# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1864_S260
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

260 Martin Chemnitz on Usury.

set against it, which one calls the price of the risk. Properly speaking,
no lending takes place at all (as is clear from its definition) when the
risk of the capital lies with the creditor; rather this is a partnership
contract. But because covetousness is inventive in fabricating either an
uncertainty or a risk, in order to be able, under some pretext, to demand
a gain for the sake of the service of lending, canon law has condemned
that contract as usurious in the chapter Naviganti. If, however, what
underlies it is duly weighed, one will be able to see clearly what
judgment is to be passed. For if the risk is really present — if, for
example, a merchant had to travel through regions made unsafe by
robbers, and the insuring is undertaken for the benefit of the debtor —
then it is not a matter of lending, or of a capital, or of a burden
contrary to the nature of lending. If, however, there is no manifest
risk, and the insuring is not done for the benefit of the debtor, but
the creditor demands that this risk be transferred to him so that he may
thereby demand something above the capital, then it is nothing but a
usurious pretext.

Usurers have also played this trick: in promissory notes they have added
a penalty of a certain sum of money in case the capital should not be
repaid by the fixed term — especially when, by a probable conjecture,
they held that it would then not be able to be repaid. But it has
rightly been decided that this is done for the purpose of usurious
fraud.

And whatever other questions there may be, these can either be judged
according to these rules, or their explanation must be sought from
those learned in the law. For we have mentioned these with the intention
of showing how, in explanation, one must look to the true foundations,
and that a moderate consideration of the foundations shows most
beautifully both the sources of the explanations and the grounds for
which any opinion is either to be approved or disapproved.

Finally the question is also raised whether the one who takes usury, or
the one who pays usury, either himself sins, or makes himself a
partaker of another's sins. The general answer is: it is one thing to
suffer wrong, another to do wrong. As he who suffers wrong is not
entangled in the same sin as he who is bound by doing the wrong, so
Scripture condemns those who give at usury, not those who take at
usury. Gerson, however, teaches such a distinction: he who, driven by
necessity, takes at usury, because he can find no one who will come to
the aid of his need by lending free of charge or in some other lawful
way, is the only one who truly suffers wrong; but if someone is not
compelled by a true need, but, not content with his middling fortune,