History, New York, 1888, pp. 152, 163. For effects of these doctrines on the Jews, see Milman, History of the Jews, vol. iii, p. 179; also Wellhausen, History of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546; also Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, B, p. 114 (on driving Jews out of other industries than money-lending).
