# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1860_S330
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

330                    Fifteen Theses on Usury.

...teenth [Psalm] (1519): "In our century usury finds itself in the
greatest good fortune, since the Roman pontiff has made it into a
justice and a permissible contract, in that the name usury has been
taken from it and a new one bestowed, according to which it is now
called a redemption-contract — for this is now held to be a nicely
chosen expression, and by this justice the whole world is nowadays
justified, the clergy quite especially, and this monster reigns in
security, since in this way the Gospel and all its righteousness,
together with the kingdom of God, are being destroyed, and yet no one
believes that the Antichrist is present. So too, in a second way, this
contract is confirmed by a new miracle, namely that temporal things
are not temporal, since that interest, which is the nerve, the
substance and the strength of that contract, is imperishable, despite
the idleness and unfruitfulness of the money. These crude wiles of
Satan — how piously they are accepted and venerated by us, solely
because they are adorned with the name of the Roman pontiff, so that,
among all the wonders that God works nowadays, the one that seems to
me the foremost is that the world can still stand and endure the
incomprehensible usury of this interest."

V. The moral law forbids regarding lending at usury as a permissible
exchange.

Proof: It belongs to the essence of exchange that things of different
kinds are exchanged, and that the gain, on account of the different
kinds of the things exchanged, is mutual. But it belongs to the
essence of lending at usury that the usurer draws his gain from the
surplus of the same kind of thing, thus at the same time making
something of his neighbor's goods his own property, for which he gives
no substitute. Lending at usury cannot therefore, without sinning
against the truth, be regarded as a permissible exchange.

VI. The moral law forbids representing lending at usury as a
permissible purchase and sale:

Proof: It belongs to the essence of purchase and sale that the seller
transfers to the buyer, as his property, a thing in his possession, in
return for a fixed price — that is, in return for a thing of a
different kind than the thing sold — so that the advantage gained
thereby has its ground in the different kinds of the goods and the
money. But it belongs to the essence of lending at usury that the
advantage