# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S329
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fifteen Theses on Usury.                    329

them, we do not call greedy — such as, for example, the tyrants who
plunder cities and rob temples — but rather scoundrels, godless men and
unjust men. Gamblers, thieves, and highwaymen belong among the greedy,
for they seek shameful gain. For both exert themselves for the sake of
gain and undergo disgraceful actions — the one class to seize the
greatest dangers, the other drawing gain from friends to whom they
ought rather to give, and so forth.

2. From the people of the Romans, Cicero reports of Cato the Censor
that, asked once what he thought of lending at usury, he answered:
What does it mean to kill a man? — thereby implying, as Holy Scripture
also does, that he held lending at usury to be a kind of manslaughter.
For whoever deprives his neighbor of the tokens by means of which the
means necessary for life are obtained in exchange, without giving him
a substitute for them, is in the act of taking his life.

3. That in all languages the moral abhorrence of the whole people is
inseparably bound up with the word "usurer," and indeed to a far
higher degree than with the word "thief."

VI. The opinion that whoever takes interest customary in the land,
that is, permitted by civil law, on lent capital, is not to be
considered a usurer, belongs to the antichristian seduction of the
last times.

Proof: 1. Whoever holds it permissible to take interest customary in
the land declares lending at usury, absolutely and according to its
essence, to be a permissible act, because it then becomes sinful only
through the accident of excess or of disobedience to the authorities.
But since lending at usury is in itself contrary to the natural moral
law and the revealed law — offending, at every value of the interest
and independently of civil law, against love, truth, justice, and
fairness — such a person permits what God has forbidden, and, by
forbidding that customary interest be held to be usury, forbids what
God has commanded; which belongs to the marks of the Antichrist.

2. History shows that the Pope was the first, and indeed around the
time of the Reformation, to permit in the church lending at usury —
which was practiced under the name of redeemable interest — as
not-usury; whereupon in the seventeenth century the Christian
authorities fixed a rate of interest, as a result of which only the
exceeding of the permitted interest was treated as usurious interest.
Compare Luther, on Psalm 14 [in psalm. quart(um decimum)].