RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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RELIGION
AND THE
RISE OF CAPITALISM

A HISTORICAL STUDY

(HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922)

BY R. H. TAWNEY

READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON; SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.

TO
DR. CHARLES GORE
WITH
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE

“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.”

Bishop Berkeley, Siris, 350.

INTRODUCTION

The object of this book is to trace some strands in the development of religious thought on social and economic questions in the period which saw the transition from medieval to modern theories of social organization. It does not carry the subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history either of economic theory or of economic practice, except in so far as theory and practice were related to changes in religious opinion. In reality, however, the connection between them was intimate and vital. The revolutions, at once religious, political and social, which herald the transition from the medieval to the modern world, were hardly less decisive for the economic character of the new civilization than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious doctrines. The economic categories of modern society have their roots in the economic expansion and social convulsions which accompanied the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The history of religious thought on questions of social ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay on The Canonist Doctrine first interested me in the subject, by Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O’Brien. But it is no reflection on their work to say that the most important contributions of recent years have come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max Weber, whose celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No one can work, on however humble a scale, in the same field, without being conscious of the heavy obligation under which these scholars have laid him. While I have not always been able to accept their conclusions, I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret that Mr. Coulton’s The Mediæval Village appeared too late for me to make use of its abundant stores of learning and insight.

It only remains for me to thank the friends whose assistance has enabled me to make this book somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. Mr. J. L. Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have been kind enough to read, and to improve, the manuscript. Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading the proofs, has helped me most generously throughout with advice and criticism. I am deeply indebted both to Miss Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the proofs and making an index, and to the London School of Economics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for enabling me to make use of her services. My obligation to the help given by my wife is beyond acknowledgment.

R. H. Tawney.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

“La miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera même un riche.”

Anatole France, Le Puits de Sainte Claire.

“Que pourrions-nous gagner,” once wrote a celebrated economist, “à recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décriées, et qui méritent de l’être? Il serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les exhumer.”[[1]] One who studies the development of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the criticism which is brought against those who disturb the dust in forgotten lumber-rooms. If he seeks an excuse beyond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the reflection that the past reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing, and that the face which to one age is a blank may to another be pregnant with meaning. Writing when economic science was in the first flush of its dogmatic youth, it was natural that Say should dismiss as an unprofitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of ages unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to determine the significance of opinion is, perhaps, not altogether so simple a matter as he supposed. Since the brave days when Torrens could say of Political Economy, “Twenty years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any of its fundamental principles,”[[2]] how many confident certainties have been undermined! How many doctrines once dismissed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an unsuspected vitality!

The attempt to judge economic activity and social organization by ethical criteria raises problems which are eternal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at least with conviction and persistence, may prove, even today, not wholly without instruction. In the present century, the old issues seem, indeed, to have acquired a new actuality. The philosophy which would keep economic interests and ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate compartments finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly restive. On the one hand, it is evident that the whole body of regulations, by which modern societies set limits to the free play of economic self-interest, implies the acceptance, whether deliberate or unconscious, of moral standards, by reference to which certain kinds of economic conduct are pronounced illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indications that religious thought is no longer content to dismiss the transactions of business and the institutions of society as matters irrelevant to the life of the spirit.

Silently, but unmistakably, the conception of the scope and content of Christian ethics which was generally, though not universally, accepted in the nineteenth century, is undergoing a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the experience of mankind, which is history, has played some part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods in which a tacit agreement, accepted in practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of religion. A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose conception of the relations of Church and State appears to have been modeled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer with the protest, “Things have come to a pretty pass if religion is going to interfere with private life”; and a more recent occupant of his office has explained the catastrophe which must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular capital of public affairs.[[3]]

Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident today that the line of division between the spheres of religion and secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is shifting. By common consent the treaty of partition has lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity, that the spokesmen of religion “leave the present world to the men of business and the devil,”[[4]] shows some signs of drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent and in America, not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of international politics and of social organization. It is being made today. It has been made in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical affairs men will say,

Here nature first begins

Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire

As from her outmost works, a broken foe,

will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the analogous problem of the relations between Church and State, issues which were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which they have assumed and the phases through which they have passed, even in the narrow field of a single country and a limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by widening the experience brought to their consideration.

In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis[[5]] has described the secularization of political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science among others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.

The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institution, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made irreconcilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the monarchy. When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which had regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually ends with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The age of the wars of economic nationalism virtually begins with the war between England and Holland under the Commonwealth and Charles II. The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It appeals to no supernatural commission, but exists to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.”[[6]]

While the political significance of this development has often been described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have received less attention. They were, however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The emergence of an objective and passionless economic science took place more slowly than the corresponding movement in the theory of the State, because the issues were less absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the self-contained department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world of business relations, and even in the England of the early seventeenth century, to discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms of pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not quite reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, not only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms of mechanism.

Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is between those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a supernatural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern political theory, develops only when society is given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation, and a capital fact which presides at the birth of both is a change in the conception held of the nature and functions of a Church. The crucial period is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The most important arena (apart from Holland) is England, because it is in England, with its new geographical position as the entrepôt between Europe and America, its achievement of internal economic unity two centuries before France and two and a half centuries before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the structure of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its essence is the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is resolved into its elements—politics, business, and spiritual exercises; each assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own being. The social functions matured within the Church, and long identified with it, are transferred to the State, which in turn is idolized as the dispenser of prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel compartments, between which a due balance should be maintained, but which have no vital connection with each other.

The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, and is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its general character. It is easy to detect premonitions of the coming philosophy in the later Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at the very end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth century can anticipate the monetary theory associated with the name of Gresham; in the fifteenth century Laurentius de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade bills and finance bills, and St. Antonino describe the significance of capital; while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in the style of a medieval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can dissect the economic iniquities of Mr. Badman, who ground the poor with high prices and usury, in the manner of a medieval friar.[[7]] But the distance traversed in the two centuries between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At the earlier date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the typical economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the typical popular teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers, the canon law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is conducted in terms of economic expediency.

It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it. No one can read the discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 on three burning issues—the rise in prices, capital and interest, and the land question in England—without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority. It is because it is regarded as the final authority that the officers of the Church claim to be heard on questions of social policy, and that, however Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that social morality is the province of the Church, and are prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the destruction of Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and with the failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly. After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration economists,[[8]] that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years is not with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered circumstances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, before the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester.

Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later. But that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be refuted by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A medieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, remarked that “he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse.”[[9]] Mr. Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which has as its subject social thought, not the history of business organization, it is not necessary to elaborate that truism. Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast successive periods as light with darkness or darkness with light, or yield to the temper which finds romantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the merits of different theories of social organization must be left to those who feel confident that they possess an adequate criterion. All that can be attempted in these pages is to endeavor to understand a few among them.

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men should have thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have acted as they did, and not least significant when thought and practice are at variance. It may be true that “theory is a criticism of life only in the same sense as a good man is a criticism of a bad one.” But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself an interpretation, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his questions are none the less evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they were asked. It would be paradoxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age, merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dismiss those who formulated economic and social theories in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century merely because, behind canon law and summæ and sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind statutes and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable appetites of the economic man.

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeaths it to its successors.

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to be explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace the change, from a view of economic activity which regarded it as one among other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon impersonal and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of individualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by the Church and of public policy by the State, first denounced, then palliated, then triumphantly justified in the name of economic liberty; to watch how ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it had claimed and finally abdicates them—to do this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivulets which are now a flood.

Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or has it endeavored not only to christianize the individual but to make a Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis between personal morality and the practices which are permissible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve the acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and, if so, ought a Church to endeavor to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on which a more competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might throw at any rate an oblique and wavering light.

I. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradition, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doctrines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation developed, different churches produced characteristic differences of social opinion.

But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new economic world was not accepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness that innovations in doctrine and church government involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily, the historical background.

That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic conditions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded.

The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic structure rose were far removed from those of later generations, it flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Summæ of the Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of development. The economic teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic parts of the system—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.”

Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper predominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.[[10]] It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all” and that “in this world God must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them—the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred.

To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net, and to label them “medieval thought,” is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern Christianity has its root in medieval religion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in his excellent book,[[11]] Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines. The social theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of medieval parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work of conversion and of social construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged from it endeavored, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all alike, in one form or another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic. The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the Summæ of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe. “The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the vision of the divine essence.”[[12]]

Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at variance with theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is “the sphere of religion,” and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant.

There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society—“to know the truth about God and to live in communities.”[[13]] These activities, which form his life according to the law of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.

The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull: “The way of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to the law of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.”[[14]] Thus social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, society is an organism of different grades, and human activities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards:

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse

Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,

Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described—an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—is the same.[[15]] Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occasions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploitation, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-comprehensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning given them is simple. The facts of class status and inequality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to us—enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.

As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is damnable.”[[16]] As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere money-making was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essense of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily interpreted in terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasize that they had undergone a re-dedication at the hands of religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true function was “to defend God’s law by power of the world.”[[17]] Craftsmen—the burden of endless sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every other.”[[18]]

If the medieval moralist was often too naïve in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. “The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and ... laborers.... As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained it.... Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body ... and thus should it be in parts of the Church.... As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the Church.... Surely the Church shall never be whole before proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and [by] medicine of men.”[[19]]

Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, however radical it is, the established order. Clearly this patriarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval industry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less intractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than it is today. In the great commercial centers there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants.[[20]] But outside them trade, industry, the money-market, all that we call the economic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition. There was very little large-scale organization. With some important exceptions, such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval artisan, especially in backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on in London even before the end of the thirteenth century,[[21]] and the growth of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters.[[22]]

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a question whether there was not a considerable population of casual workers—consider only the number of unskilled workers that must have been required as laborers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes—who were rarely organized in permanent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society over-riding particular interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time to time more than a little justification for his complaint that “all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse [against false conspirators],” because “they conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power.”[[23]] It is significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the century before the Reformation proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.[[24]]

There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French gilds, “était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une règle puissante s’imposait à tous et d’une manière générale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par l’Evangile.”[[25]] The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury of all—whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate and direct, and there was little room for organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic expediency.

Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not unfavorable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tremendous claim to mediate between even the humblest activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” At Rome, everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the marks of silver.[[26]]

Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti,

Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,

Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;

Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,

‘Payez, payez,’ dit le mot, si vis impetrare.[[27]]

The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center of the most highly organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and receiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other Governments still included personal services and payments in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of “peculiar sons of the Roman Church.”[[28]] Grosstête rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London expelled them, but papal protection brought them back.[[29]] Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunication, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the archbishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special mandate, it would be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders.”[[30]] The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage in trade and take usury.[[31]] Cathedral chapters lend money at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have been refused by churchmen, as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging restitution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the building of Notre-Dame.[[32]] “Thus,” exclaimed St. Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money.... O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”[[33]]

The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued, and what standards they erected. The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summæ of the Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most systematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throwing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic questions were eminently practical. The movement which prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual movement. By lifting the weight of antiquated formulæ they cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious authority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual justification for developments which earlier generations would have condemned.

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were less significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another; the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,[[34]] will consider in founding his State the natural resources of the country. But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental—sicut quædam adminicula, quibus adjuvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. “It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.”[[35]] Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches.

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal—if only man’s nature could rise to it—is communism. “Communis enim,” wrote Gratian in his decretum, “usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit.”[[36]] At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they are not in actual destitution. Such were the conditions which commended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century Europe.[[37]] There have been ages in which they would have been described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to defend the property of the peasant and small master is necessarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.

The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labor—the common lot of mankind—is necessary and honorable; trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the Philosopher himself praised αὐτάρκεια? But it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in medieval social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.[[38]]

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptionis negotiatio.[[39]] The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary economic organization. The economy of the medieval borough—consider only its treatment of food supplies and prices—was one in which consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as monasteries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.

Apart, however, from the color which it took from its environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as distinct from labor, required some special justification. The suspicion of economic motives had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sanctification. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was softened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites; and towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The merchant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The traditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: “Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.”[[40]] By very definition a man who “buys in order that he may sell dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain.”[[41]]

The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the qualification that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehensible as turpe lucrum. The condition of the trader’s exoneration is that “he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages of his labor.”[[42]] Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was difficult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as “an affectation not very common among merchants.” But the motives which prompted it were characteristic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most merciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues. “He who has enough to satisfy his wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.”[[43]] Two and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the same.[[44]] The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labor in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.

II. THE SIN OF AVARICE

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and property acquired. Their practical expression was the body of economic casuistry, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines sprang as much from the popular consciousness of the plain facts of the economic situation as from the theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fables of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, or who (as the scrupulous recorder remarks), “about the year 1240,” on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from the porch, which proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than the refinements of lawyers.[[45]]

On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional moralists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any unnatural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar subjects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth century, their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men might curse the chicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and boroughs might forbid their members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a flavor of the canon law. Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe; but even at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for usury in the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business forbidden to Christians.[[46]] Cologne was one of the greatest of commercial entrepôts; but, when its successful business man came to make his will, he remembered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly sin, and offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make restitution and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the merchant.[[47]] The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.[[48]] It was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through a hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated as a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed themselves irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision between the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of business—its individual practice was, of course, another matter—because both were formed by the same environment, and accepted the same broad assumptions as to social expediency.

The economic background of it all was very simple. The medieval consumer—we can sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914—is like a traveller condemned to spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is inevitable. Indeed, a great part of medieval industry is a system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a society of small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning question, for, except in the great industrial centers of Italy and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it is today in similar circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption, not for production. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw materials, and his distress is the money-lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a passionate popular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbor’s necessities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. “The usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more than other sin.”[[49]]

No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities of commercial immorality.[[50]] Among the peasants and small masters who composed the mass of the population in medieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that the traditional attitude towards the money-lender had been crystallized. It was natural that “Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation,” and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus,[[51]] should be regarded as figures at once too scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbors and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and enforced, in the last resource, through the courts.

The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. “Every law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion of law.”[[52]] The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the long run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not yet been invented. The idea of a law of nature—of natural justice which ought to find expression in positive law, but which is not exhausted in it—supplies an ideal standard by which the equity of particular relations can be measured. The most fundamental difference between medieval and modern economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however it may be interpreted, for the justification of any particular action, policy, or system of organization, the former starts from the position that there is a moral authority to which considerations of economic expediency must be subordinated. The practical application of this conception is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the fortuitous combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more than the price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigor, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the market, the man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have been poor yesterday and rich today.[[53]]

The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through a considerable development. The dominant conception of Aquinas—that prices, though they will vary with the varying conditions of different markets, should correspond with the labor and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the communis estimatio, conformity with which was the safeguard against extortion—was qualified by subsequent writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century emphasized the subjective element in the common estimation, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and drew the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be reached under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bargain had been struck showed that both parties were satisfied.[[54]] In the fifteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote with a highly developed commercial civilization beneath his eyes, endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the principle of the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the necessary play should be left to economic motives. After a subtle analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded that the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of “probability and conjecture,” since it would vary with places, periods and persons. His practical contribution was to introduce a new elasticity into the whole conception by distinguishing three grades of prices—a gradus pius, discretus, and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price fixed by more than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitution, and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a debatable ground within which prices might move without involving sin.[[55]]

This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the intense economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evidently contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the economic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much more various and much more modern than is sometimes suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was different. It was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard against extortion. “To leave the prices of goods at the discretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.” Prices must be such, and no more than such, as will enable each man to “have the necessaries of life suitable for his station.” The most desirable course is that they should be fixed by public officials, after making an enquiry into the supplies available and framing an estimate of the requirements of different classes. Failing that, the individual must fix prices for himself, guided by a consideration of “what he must charge in order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and labor.”[[56]] If the latter recommendation was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a platitude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry out before breakfast.

No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man. He may demand compensation—interesse—if he is not repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask payment corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes. He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal, for this is compensation for damages incurred; or when Geoffrey de Eston grants William de Burwode three marks of silver in return for an annual rent of six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when James le Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin, merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for this is a partnership; or when the priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital sum paid down.[[57]] What remained to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern economic text-books as “pure interest”—interest as a fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the lender. “Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum ... quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per pactum vel exactionem, usura est, quodcunque nomen sibi imponat.”[[58]] The emphasis was on pactum. The essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they are reasonable—for is not every one in a small way a profit-maker?—has no mercy for the debenture-holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury.

The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth of the habit of investment, of a market for capital, and of new forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange business, theory became steadily more elaborate, and schools more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges produced one controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the development of Monts de Piété a third. Even before the end of the fourteenth century there had been writers who argued that interest was the remuneration of the services rendered by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they did not draw the modern corollary) that present are more valuable than future goods.[[59]] But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lending, theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its modern interpreter,[[60]] who sees in its indulgence to interesse the condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in theological circles in any age before that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labor; it is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, for the benefit of the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money is made, the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and why should the creditor demand payment from a man who is merely using what is now his own?

The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35—apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the Politics, which some now say was mistranslated also.[[61]] But practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit system, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could be said that “he who borrows is always under stress of necessity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when they could do nought else, and so there would be so great a famine that all the poor would die of hunger; for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit and of security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments.”[[62]] The man who used these arguments was not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate man of business, a believer, even to excess, in Realpolitik, and one of the ablest statesmen of his day.

True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The distinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honorable, was as familiar in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no reasonable judgment of the medieval denunciation of usury is possible, unless it is remembered that whole ranges of financial business escaped from it almost altogether. It was rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings, feudal magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects, squeezed to pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of financiers, who could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more rarely applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international banking-houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of excommunication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the international money-market escaped from it; in the fourteenth century Italy was full of banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in every commercial center from Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs, such as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts.[[63]]

It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypocrisy which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce nor government could be carried on without credit. It was that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and practical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based, had reference to a quite different order of economic activities from that represented by loans from great banking-houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its object was simple and direct—to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small men that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable. It was for them that the Church’s scheme of economic ethics had been worked out, and with reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.

It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesiastical legislation on the subject of usury has been so often analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude to it. Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.[[64]] The Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbid it to be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons in need, take their possessions in pawn, and receive profits beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their office.[[65]] Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to communion or Christian burial; their offerings are not to be accepted; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.[[66]] The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury was probably reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons (1274) and of Vienne (1312). The former re-enacted the measures laid down by the third Lateran Council (1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually made the money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to usurers, but was to expel them (had they been admitted) within three months. They were to be refused confession, absolution and Christian burial until they had made restitution, and their wills were to be invalid.[[67]] The legislation of the Council of Vienne was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned with dismay that there are communities which, contrary to human and divine law, sanction usury and compel debtors to observe usurious contracts, it declares that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws are to incur excommunication, and requires the legislation in question to be revoked within three months. Since the true nature of usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various specious devices, money-lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities to submit their accounts to examination. Any person obstinately declaring that usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors are to proceed against him tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de hæresi.[[68]]

It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the superiority of the moral law to economic expediency, than the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But, for an understanding of the way in which the system was intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps less illuminating than the correspondence between the papal Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on specific cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those who have made money by usury bound to make restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the original offenders. The pious object of ransoming prisoners is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to be accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, but if he allows for the element of time in a bargain, by asking a higher price when he sells on credit. Even when debtors have sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ecclesiastical authorities are to compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by the protection given to usurers by the powerful, punishment can be imposed without their evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of common notoriety. An archbishop of Canterbury is reminded that usury is perilous, not only for the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use ecclesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the deduction of interest, of property which has been pawned. Usurers, says a papal letter to the archbishop of Salerno, object to restoring gains, or say that they have not the means; he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to those from whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course is possible, they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, non remittitur peccatum, nisi restituitur ablatum. At Genoa, the Pope is informed, a practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; nevertheless, the sellers run into sin, unless there is a probability that the wares will have changed in value by the time that payment is made; “and therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making contracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.”[[69]]

It is evident from the number of doubtful cases referred to Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury was not easily administered. It is evident, also, that efforts were made to offer guidance in dealing with difficult and technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show how usurers should be handled.[[70]] About the same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the duties of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of extortion, and designed to expose the various illusory contracts—fictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales, excessive deposits against advances—by which the offence was concealed.[[71]] Instructions to confessors define in equal detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning merchandising, and other things pertaining to avarice and covetousness.” Barons and knights are to be requested to state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and officers (ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and craft. Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to theft and detention of the property of others, especially with regard to tithes ... also as to the removing of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land.... Concerning avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of simony ... an unjust judge ... a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a remover of landmarks in fields ... a false merchant, an oppressor of any man and above all of widows, wards and others in misery, for the sake of unjust and greedy gain?” Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large alms, on the principle that “contraries are to be cured with contraries.” But there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be found, the money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of the priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the poor.”[[72]]

The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation, by taking as his illustration the books which had been written on the text, “Lend, hoping for nothing again,” and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little enough “to answer ... all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which all day have need to be assoiled in men’s bargains and chafferings together.”[[73]] A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their tenants, and in general—a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment—“all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep their neighbor from poverty and mischance and do it not.”[[74]]

On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice with these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the secular authorities, to whom the money-lender is too convenient to be victimized by any one but themselves.[[75]] At the end of the thirteenth century an archbishop of Bourges makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge at a sitting,[[76]] and seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers.[[77]] In England commercial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical and secular authorities contended from time to time for jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of contract in general, on the ground that they involved læsio fidei, and with usury in particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon,[[78]] had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was laid down more than once in the course of the next century. The latter again and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and fined those who disregarded the prohibition.[[79]] Both, in spite of repeated protests from the clergy,[[80]] made good their pretension to handle usurious contracts in secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction of the Church. The question at issue was not whether the usurer should be punished—a point as to which there was only one opinion—but who should have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran the gauntlet of all and of each. Local authorities, from the City of London to the humblest manorial court, make by-laws against “unlawful chevisance” and present offenders against them.[[81]] The Commons pray that Lombard brokers may be banished, and that the ordinances of London concerning them may be made of general application.[[82]] The justices in eyre hear indictments of usurers,[[83]] and the Court of Chancery handles petitions from victims who can get no redress at common law.[[84]] And Holy Church, though there seems to be only one example of legislation on the subject by an English Church Council,[[85]] continues to deal with the usurer after her own manner.

For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it is evident that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by the secular authorities. A statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long before) the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living. The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated when the question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and survived, an antiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty capitalism under Elizabeth and James I.[[86]]

That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of enforcing the canon law in connection with money-lending is improbable. It was naturally in the commercial towns that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns did not look with favor on the interference of churchmen in matters of business. In London, collisions between the courts of the Official, the Mayor and the King were frequent in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceedings before the first, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired, or when their case was of a kind which secular courts were not likely to regard with favor. Thus craftsmen, to give one curious example out of many, were evidently using the courts christian as a means of giving effect to trade union regulations, which were more likely to be punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device of imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for breach of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a “confederacy,” supported by an oath, with the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was alleged in court, of preventing any but members of their organization from working at the trade, and summoned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical courts. The spurriers forbade any one to work between sunset and sunrise, and haled an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the result that “the said Richard, after being three times warned by the Official, had been expelled from the Church and excommunicated, until he would swear to keep the ordinance.”[[87]]

Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused of usury undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.[[88]] Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or usury have been begun before “spiritual men.”[[89]] The records of ecclesiastical courts show that, though sometimes commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury continued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.[[90]] The disreputable family of Marcroft—William the father was a common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pentecost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day—is punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it deserves.[[91]] At Ripon a usurer and his victim are induced to settle the case out of court.[[92]] The Commissary of London cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurariæ pravitatis, on the ground that, having advanced four shillings on the security of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence over and above the principal, and suspends him when he does not appear in court.[[93]] Nor did business of this kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great commercial center like the City of London it was still possible in the reign of James I for the Bishop’s Commissary to be trying tradesmen for “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain.”[[94]]

It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an attempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the exactions of the money-lender. From a very early date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be “colored,” direct prohibition was almost necessarily impotent, and which favored the policy of providing facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be obtained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps monasteries lend corn, cattle and money.[[95]] In England, bishops are organizing such loans with papal approval in the middle of the thirteenth century,[[96]] and two centuries later, about 1462, the Franciscans lead the movement for the creation of Monts de Piété, which, starting in Italy, spread by the first half of the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and, though never taken up in England—for the Reformation intervened—supplied a topic of frequent comment and eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.[[97]] The canon law on the subject of money-lending underwent a steady development, caused by the necessity of adapting it to the increasing complexity of business organization, down at least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with which professional opinion elaborated the code was itself a proof that considerable business—and fees—were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught. The canonists, who had a bad reputation with the laity, were not, to put it mildly, more innocent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making business. The Italians, in particular, as was natural in the financial capital of Europe, made the pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In England, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, because “they do not fear to make contracts on usury,”[[98]] or, most probably, because English business was a conservative and slow-going affair, the English canonist Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence from an English archbishop of the thirteenth century and to leave it at that.[[99]]

But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neighborly or unneighborly conduct. Though a rationalist like Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hateful to God,[[100]] it has a traditional prejudice against the arts by which men—or at least laymen—acquire riches, and is apt to lump them together under the ugly name of avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-lenders who grind the poor, it regards, not as business strategists, but as nefandæ belluæ—monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and victualers “who conspire wickedly together that none shall sell better cheap than another,” and speculators “who buy up corn, meat and wine ... to amass money at the cost of others,” they are “according to the laws of the Church no better than common criminals.”[[101]] So, when the price of bread rises, or when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit that they are “all poor and caitiffs on account of their own simplicity, and if they would act on his advice they would be rich and powerful,”[[102]] form a combine, to the great loss and hardship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not console themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in the approval of all good Christians, they stand the miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the sixth commandment, choosing as his text the words of the Book of Proverbs, “Give me neither riches nor poverty, but enough for my sustenance.”

III. THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization, that made the age a watershed in economic development. It is evident that the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely conservative. There was no question of progress, still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church, to which independence of thought among the lower orders was but little less abhorrent when it related to their temporal well-being than when it was concerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to the most formidable of insurrections.

Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view, which regarded the social order as a thing unalterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labor, the hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore, they denounced agitations, like the communal movement,[[103]] designed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of medieval Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in civilization. They referred to questions of economic conduct, not because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct formed an important part.

Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties. The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St. Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church.

The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths of the population consisted of agriculturists, had been serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, conservative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished age, which “knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father.”[[104]] Their idealization of the past is as misleading, as an account of the conditions of previous centuries, as it is illuminating as a comment upon those of their own. In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the bulk of medieval agriculturists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant prosperity is, except here and there, a romantic myth, at which no one would have been more surprised than the peasants themselves. The very essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless form, compulsory labor, additional corvées at the very moments when the peasant’s labor was most urgently needed on his own holding, innumerable dues and payments, the obligation to grind at the lord’s mill and bake at the lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s court. The custom of the manor, the scarcity of labor, and, in England, the steadily advancing encroachments of the royal courts, blunted the edge of the system, and in fifteenth-century England a prosperous yeomanry was rising on its ruins. But, during the greater part of the Middle Ages, its cumulative weight had been, nevertheless, immense. Those who lived under it had no illusions as to its harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money took was to buy himself out of the obligation to work on the lord’s demesne. The Peasants’ Revolt in England, the Jacquerie in France and the repeated risings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social exasperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent movements.

It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval economics refrain from asking) what the attitude of religious opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be treated with humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not “living tools,” but men; in the eyes of God all men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of Heaven Lazarus is before Dives.[[105]] True, villeinage was a legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth century there were serfs who were rich men. But to release the individual is not to condemn the institution. Whatever “mad priests” might say and do, the official Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circumspection.

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom.[[106]] Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pronouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the result of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on economic grounds.[[107]] Almost all medieval writers appear to assume it or excuse it. Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens, was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the children of light concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of St. Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and England, who appealed to the fact that “Christ has made all men free”;[[108]] and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to them. The disappearance of serfdom—and, after all, it did not disappear from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the nineteenth—was part of a general economic movement, with which the Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes resisted. It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of the French Revolution.

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed. The result was a compromise—a compromise of which the critic can say, “How much that was intolerable was accepted!” and the eulogist, “How much that was intolerable was softened!”

Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opinion acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the medieval Church almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of the medieval land system was precisely that which made it strong, at least in theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the individual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of peaceful labor, for the care of the poor, the unfortunate and the oppressed—for the ideal, at least, of social solidarity against the naked force of violence and oppression. With the growing complexity of economic civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily handled by its traditional categories. But, if applied capriciously, they were not renounced, and the world of economic morality, which baffles us today, was in its turn converted by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity. Whatever emphasis may be laid—and emphasis can hardly be too strong—upon the gulf between theory and practice, the qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the endeavor to draw the most commonplace of human activities and the least tractable of human appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal system still glows through it all with a certain tarnished splendor. When the distinction between that which is permissible in private life and that which is permissible in business offers so plausible an escape from the judgment pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted that the law of charity is binding on the second not less than on the first. When the austerity of principles can be evaded by treating them as applicable only to those relations of life in which their application is least exacting, it is something to have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand against commercial unscrupulousness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate transaction. If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high places, it is not less important to observe that men called these vices by their right names, and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice economy.

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.

The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in medieval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of its contribution consists, not in its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and borrower to extortion, but in its insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by “natural law.”

When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be contested.

CHAPTER II
THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS

“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.”

Bucer, De Regno Christi.

Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History, has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.”[[1]] His reference was to the new world revealed by learning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought.

The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the effect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from which new streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency. The sixteenth century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth—because it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by an older social order. The practical implications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced.

I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship, the scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His uncouth labors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.

For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought the news of fresh triumphs. The general who marshaled the host and launched the attack was economic power.

Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with the climax of the great Discoveries, the flood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the conventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic significance. It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared by the patient labor of Italian cartographers and Portuguese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors.

The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance; and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a single economic system, has no space left for fresh expansion, for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemorial pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its commercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.

As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic in its external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal, relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and the brethren of borough and gild had turned on the foreign devil from upland and valley a face of flint. Above both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an economic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony with its depôt, the Steel-yard of the Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried on under capitulations.

This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion. Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi flooded Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated rather than allayed its thirst.[[2]] It was not the lords of great estates, but eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been accumulated. It was not great capitalists, but enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity the basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and east to north and west. The records of German and English trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and civilization,[[3]] and for a century after them English economic development was to be as closely wedded to its continental connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as his strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Discoveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient economic effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine.

The result was not the less sensational because it had been long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid struggles not less bitter.

It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensations, which were recorded in the letter-books[[4]] of business men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German cities which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which henceforward must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no longer local but international, and based, not merely on exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive from the field all feebler competitors; a revolution in prices which shattered all customary relationships; the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power; the triumph of the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church—all were crowded into less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of Basel was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three-quarters of a century the whole framework of European civilization had been transformed.

Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the Low Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could already, though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial expansion had begun.

The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not discerned, and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the water-logged Netherlands.[[5]] The justice of the criticism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, completed her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long agony, in which the powerhouse of European enterprise was to be struck with paralysis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated by political and religious struggles, seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting struggle with marsh and forest and moor she had colonized her own waste places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years, and which only in the twentieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of mere experiment over, and the new connections firmly established, she appeared to be in sight of an economic stability based on broader foundations than ever before.

Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of East and West. But it was not Portugal, with her tiny population, and her empire that was little more than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries an army on the march, and now staggering beneath the responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the material harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the political agents of minds more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace. Every period and society has some particular center, or institution, or social class, in which the characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be fixed and embodied. In the Europe of the early Renaissance the heart of the movement had been Italy. In the Europe of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The institution which best symbolized its eager economic energies was the international money-market and produce-exchange. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the international financier.

Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarnation in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the international idea when outlawed by every other power in Europe, Antwerp, “a home common to all nations,” was the most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a center of learning by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a country where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Dürer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found a spiritual home, where the energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that land of happiness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at Antwerp.

The economic preëminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial region behind it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the munitions of the Black Country round Liége, poured in an unceasing stream on to its quays.[[6]] But Antwerp was a European, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the competitor of Bruges for the reception of the two great currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth century she had crushed her rival. The Hanse League maintained a depôt at Antwerp; Italian banking firms in increasing numbers opened businesses there; the English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepôt through which English cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern Europe; the copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap the wealth, not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged preëminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads which ran east and west met and ended in its harbors. The Portuguese Government made it in 1503 the depôt of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite of protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for American silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit, brought finance in its train. The commercial companies and banking-houses of south Germany turned from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp the base for financial operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.[[7]]

In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of society, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Professor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook of the medieval middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the sixteenth century, with its international ramifications, its independence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindication of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial protection of gild and borough and carve his own career.[[8]] “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants at Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the cause of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade there.”[[9]] Swept into wealth on the crest of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all precedents, a policy of practical individualism, which would have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian monarchy, which were fought by their more conservative neighbors, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, welcoming the technical improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Exchange, with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum cuiusque gentis ac linguae.

For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in the mere expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance the movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the impecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the growth of an international banking system mobilized immense resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of international currency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They formed together the departments of an international clearing-house, where bills could be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nationality changed hands.[[10]]

Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reëstablished them by political art.

The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it.”[[11]] The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including the financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared their position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace.

It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon. The centralized States which were rising in the age of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial situation. It sprang from the combination of modern administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of masses of professional infantry and artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspiration of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of printing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized industry. Government after Government, undeterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its neighbors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the taxpayer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property which should have been treated as capital. They parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their successors.

These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money-market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the financier was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, financing impartially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis, Charles and Philip, stood in the last resort a little German banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince. Compared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.

The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German banking-houses were involved is astonishing. The Welsers had invested in the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East Indies, financed an expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Imhofs were much the same. The Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous concessions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and commercial businesses in Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Brandenburg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences and taking half the proceeds; provided the funds with which Charles V bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of an auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client; and found the money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 per cent. for the preceding sixteen years.[[12]]

II. LUTHER

Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of pungent criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercantilist thinkers resharpened an old economic weapon for the armory of princes. Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus from the controversies of practical men on the rise in prices, on currency, and on the foreign exchanges.

The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an instrument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own conception of man’s spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who had stretched old formulæ to cover the new forces of capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate itself from the stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic treatment of economic questions was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology.

Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that questions of economic conduct belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the intolerable complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to conscientious scruples, were sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in order to consult the theologians of the University as to the compatibility of speculative exchange business with the canon law.[[13]] When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the University of Bologna authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.[[14]]

Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry, and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a scale unknown before, the new economic civilization inevitably gave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the friends and the enemies of the Reformation identified it with social change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the protagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social revolution had been fermenting for half a century, it seemed at last to have come. The rise in prices, an enigma which baffled contemporaries till Bodin published his celebrated tract in 1569,[[15]] produced a storm of indignation against monopolists. Since the rising led by Hans Böheim in 1476, hardly a decade had passed without a peasants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and peasant, had become a battle-cry. From city after city municipal authorities, terrified by popular demands for the repression of the extortioner, consulted universities and divines as to the legitimacy of interest, and universities and divines gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending and prices.[[16]] Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on the same subject.[[17]] Bucer sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a Christian prince.[[18]] Bullinger produced a classical exposition of social ethics in the Decades which he dedicated to Edward VI.[[19]] Luther preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,[[20]] and said that it was time “to put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers.”[[21]] Zwingli and Œcolampadius devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief.[[22]] Above all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightful catastrophe, not only terrified Luther into his outburst: “Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer”;[[23]] it also helped to stamp on Lutheranism an almost servile reliance on the secular authorities. In England there was less violence, but hardly less agitation, and a similar flood of writing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel—to mention but the best-known names—all contributed to the debate.[[24]] Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the part of men of religion. If the world could be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise.

That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in England, is its conservatism. Where questions of social morality were involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways, appealed to medieval authorities, and reproduced in popular language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.

A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found acceptance in certain quarters has represented the Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to Oziander protesting against the embarrassment caused to reformers in England by the indulgence to moral laxity, in the matter alike of economic transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given by reformers in Germany.[[25]] By the seventeenth century the hints had become a theory and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the first theologians to defend extortion,[[26]] and it only remained for a pamphleteer to adapt the indictment to popular consumption, by writing bluntly that “it grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of heresy.”[[27]] That the revolt from Rome synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a period of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it had its seamy side. What is sometimes suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of religious and economic movements, but a logical connection between changes in economic organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad social practice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly teach a conscienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of their teaching. In the eighteenth century, which had as little love for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as for their political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our own day, the wheel seems almost to have come full circle. What was then a matter for congratulation is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by whom the Reformation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of unscrupulous commercialism, which had previously been held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching of the Church.

These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the grand religious struggles of the age have their significance. But the obiter dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants than on the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to partisans. If capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of capital for their own pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which establish themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in medieval Italy and in medieval Flanders. If by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements of the Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predominantly Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic bankers who were its leading financiers.

Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the Reformation released forces which were to act as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and economic issues, it did so without design, and against the intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensational the innovations in economic practice which accompanied the expansion of financial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the development of doctrine on the subject of economic ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To think of the abdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to antedate a movement which was not finally accomplished for another century and a half, and which owed as much to changes in economic and political organization, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all shades of opinion still searched the Bible, the Fathers and the Corpus Juris Canonici for light on practical questions of social morality, and, as far as the first generation of reformers was concerned, there was no intention, among either Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good conscience, which were supposed to control economic transactions and social relations. If anything, indeed, their tendency was to interpret them with a more rigorous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, in particular, against the avarice which was thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the passion for regeneration and purification, which was one element in the Reformation, was directed against the corruptions of society as well as of the Church. Princes and nobles and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and fished eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive Christianity.

The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression in the writings of the German reformers. Like the return to nature in the eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society disillusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The prosperity of Augsburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central position, which they were to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the entrepôt between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy and the near East. But the expansion of commerce, which brought affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of an acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and popular agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Germany from a highway into a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise to a position of overwhelming preëminence of the new interests based on the control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally of the personal labor of craftsman and artisan. In the Germany of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements.

Under the impact of these new forces, while the institutions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and operation were transformed. In the larger cities the gild organization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the capitalist, became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate his power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding morass of hopeless pauperism.[[28]] The peasantry suffered equally from the spread of a commercial civilization into the rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches of the towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and fines by their competition. But, while in England the customary tenant was shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found corvées redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights curtailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanction to its harshest exactions.[[29]]

On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless field to economic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized themselves into companies, which handled at Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their own resources. The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar movement took place on the narrower stage of European commerce in the generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany, and it was defended and attacked by arguments almost identical with those which are familiar today. The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in bulk, drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great pike swallows up a lot of little fishes,” and plundered the consumer, were the commonplaces of the social reformer.[[30]] The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger of interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by the companies. The problem was on several occasions brought before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who observed that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had already been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do not seem to have been more effective than modern legislation on the same subject.

The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such conditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fifteenth century, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.[[31]] In the age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants’ companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed merchants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should be exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther.[[32]]

Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated consciousness.

It was partly that they were pièces de circonstance, thrown off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested. Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine. He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity. But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a conception which made the learning of the schools appear trivial or mischievous.

“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, “constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Paradise.”[[33]] It was this doctrine that all things have their price—future salvation as much as present felicity—which scandalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave their most powerful argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this in common with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolutionary conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the merchant and financier is the same as his attitude towards the commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at German social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and become a congregation of believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of Adam.

The children of the mind are like the children of the body. Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if their parents could foresee their future development, it would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would have been horrified, could he have anticipated the remoter deductions to be derived from his argument. Wamba said that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all, and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded by Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed would have more affinity with the thought of Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his teaching a plea for treating questions of economic conduct and social organization as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s revolt against authority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on its laxity and its corruption. His individualism was not the greed of the plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness of public authority an opportunity for personal gain. It was the ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers for a society in which order and fraternity will reign without “the tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute,” because they well up in all their native purity from the heart.

Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church-civilization, in which all departments of life, the State and society, education and science, law, commerce and industry, were to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.[[34]] That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on social issues. So far from accepting the view which was afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves for that plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those directed against Rome. The text of his admonitions is always, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a formal, legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not need to be organized by law, because it is the spontaneous expression of a habit of love. To restore is to destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder of revolution. It was the declaration of the peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised Messiah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées, and enclosures.[[35]]

The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of society more medieval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the commercial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse into paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a vague conception of a state of nature in which men had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular protests against a commercial civilization which were everywhere in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people, absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naïveté, even while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.

For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for the anxious provision which accumulates for the future, Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk. Christians should earn their living in the sweat of their brow, take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther thought that the most admirable life was that of the peasant, for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of commercial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home the lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.[[36]] The labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the community in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is confined to the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands no more than will compensate him for his labor and risk. The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are members. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome. For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders, mischievous alike in their practice and by their example, cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrimages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or compelled to labor, and each town must organize charity for the support of the honest poor.[[37]]

Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and subordination, though he knocked away the ecclesiastical rungs in the ladder. The combination of religious radicalism and economic conservatism is not uncommon, and in the traditional conception of society, as an organism of unequal classes with different rights and functions, the father of all later revolutions found an arsenal of arguments against change, which he launched with almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping monopolists. His vindication of the spiritual freedom of common men, and his outspoken abuse of the German princes, had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs groaning under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable rising came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another age, was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and his own. As fully convinced as any medieval writer that serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by a political theory which exalted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis between the external order and the life of the spirit. The demand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because “Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood,”[[38]] horrified him, partly as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be confused with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation movement, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gospel by turning a spiritual message into a program of social reconstruction. “This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an external worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’”[[39]] After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated.

A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence. Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined; and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could be more striking than that between his social theory and the outlook of Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigor, accepted the main institutions of a commercial civilization, and supplied a creed to the classes which were to dominate the future. The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw no room in a Christian society for those middle classes whom an English statesman once described as the natural representatives of the human race. International trade, banking and credit, capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic forces, which, next to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest solvent of the medieval world, seem to him to belong in their very essence to the kingdom of darkness which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law, only to reaffirm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it had been used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions at length, as in his Long Sermon on Usury in 1520, or his tract On Trade and Usury in 1524, his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists themselves had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical life.

In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional doctrines. “A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and conscience that thou mayest practice it without harm or injury to him.”[[40]] If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it. If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation. If he has to determine it himself, he must consider the income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his labor, and his risk, and must settle it accordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments.

On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the canonists. “The greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the traffic in interest.... The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.”[[41]] Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of interest as compensation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian burial. With such a code of ethics, Luther naturally finds the characteristic developments of his generation—the luxury trade with the East, international finance, speculation on the exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking beyond measure. “Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels and spices ... and drain the land and people of their money, should not be permitted.... Of combinations I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless and bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong.... Who is so stupid as not to see that combinations are mere outright monopolies, which even heathen civil laws—I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law—condemn as a plainly harmful thing in all the world?”[[42]]

So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed that Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, would have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite. It was one, not merely of indifference, but of repugnance. The prophet who scourged with whips the cupidity of the individual chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned a shattering dialectic on the corporate organization of the Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of human hopes are human institutions, there have been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost everything that men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived at a time when the contrast between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been intolerable, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been made to give it a concrete expression. He reiterates the content of medieval economic teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers of the later Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received a positive, if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but abhorrence. God speaks to the soul, not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social institutions built up by man, but solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and in the heart alone. Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of sense are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men, that it may enter into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but those relations can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of grace. Like the primeval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of contributing to sanctification. “It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty.... One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ.”[[43]]

The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight, appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only good works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between the individual soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions—drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.

The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the content of medieval social teaching, while rejecting its sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of salvation as vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is combined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good conscience in economic matters, but to purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea that merit could be acquired by the operation of some special machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to them. “There can be no better instructions in ... all transactions in temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments: ‘What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to rights, for every one’s heart and conscience would guide him.”[[44]]

“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate substitute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to solve the problem which social duties present to the individual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it necessarily follow that the external order is simply irrelevant to it? To wave aside the world of institutions and law as alien to that of the spirit—is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for which medieval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy of values related to a common end, had attempted, however inadequately, to discover a formula? A Catholic rationalist had answered by anticipation Luther’s contemptuous dismissal of law and learning, when he urged that it was useless for the Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was prepared to undertake the intellectual labor of defining the transactions to which the prohibition applied.[[45]] It was a pity that Pecock’s douche of common sense was not of a kind which could be appreciated by Luther. He denounced covetousness in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted with a request for advice on the specific question whether the authorities of Dantzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. “The preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to each man to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it; he cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the spirit of God urges forward.”[[46]]

Luther’s impotence was not accidental. It sprang directly from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He attacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching with regard to which his criticism was justified were only too numerous. But the remedy for bad law is good law, not lawlessness; and casuistry is merely the application of general principles to particular cases, which is involved in any living system of jurisprudence, whether ecclesiastical or secular. If the principles are not to be applied, on the ground that they are too sublime to be soiled by contact with the gross world of business and politics, what remains of them? Denunciations such as Luther launched against the Fuggers and the peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as he advanced in his tract On Trade and Usury. Pious rhetoric may be edifying, but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul.

“As the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works.... Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to strengthen his faith alone more and more.”[[47]] The logic of Luther’s religious premises was more potent for posterity than his attachment to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its own inexorable conclusions in spite of them. It enormously deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring. But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dualism which, as its implications were developed, emptied religion of its social content, and society of its soul. Between light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere heights where alone true faith is found, no human institution can avail to help him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many.

He himself was conscious that he had left the world of secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual restraints. He met the difficulty, partly with an admission that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in the majestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, be obeyed; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could find no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked, ‘Who then can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For in this fashion no merchandising would remain on earth.’... You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.”[[48]]

Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to the hands of the State. Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.

III. CALVIN

The most characteristic and influential form of Protestantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is that which descends, by one path or another, from the teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in different countries, became an international movement, which brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was strewn with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had been socially conservative, deferential to established political authorities, the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism was an active and radical force. It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the influence of religion.

Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of society, it possessed from the beginning one characteristic which was both novel and important. It assumed an economic organization which was relatively advanced, and expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of medieval theologians and of Luther. The difference is not merely one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on which the discussion is conducted. The background, not only of most medieval social theory, but also of Luther and his English contemporaries, is the traditional stratification of rural society. It is a natural, rather than a money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of peasants and craftsmen in the small market-town, where industry is carried on for the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the production of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep the whole system in motion. When they criticize economic abuses, it is precisely against departures from that natural state of things—against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless competition, which disturb the stability of the existing order with clamorous economic appetites—that their criticism is directed.

These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of unscrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on the writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example, who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that private property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Councils of Constance and Basel—“assembled, forsooth, at the bidding of the Holy Ghost”—for showing indulgence to the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God.[[49]] Of the attempts made at Zürich and Geneva to repress extortion something is said below. But these full-blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legislation by which interest was permitted, and already, when they were uttered, they had ceased to represent the conclusion of the left wing of the Reformed Churches.

For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began their voyage lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who saw economic life with the eyes of a peasant and a mystic, they approached it as men of affairs, disposed neither to idealize the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist enterprise in commerce and finance. Like early Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban movement; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from country to country partly by emigrant traders and workmen; and its stronghold was precisely in those social groups to which the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its treatment of economic interests as a quite minor aspect of human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As was to be expected in the exponents of a faith which had its headquarters at Geneva, and later its most influential adherents in great business centers, like Antwerp with its industrial hinterland, London, and Amsterdam, its leaders addressed their teaching, not of course exclusively, but none the less primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and industry, who formed the most modern and progressive elements in the life of the age.

In doing so they naturally started from a frank recognition of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of business life. They thus broke with the tradition which, regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond what is necessary for subsistence” as reprehensible, had stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a thief. They set the profits of trade and finance, which to the medieval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty escaped censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of respectability as the earnings of the laborer and the rents of the landlord. “What reason is there,” wrote Calvin to a correspondent, “why the income from business should not be larger than that from land-owning? Whence do the merchant’s profits come, except from his own diligence and industry?”[[50]] It was quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of merchants, should urge the English Government to undertake the development of the woollen industry on mercantilist lines.[[51]]

Since it is the environment of the industrial and commercial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and his followers, they have to make terms with its practical necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are concerned to moralize is one in which the main features of a commercial civilization are taken for granted, and that it is for application to such conditions that their teaching is designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has its own rule, and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of economic affairs. But it no longer suspects the whole world of economic motives as alien to the life of the spirit, or distrusts the capitalist as one who has necessarily grown rich on the misfortunes of his neighbor, or regards poverty as in itself meritorious, and it is perhaps the first systematic body of religious teaching which can be said to recognize and applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy is not the accumulation of riches, but their misuse for purposes of self-indulgence or ostentation. Its ideal is a society which seeks wealth with the sober gravity of men who are conscious at once of disciplining their own characters by patient labor, and of devoting themselves to a service acceptable to God.

It is in the light of that change of social perspective that the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is to be interpreted. Its significance consisted, not in the phase which it marked in the technique of economic analysis, but in its admission to a new position of respectability of a powerful and growing body of social interests, which, however irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by religious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor than by its indulgence. “Calvin,” wrote an English divine a generation after his death, “deals with usurie as the apothecarie doth with poyson.”[[52]] The apologetic was just, for neither his letter to Œcolampadius, nor his sermon on the same subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of the financier. That interest is lawful, provided that it does not exceed an official maximum, that, even when a maximum is fixed, loans must be made gratis to the poor, that the borrower must reap as much advantage as the lender, that excessive security must not be exacted, that what is venial as an occasional expedient is reprehensible when carried on as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic gain for himself to the injury of his neighbor—a condonation of usury protected by such embarrassing entanglements can have offered but tepid consolation to the devout money-lender.

Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor might properly be asked to concede some small part of his profits to the creditor with whose capital they had been earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his labor.” There have been ages in which such doctrines would have been regarded as an attack on financial enterprise rather than as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin’s specific contributions to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence and from the idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably regarded by himself merely as one additional step in the long series of developments through which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on the subject had already gone. In emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from the necessities of the poor and the interest which a prosperous merchant could earn with borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the organizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a legend. Like the author of another revolution in economic theory, he might have turned on his popularizers with the protest: “I am not a Calvinist.”

Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its defenders were correct in regarding Calvin’s treatment of capital as a watershed. What he did was to change the plane on which the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal to a special body of doctrine on the subject of usury, but as a particular case of the general problem of the social relations of a Christian community, which must be solved in the light of existing circumstances. The significant feature in his discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and inevitable incident in the life of society. He therefore dismisses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testament and the Fathers as irrelevant, because designed for conditions which no longer exist, argues that the payment of interest for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent for land, and throws on the conscience of the individual the obligation of seeing that it does not exceed the amount dictated by natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the rule “non fœnerabis,” but “l’équité et la droiture,” and appeals from Christian tradition to commercial common sense, which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian. On such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians. But capital and credit are indispensable; the financier is not a pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at interest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans are made freely to the poor, is not per se more extortionate than any other of the economic transactions without which human affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its off-shoots took their stand on the side of the activities which were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring concentration on the task of using for the glory of God the opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could and must be lived.

It was on this practical basis of urban industry and commercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic from the theological premises. “God not only foresaw,” Calvin wrote, “the fall of the first man, ... but also arranged all by the determination of his own will.”[[53]] Certain individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit”; the remainder have been consigned to eternal damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment.”[[54]] Deliverance, in short, is the work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing to it, but of an objective Power. Human effort, social institutions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the true aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon broken reeds.

That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the sanctification of the world by strife and labor. For Calvinism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained. The central paradox of religious ethics—that only those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they are the humble instruments—finds in it a special exemplification. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live for that end. His task is at once to discipline his individual life, and to create a sanctified society. The Church, the State, the community in which he lives, must not merely be a means of personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs. It must be a “Kingdom of Christ,” in which individual duties are performed by men conscious that they are “ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye,” and the whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing discipline.

The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age from the realization of the contrast between the external order of society and the moral standards recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely felt. The men who made the Reformation had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which, amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows in the pictures of Nürnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Æneas Silvius and in the woodcuts of Dürer. And already a new dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was splendid, but it had been accompanied by a cynical materialism which seemed a denial of all that had been meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian Church that it reached its height. Shocked by the gulf between theory and practice, men turned this way and that to find some solution of the tension which racked them. The German reformers followed one road and preached a return to primitive simplicity. But who could obliterate the achievements of two centuries, or blot out the new worlds which science had revealed? The Humanists took another, which should lead to the gradual regeneration of mankind by the victory of reason over superstition and brutality and avarice. But who could wait for so distant a consummation? Might there not be a third? Was it not possible that, purified and disciplined, the very qualities which economic success demanded—thrift, diligence, sobriety, frugality—were themselves, after all, the foundation, at least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not conceivable that the gulf which yawned between a luxurious world and the life of the spirit could be bridged, not by eschewing material interests as the kingdom of darkness, but by dedicating them to the service of God?

It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical values which the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was that new type of Christian character that they labored to create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs, stamped on them a new sanctification, and used them as the warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation: the members of the Reformed Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe that they could atone for a life of worldliness by the savorless formality of individual good works reduced to a commercial system, as though man could keep a profit and loss account with his Creator: the true Christian must organize his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion, even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion.

Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie, conscious of the contrast between its own standards and those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard-bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate an open road for its own way of life by the use of every weapon, including political revolution and war, because the issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or self-interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new ideal of social conduct. Its practical message, it might perhaps be said, was la carrière ouverte—not aux talents, but au caractère.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of order. While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the theory of historical materialism. He set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the established order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a chosen people, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; it not merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Compared with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bankrupt monarchies, the middle classes in whom Calvinism took root most deeply, were a race of iron. It was not surprising that they made several revolutions, and imprinted their conceptions of political and social expediency on the public life of half a dozen different States in the Old World and in the New.

The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the call to fashion for the Christian character an objective embodiment in social institutions. Though logically connected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration from the conception of a visible Christian society, in which, as one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially to be fulfilled.”[[55]] Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on differences of political environment and of social class. It depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile Government.

In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the English upper classes in the seventeenth century, individualism in social affairs was, on the whole, the prevalent philosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who drew inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending on England’s green and pleasant land, and the troopers of Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the theology of Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception of society, diluted by the practical necessities of a commercial age, and softened to suit the conventions of a territorial aristocracy, was poles apart from that of the master who founded a discipline, compared with which that of Laud, as Laud himself dryly observed,[[56]] was a thing of shreds and patches. As both the teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice of some Calvinist communities, suggest, the social ethics of the heroic age of Calvinism savored more of a collectivist dictatorship than of individualism. The expression of a revolt against the medieval ecclesiastical system, it stood itself, where circumstances favored it, for a discipline far more stringent and comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. If, as some historians have argued, the philosophy of laissez faire emerged as a result of the spread of Calvinism among the middle classes, it did so, like tolerance, by a route which was indirect. It was accepted, less because it was esteemed for its own sake, than as a compromise forced upon Calvinism at a comparatively late stage in its history, as a result of its modification by the pressure of commercial interests, or of a balance of power between conflicting authorities.

The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the burning question of Pauperism. The reform of traditional methods of poor relief was in the air—Vives had written his celebrated book in 1526[[57]]—and, prompted both by Humanists and by men of religion, the secular authorities all over Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to cope with what was, at best, a menace to social order, and, at worst, a moral scandal. The question was naturally one which appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reformation. The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like the statesman, as a problem of police, nor, like the more intelligent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, but as a question of character. Calvin quoted with approval the words of St. Paul, “If a man will not work, neither shall he eat,” condemned indiscriminate almsgiving as vehemently as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise undesirable.[[58]] Œcolampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of the poor.[[59]] Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced by monastic charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school and the assistance of the destitute.[[60]] In the plan for the reorganization of poor relief at Zürich, which was drafted by Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to be relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to be made for the sick and aged in special institutions; no inhabitant was to be entitled to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to attend church, or who played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive to work. “With labor,” he wrote, “will no man now support himself.... And yet labor is a thing so good and godlike ... that makes the body hale and strong and cures the sicknesses produced by idleness.... In the things of this life, the laborer is most like to God.”[[61]]

In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives were not distinguished. The idleness of the mendicant was both a sin against God and a social evil; the enterprise of the thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and a benefit to the community. The same combination of religious zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks on gambling, swearing, excess in apparel and self-indulgence in eating and drinking. The essence of the system was not preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible society, which should be at once a Church and a State. Having overthrown monasticism, its aim was to turn the secular world into a gigantic monastery, and at Geneva, for a short time, it almost succeeded. “In other places,” wrote Knox of that devoted city, “I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.”[[62]] Manners and morals were regulated, because it is through the minutiæ of conduct that the enemy of mankind finds his way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be revealed by pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793 those guilty of another kind of incivisme were betrayed by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant legislation, and, still more, administration. The word in which both were summarized was Discipline.

Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of religion,[[63]] and the common observation that he assigned to it the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed primarily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censorship of morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from the canon law of the Church of Rome, as the rules of a private society may differ from the code of a State. Its establishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the last half of the sixteenth century, was the result of nearly twenty years of struggle between the Council of the city and the Consistory, composed of ministers and laymen. It was only in 1555 that the latter finally vindicated its right to excommunicate, and only in the edition of the Institutes which appeared in 1559 that a scheme of church organization and discipline was set out. But, while the answer to the question of the constitution of the authority by whom discipline was to be exercised depended on political conditions, and thus differed in different places and periods, the necessity of enforcing a rule of life, which was the practical aspect of discipline, was from the start of the very essence of Calvinism. Its importance was the theme of a characteristic letter addressed by Calvin to Somerset in October 1548, the moment of social convulsion for which Bucer wrote his book, De Regno Christi. The Protector is reminded that it is not from lack of preaching, but from failure to enforce compliance with it, that the troubles of England have sprung. Though crimes of violence are punished, the licentious are spared, and the licentious have no part in the Kingdom of God. He is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et honneste discipline,” and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de l’Evangile s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.”[[64]]

“Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life”—the words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers, and their projects of social reconstruction are a commentary on the sense in which “holiness of life” was understood. It was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in forming at Zürich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of the clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian morals; and drew up a list of sins to be punished by excommunication, which included, in addition to murder and theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it discovers itself in usury and fraud.”[[65]] It was in that spirit that Calvin composed in the Institutes a Protestant Summa and manual of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule. It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a comprehensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whole range of civic administration, from the regulations to be made for markets, crafts, buildings and fairs to the control of prices, interest and rents.[[66]] It was in that spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a generation Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death. “Having considered,” ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576, which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, “that it is a thing worthy of commendation above all others, that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly maintained by good government and policy, and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully instructed, and the Hospital well-ordered for the support of the poor: Which things can only be if there be established a certain rule and order of living, by which each man may be able to understand the duties of his position....”[[67]] The object of it all was so simple. “Each man to understand the duties of his position”—what could be more desirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? It is sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years.[[68]] Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Governments which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness. The characteristic which was distinctive of Geneva—“the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles”[[69]]—was not its merciless intolerance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was possible. It was the attempt to make the law of God prevail even in those matters of pecuniary gain and loss which mankind, to judge by its history, is disposed to regard more seriously than wounds and deaths. “No member [of the Christian body],” wrote Calvin in his Institutes, “holds his gifts to himself, or for his private use, but shares them among his fellow members, nor does he derive benefit save from those things which proceed from the common profit of the body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his brethren all that it is in his power to give.”[[70]] It was natural that so remorseless an attempt to claim the totality of human interests for religion should not hesitate to engage even the economic appetites, before which the Churches of a later generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism welcomed the world of business to its fold with an eagerness unknown before, it did so in the spirit of a conqueror organizing a new province, not of a suppliant arranging a compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code of law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testament. Samuel and Agag, King of the Amalekites, Jonah and Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of Baal, Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of the Lord, and Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, worked on the tense imagination of the Calvinist as did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793. The first half-century of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a prolonged effort to organize an economic order worthy of the Kingdom of Christ, in which the ministers played the part of Old Testament prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the fleshpots of Egypt.

Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism made few innovations in the details of social policy, and the contents of the program were thoroughly medieval. The novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into its application. The organ of administration before which offenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed body of laymen and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, punishes usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands or fines the merchant who defrauds his clients, the cloth-maker whose stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who provides short measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat above the rates fixed by authority, the tailor who charges strangers excessive prices, the surgeon who demands an excessive fee for an operation.[[71]] In the Consistory the ministers appear to have carried all before them, and they are constantly pressing for greater stringency. From the election of Beza in place of Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes without a new demand for legislation from the clergy, a new censure on economic unrighteousness, a new protest against one form or another of the ancient sin of avarice. At one moment, it is excessive indulgence to debtors which rouses their indignation; at another, the advance of prices and rents caused by the influx of distressed brethren from the persecutions in France; at a third, the multiplication of taverns and the excessive charges demanded by the sellers of wine. Throughout there is a prolonged warfare against the twin evils of extortionate interest and extortionate prices.

Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for the same reasons which made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars of religion, the city was a financial center of some importance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In order to secure command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the capital to do exchange business and make advances, the rate of interest being fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To the establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been consulted, agreed; against the profitable business of advancing money at high rates of interest to private persons they protested, especially when the loans were made to spendthrifts who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in 1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some company promoters of establishing a second bank in the city, the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the danger of covetousness as revealed by the moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however, the commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist who borrowed in order to invest and make a profit could take care of himself, and the ministers explained that they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur argent aux marchands pour emploier en marchandise.” The crucial issue was that of the money-lender who makes advances “simplement à un qui aura besoin,” and who thereby exploits the necessities of his poorer neighbors.[[72]]

Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as larrons, brigands, loups et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but what they are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of God.... One has cried in the market-place, ‘a curse on those who bring us dearth.’... The Lord has heard that cry ... and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence!... A cut-purse shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet Amos ... ‘Famine is come upon my people of Israel, O ye who devour the poor.’ The threats there uttered have been executed against his people.”[[73]] They demand that for his second offense the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that, if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least be required to testify his repentance publicly in church, before being admitted to the sacrament. They remind their fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momentarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly, they propose to deprive him of his victims by removing the causes which create them. Pour tarir les ruisseaux il faut escouper la source. Men borrow because of “idleness, foolish extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be established at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among rich as well as among poor, how each household earns its livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litigation, and to “bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the necessities of their poor neighbors.”[[74]]

The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and they concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers the pious hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of your honorable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question the right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and platform in one; ministers had the public behind them, and, conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel submission by threatening to resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yielding down of official procrastination, and its first reply was normally qu’on y pense un peu. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he accused members of the Council of having intelligence with speculators who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were reproaching the Council with laxity in administration, and they finally denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social reform.

The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to exhorting the public to attend sermons and to send their children to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers concerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do creditors, they would make no concession to the complaint that debtors were subjected to a “double usury,” since they were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. They informed the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding up supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons against avarice, with appropriate topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich.[[75]]

The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza’s remarks as a personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty, condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty crowns which he had lent at 10 per cent. interest. Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The Council and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of the local hospital. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied politely that they would be well advised to mind their own business.

So monstrous a suggestion—as though there were any human activity which was not the business of the Church!—evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps his corn in time of scarcity”? To the charge of intemperate language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should be silent,” said Beza, “what would the people say? That they are dumb dogs.... As to the question of causing scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been punished.... It is notorious everywhere that the city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is 10 per cent. or more.”[[76]] The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.[[77]] But at the godly proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, “most men are debtors.” If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed the ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied in the language of Nathan, we are not informed.

Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the collectivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the omnicompetent Church.[[78]] The religious community formed a closely organized society, which, while using the secular authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting down offences against public order and public morals, providing for the education of youth and for the relief of the poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which for a short time made the system possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a minority in a national State organized on principles quite different from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion, civil war or the abandonment of the pretension to control society was the inevitable consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, whatever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations to a lapse into immorality.

The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Reformed Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in 1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted, certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were discussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to lax the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the time.”[[79]] Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves compliance with a standard of economic morality which the Church must enforce, the problems of interpretation which arise are innumerable, and the religious community finds itself committed to developing something like a system of case law, by the application of its general principles to a succession of varying situations. The elaboration of such a system was undertaken; but it was limited in the sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the economic structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva, being concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on which specific guidance was demanded by the Churches.

Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord’s Supper? May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows moderate interest: what is to be the attitude of the Church? What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are lotteries permissible? Is it legitimate to invest at interest monies bequeathed for the benefit of the poor? The answers which the French Synods made to such questions show the persistence of the idea that the transactions of business are the province of the Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an impracticable rigor. All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others must make restitution before they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and tradesmen are to seek only “indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the same division of opinion is visible in the French Reformed Church as existed at the same time in England and Holland, and Calvin’s advice on the subject was requested. The stricter school would not hear of confining the prohibition of usury to “excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of raising money for the poor by interest on capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these heroic rigors had passed, and the common-sense view prevailed. The brethren were required to demand no more than the law allowed and than was consistent with charity. Within these limits interest was not to be condemned.[[80]]

Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the views of the reformers as to economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the Church before the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline denounced covetousness with the same vehemence as did the “accursed Popery” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches are required to make provision for the poor. “Oppression of the poor by exactions,” it is declared, “[and] deceiving of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure ... do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God’s word commandeth.”[[81]] The interpretation given to these offences is shown by the punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St. Andrews.[[82]] The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven years after it had in England been finally transferred to the State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox.

Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of New England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden, where men desired only to worship God “according to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of God’s word,”[[83]] not only were “tobacco and immodest fashions and costly apparel,” and “that vain custom of drinking one to another,” forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers adopted towards that “notorious evil ... whereby most men walked in all their commerce—to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can,”[[84]] an attitude which possibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business-like descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachusetts a minister had called attention to the recrudescence of the old Adam—“profit being the chief aim and not the propagation of religion”—and Governor Bradford, observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward estates,” remarked that the increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New England, at least of the Churches of God there.”[[85]] Sometimes Providence smote the exploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American Trust—he owned the only milch cow on board and sold the milk at 2d. a quart—“being after at a sermon wherein oppression was complained of ... fell distracted.”[[86]] Those who escaped the judgment of Heaven had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which, in the infancy of the colony, were the same thing.

Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate of interest, fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to apply the same wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business profits. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return to the seller.[[87]] Against those who charged more, their wrath was that of Moses descending to find the chosen people worshipping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to spare from their rage against religious freedom, they turned against economic license. Roger Williams touched a real affinity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he argued that, though extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of which should be left to the discretion of the civil authorities.[[88]]

Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in which he took “in some ... above 6d. in the shilling profit; in some above 8d.; and in some small things above two for one”; and this, though he was “an ancient professor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having come over for conscience’ sake and for the advancement of the gospel.” The scandal was terrible. Profiteers were unpopular—“the cry of the country was great against oppression”—and the grave elders reflected that a reputation for greed would injure the infant community, lying as it did “under the curious observation of all Churches and civil States in the world.” In spite of all, the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine what profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law of God required no more than double restitution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him only £200.

Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all “did with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error of such false principles, and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were these:— “1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can. “2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest. “3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc. “4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or necessity. “5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompence of one as of another.”

The rules for trading were not less explicit:— “1. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which every man will take, etc. “2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another. “3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person. “4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is worth thus much.”

It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not remembered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appropriate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.

The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The question was only whether he had erred through ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his conscience or the very light of nature”—whether, in short, his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with his fine and admonition.[[89]]

If the only Christian documents which survived were the New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection between them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts.

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was accepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even the savage superstition of New England, that result was only to be expected.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron.[[90]]

CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.”

Laud, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621.

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.

Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in earnest.

In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life was in process of swift transformation. Foreign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went the growth of the financial organization on which commerce depends, and English capital poured into the growing London money-market, which had previously been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, opportunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent on securing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate discipline, their organized torpor restricting individual enterprise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be made effective, or he accepted the gild organization, captured its government, and by means of it developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was in effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture, the customary organization of the village was being sapped from below and battered down from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had commuted the labor services that were still the rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal restrictions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry and agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.

It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbulent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once content to win a position of dignity and power in fraternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to solitary preëminence, unaided by the artificial protection of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine, their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added the haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small, proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control.

I. THE LAND QUESTION

The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the material on which agitation fed had been accumulating for three generations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the currency, there was not one—neither enclosures and pasture farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, nor the extortions of the engrosser—which had not evoked popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced legislation and administrative action, long before the Reformation Parliament met. The floods were already running high, when the religious revolution swelled them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the social situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovernment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing on questions not only of religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head in a sweeping indictment of the new economic forces and an eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social obligations. The center of both was the land question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground of social agitation.

The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.[[1]] Then had come the legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal Commission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.[[2]] Throughout, a steady stream of criticism had flowed from men of the Renaissance, like More, Starkey and a host of less well-known writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince who would take counsel of philosophers.

If, however, the problem was acute long before the confiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents whom they often employed to manage their property naturally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more frequent or more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical landowners.[[3]] In England a glance at the proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copyholders into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted arable land to pasture.[[4]]

In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to explain the part which the rapid transference of great masses of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Estates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed hands.[[5]] To the abbey lands which came into the market after 1536 were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial necessities of the Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in its own possession and drawing the rents; nor, in any case, would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a Government which required a party to carry through a revolution. What it did, therefore, was to alienate most of the land almost immediately, and to spend the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of land speculation. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers, at a ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business men, who brought to bear on its management the methods learned in the financial school of the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen—cloth-workers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversions of arable to pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay.[[6]]

Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? “Do ye not know,” said the grantee of one of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their commons, “that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.”[[7]] Such arguments, if inconsequent, were too convenient not to be common. The protests of contemporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and some of the new landlords—the Herberts, who enclosed a whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which, according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his Arcadia, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Abbey, whose tenants found their rents raised from £29 to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging the Government with petitions for redress.[[8]] The legend, still repeated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations, though unveracious, is not surprising. The wish was father to the thought.

It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and license which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine. The touching words[[9]] in which the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet.

Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of religion.[[10]] In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encouragement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.

It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social program of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its details elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plow. It is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For, though trade in itself is honorable, most traders are rogues—indeed “next to the sham priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth”; their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to overlook both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices—“a very necessary but an easy matter.” Only “pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth more than to their own interests,” are to be allowed to engage in trade at all. In every village and town a school is to be established under a master eminent for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all things strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God.... Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbors.”[[11]]

The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These endowments were confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day.”[[12]] “King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools” are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.

The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual—side by side with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the House of Commons,[[13]] and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with favorable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nouveaux riches.[[14]] The men whose religion was not money said what they thought of the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable congregations spluttering with fury.

Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sympathy with the peasants who rose under Ket.[[15]] Becon told the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only difference between them and the monks was that they were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing the last penny from the tenants, more selfish in spending the whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.[[16]] “In suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges and chantries,” preached Lever in St. Paul’s, “the intent of the King’s Majesty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other wondrous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods as was superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to bear his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth, or partly unto other men’s hands, for the better relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and the setting forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers have so used this matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the common wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition.... You which have gotten these goods into your own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other goods more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the poor, and brought a common wealth into a common misery.”[[17]]

This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies as the “Commonwealth men” from their advocacy of social reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge of stirring up class hatred, which is normally brought against all who call attention to its causes. The result of their activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the conversion of arable to pasture, the introduction of legislation requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The gentry were furious. Paget, the secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror, provided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German Peasants’ War was to be reënacted in England; the Council, most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the personification of the predatory property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely for carrying out, as chairman of the Midland committee of the Depopulation Commission, the duties laid upon him by the Government. “Sir,” wrote a plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, “be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretense of simplicity and poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Common Wealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they are in such doubt, that almost they dare touch none of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they are afraid of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.”[[18]]

The “Common Wealth called Latimer” was unrepentant. Combining gifts of humor and invective which are not very common among bishops, his fury at oppression did not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next. So he was delighted when he provoked one of his audience into the exclamation, “Mary, a seditious fellow!” used the episode as comic relief in his next sermon,[[19]] and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his denunciations of step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself?

You thoughte that I woulde not requyre

The bloode of all suche at your hande,

But be you sure, eternall fyre

Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande.

Both for the housynge and the lande

That you have taken from the pore

Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.[[20]]

On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the authors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and, thanks to Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, modern research has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the reorganization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.

The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the expansion of the woollen industry and the devaluation of money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced labor, if it had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of landowning had been revolutionized, and for two generations the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to fine or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning copyholds into leases. The official opposition to depopulation, which had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interference with the rights of property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation, and in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eighteenth century to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties save that of submission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a flattering, but innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for “the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” To a temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian régime, with its sacrifice of the village—a fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, “a little commonwealth”—to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. It was the work of “men that live as thoughe there were no God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied.”[[21]] Its essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repudiating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Reformation called down fire from heaven.

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more business-like and impersonal forms of landownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d’être is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labor on the land, or labor in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has “every man’s living and does no man’s duty.”[[22]]

The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain. “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings ... but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[[23]] Thus, while the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553.

II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY

If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized appeal to traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social theory, to which the most representative minds of the English Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The center of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries described by the word usury.

“Treasure doth then advance greatness,” wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, “when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few.”[[24]] In spite of the growing concentration of property, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosperity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed beggars” of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-à-vis their employers. The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which evoked programs of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning proletariat by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to “give day.” Almost every one, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the money-lender. And the lender is often a monopolist—“a money master,” a malster or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.[[25]]

In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most conspicuous species, of extortion.

In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the excessive profits of a middleman—all these had been denounced as usury in the very practical thirteenth-century manual of St. Raymond;[[26]] all these were among the “unlawful chaffer,” the “sublety and sleight,” which was what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to sermons in parish churches meant by usury three centuries later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he would probably have answered with a quotation from Scripture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the bill introduced in 1571: “It standeth doubtful what usury is; we have no true definition of it.”[[27]] The truth is, indeed, that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more advantage than the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded as usurious. The description which best sums up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is contained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling—the cry of all poor men since the world began—Dr. Bennet “is a great taker of advantages.”[[28]]

It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the center. The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned by the conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme of medieval thought, which had attempted to treat economic affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all interests and activities, of which the apex was religion.

If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiastical organization and the traditional scheme of social thought. The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse, morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from 1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession of changes in the appearance of the building and the form of the services. But there was little to make him conscious of any alteration in the social system of which the church was the center, or in the duties which that system imposed upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish continued to be a community in which religious and social obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority, that he bore his share of public burdens and performed such public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he saw most in the routine of his daily life were the churchwardens. The place where most public business was transacted, and where news of the doings of the great world came to him, was the parish church. The contributions levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such education as was available for his children was often given by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training in coöperation with his fellows as he received sprang from common undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made large profits by church ales, and occasionally engaged in trade.[[29]] Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political and economic aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel through which official information was conveyed to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with the parson.

Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the religious thought of the age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization. Both in their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the particular social obligations which religion involved, the most representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social order were to be sought, not in practical expediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guardian and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after the Restoration.

The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. The exactions of middlemen—“merchants of mischief ... [who] do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet wonderful vile and of small price to many that must needs set or sell that which is their own honestly come by”—were pilloried by Lever.[[30]] Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on The Lawful Use of Riches became something like a standard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price, and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded freedom of contract as an excuse for covetousness: “Cloake the same by what title you liste, your synne is excedyng greate.... He which hurteth but one man is in a damnable case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest whole householdes to their graves, or at the leaste art a meanes of their extreame miserie? Thou maiest finde shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte not escape the judgemente of God.”[[31]] Men eminent among Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salisbury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp Arraignment to be dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bishops and ten doctors of divinity—not to mention numberless humbler clergy—who had written in the course of the last hundred years on different aspects of the sin of extortion in all its manifold varieties.[[32]] The subject was still a favorite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher was untrammeled by the convention which in a more fastidious age was to preclude as an impropriety the discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market-place. “As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote Heming, “so it is the parte of the preachers to reprove usurie.... First, they should earnestly inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked contractes.... Let them ... amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline.... Then, if they cannot reforme all abuses which they shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende the cause unto God ... Last of all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche men, that they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches.”[[33]]

“This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ecclesiastical condemnation of usury, “hath been the generall judgment of the Church for above this fifteene hundred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church of Christ, that could never finde a lawfull usurie before this golden age wherein we live.”[[34]] The first fact which strikes the modern student of this body of teaching is its continuity with the past. In its insistence that buying and selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled by a moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did not differ from religious opinion before it. The reformers themselves were conscious, neither of the emancipation from the economic follies of the age of medieval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth century, nor of the repudiation of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The relation in which they conceived themselves to stand to the social theory of the medieval Church is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed. “Therefore I would not,” wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and for a short time Secretary of State, “have men altogether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to condempne every thinge there written, because the Popes were aucthours of them, as though no good lawe coulde bee made by them.... Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are some suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, saye others what they list.”[[35]] From the lips of a Tudor official, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain piquancy. But, in their appeal to the traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson’s words represented the starting-point from which the discussions of social questions still commonly set out.

The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, church councils, and commentators on the canon law—all these, and not only the first, continued to be quoted as decisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the theology and government of the medieval Church were an abomination. What use Wilson made of them, a glance at his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reformation authorities running into several pages.[[36]] The author of a practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with regard to money-lending—a memorandum which appears to have had some effect upon policy—thought it necessary to drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of financiers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and Hostiensis.[[37]] Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever to “the decrees of the Pope” did so only the more strongly to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable dealing contained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.”[[38]] Objective economic science was developing in the hands of the experts who wrote on agriculture, trade, and, above all, on currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intrusion of Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intellectual nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric as the voice of a musty superstition. For one who examined present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The assumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church as to social ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after the Reformation as it had been before it.

Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which no one commits or with sins that every one commits, and the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not, however, stand alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation in the political and social position of the Church it is not necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy three-quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous transference of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward presented by lay patrons, were not likely to display any excessive independence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished; the assumption of most churchmen throughout the sixteenth century was that it was to be administered; and the canon law included the whole body of legislation as to equity in contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages. True, it was administered no longer by the clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under the authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the study of canon law—after the estimable Dr. Layton had “set Dunce in Bocardo” at Oxford—it languished at the universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 to 1552, and again, and on this occasion for good, after 1571, parliamentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided that it did not exceed a statutory maximum. But the convulsion which changed the source of canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope. Its validity was not the less because it was now enforced in the name, not of the Pope, but of the King.

As Maitland has pointed out,[[39]] there was a moment towards the middle of the century when the civil law was pressing the common law hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical courts.[[40]] Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate treatise on the subject was compiled.[[41]] By an argument made familiar by a modern controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not only of the State, but of the Church. “The permission of the Prince,” it was urged, “is no absolution from the authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull ... yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case the Canons are to be preferred.... By the laws no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their souls.”[[42]]

It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of England ... usury is simply and generally prohibited.”[[43]] When the lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of their privileges, they urged, among other matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon lawes as in tymes past has been used.”[[44]] In the abortive scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived from objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth.[[45]] Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which the transaction may be concealed.[[46]] Bishops’ articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.[[47]] The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.[[48]]

The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for being an uncharitable person and for not giving to the poor and impotent,”[[49]] they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanors as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. “Thomas Wilkoxe,” complained his fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and disquieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed by his own father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in the year.”[[50]] Whether the archdeacon corrected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.[[51]] Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some Yorkshire parishes.[[52]] Even in 1619 two instances occur in which money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary of the Bishop of London, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of.” One is excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both are admonished to amend their ways.[[53]]

There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government.

The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armor of theologians

made

A little glooming light, most like a shade.

In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.

As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a propertyless proletariat, and “the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful hearts.”[[54]]

Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners.” The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” without which he could not set up in business.[[55]]

The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.

In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church became the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a single society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public officers—under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace—and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote Hooker, “that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.”[[56]]

In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic development, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!...

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong

(Between whose endless jar justice resides)

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,