# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S325
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fifteen Theses on Usury.                    325

III. Every kind of lending at usury, and thus also every taking of
interest on lent capital, is forbidden by the moral law and is
condemned as an immoral act by the moral judgment even of the natural,
unregenerate man.

A. That every kind of lending at usury is forbidden by the moral law
is made clear from the following:

1. Lending at usury is contrary to love. The principle of morality in
conduct toward one's neighbor is expressed in the saying: you shall
love your neighbor as yourself. Love, as good will, consists in this,
that I make the will of my neighbor, so far as it is not sinful, my
own, that I will for him himself what my neighbor wills. But my
neighbor wills to possess what is his freely and to dispose of it
according to his own pleasure, not that of others; and this will, as
such, is not sinful. Love therefore requires, with regard to my
neighbor's goods, that I desire for him, and will — and will with a
resolute willing to which the deed corresponds — that my neighbor
freely possess and keep what is his according to his own pleasure; it
requires that I be helpful and of service to him in keeping what is
his, and that I help to improve and protect his goods and sustenance.
Now whoever demands or takes a surplus, over and above the goods lent,
from the property of his neighbor, increases his own goods with
another's goods as a result of desiring for himself what his neighbor
has, and thereby fails to make his neighbor's will — to possess what is
his according to his own pleasure — his own; he thus acts contrary to
love, which the moral law forbids.

2. Lending at usury is contrary to truthfulness and honesty. The moral
law forbids lying and fraud. Through the lending of a fungible thing,
it becomes the debtor's property, on condition of the restitution of a
thing equal to what was lent. Now since the usurer lets the debtor
believe that he is lending to him, inasmuch as he demands back the
same again, while in truth he is not lending to him, since he demands
not the same but more; and since, further, the usurer leaves the thing
lent to the debtor as his property — so that the legal rule casum
sentit dominus, that is, that the loss on a good brought about by an
event that cannot be averted by human power must be borne by the
owner, falls upon the debtor — while at the same time, and by that
very act, he makes the debtor merely an administrator of another's
property, of whose yield a part rightly belongs to the owner — it is