# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1864_S225
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre [Doctrine and Defense].

Volume X. August 1864. No. 8.

Martin Chemnitz on Usury.

(Translated and communicated by resolution of the St. Louis District Pastoral
Conference, from the Loci theologici of Dr. M. Chemnitius, ed. op. et studio
Polycarpi Leyseri, D. Francof. et Witteberg. Ed. nov. 1653, fol., Tom. P. II,
fol. 158—170.)

(Continuation.)

IV. Use is to be made of the definition in explaining the many and various
questions that are raised in this matter. And indeed the definitions are
rightly made the foundations for judgment, but it often turns out that the
explanation of the questions is not so easy, nor lies so close at hand for
everyone, that it could be grasped by the simpler sort straight from the bare
definitions at first glance. I have therefore observed in Luther a certain
method, which Aepinus and Brentius later employed as well, and by means of
which they explained this doctrine easily and clearly. And I hold that from it
a true and thorough explanation of all questions of this kind can quite rightly
be derived. That method, however, consists very simply in attending to the
distinction of the contracts and the persons with whom one has to deal.
For because God willed that the human race should be bound together in
society through the mutual exchange of goods and the rendering of duties, he
also, for this very reason, did not distribute temporal wealth equally. And so
that love might be exercised in various ways within those civic duties, God
himself, in the Mosaic polity, instituted not one but several ways according to
which a lawful exchange of goods, services, and duties should take place. The
Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, however, chiefly teaches four ways
of dealing with outward goods in civil society. 1. The highest degree is when
we cannot recover, with the help of the laws and of the authorities, goods of
ours that have either been taken from us by force or wrongfully withheld from
us, and yet we do not take them back again by our own hand, nor stir up
rebellion on their account, but instead God