Usury Part 17

No material advantage can be regarded with favor that is detrimental to the characters of men. Position, wealth, education, are worse than worthless when a.s.sociated with a corrupted manhood.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth acc.u.mulates, and men decay."

The test of truth is its developing of the virtues and graces.

Falsehood is detected by its quickening the vices that degrade and destroy. "By their fruits shall ye know them."

Virtues are linked together so that the promoting of one gives strength to the others. All vices are also so linked that the stimulating of one quickens other vices.

Virtues and vices are opposite, so that the encouraging of a vice or fault discourages the opposing virtue. When you discourage a virtue, you encourage a vice.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned virtues which our fathers prized, and which they regarded essential elements of worthy manhood, were industry, and honesty, and self-reliance, and brotherly sympathy, and the devout recognition of G.o.d's divine sovereignty.

1. Usury discourages industry and encourages idleness. The laborer is stirred to diligence when he gets good wages. When his wages are meager he becomes discouraged, relaxes his efforts and may abandon his work altogether. When he knows that he is receiving less than he is earning, and that a part of his earnings are appropriated by another, he is embittered and becomes indifferent. When he receives all he earns, and the more diligent he is in his work the more he receives, he is stimulated to the utmost.

This will be especially true if it is made impossible to secure a gain without earning it. The benefit of full wages may be largely lost by the knowledge of persons who, without productive effort, are appropriating the earnings of others. The influence of their easy, indolent lives may destroy or counteract the beneficent influence of good wages. The laborer may be led to despise his well-paid tasks and yearn for their ease, and thus become indolent.

One is encouraged to idleness when he discovers that he can secure his bread by the sweat of another's face. He is likely to relax his efforts if he does not forsake all personal productive occupations. He may give great care and the closest attention to the management of his wealth, loaning to others and collecting the increase, but not to productive industry.

There are activities that look like virtues, but they are perverted efforts. The slave-driver may work as hard as the slave in his efforts to appropriate the earnings of others. The thief may work in the night and endure more hardness to secure the property of another than would be necessary to honestly earn it. The usurer may give his thought, night and day, to the placing of his wealth the most securely and at the best rates of interest, and at the same time abandon all effort in the direct management of useful productive enterprises.

The complete result of usury upon the habit of industry can be realized in those who have grown up under its influence; those who have an income secure from invested funds. When there is no need, present nor prospective, there is no motive to active industry, and the love of ease and pleasure grows and drives out all heart for productive effort.

The industrious habit coupled with economy is called thrift. It is not parsimony or unwillingness to give, but a disposition to save. Our Lord, who was the prince of givers and inculcated unlimited giving among his followers, gave a lesson in thrift when he said after his miracle, "Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost."

Enforced industry and economy is not thrift. When by low wages or grinding conditions the necessities of life are with difficulty secured, the very opposite disposition may be cultivated. When the external restraints are removed, the wildest extravagance may be indulged in. This is sometimes given as an excuse for low, grinding wages; that "the workmen and their wives have no idea of saving;" that higher wages would be wasted in foolish extravagance.

No one in normal conditions will be wasteful of that which has cost him hard labor. His care for it will naturally be in proportion to the effort that was necessary to secure it. Those who waste the wealth of the world are not those who by the sweat of their faces have produced it. The habit of thrift comes from the knowledge of the value of a thing, learned by earning it. Only that which comes without effort will be spent without thought. Those who have livings secured from the increase or interest of "productive" capital, having no need of industry, are wholly occupied with the spending; but in spending only, the value of the thing spent is not appreciated, the habit of extravagance grows and they become the idlers and the spendthrifts of the world.

2. It prevents open and frank honesty. When the thought is turned to an endeavor to secure a dollar that is not earned, there is secretiveness of purpose and inward guile. No person doing business on borrowed capital advertises the number and amount of his loans nor does he welcome inquiry by others. In a column of advertis.e.m.e.nts by money lenders in a newspaper lying on this table every one promises "privacy" or "no publicity." No one can be so open and frank as the one who earns every dollar that he receives or seeks.

The possibility of speculation is ruinous. The first step in the wreck of integrity in a young man's character is when he becomes absorbed in some scheme by which he can secure gain without honestly earning it.

Lotteries are outlaws not only because they defraud but they undermine integrity and honest industry.

When property earns property, and the gain is secured with no struggle on his part, the temptation is presented and the disintegration of his character has begun. When there is no gain except by production, the whole thought and energy of the man is directed to that end, and his desire to secure that earned by another is restrained. The frank, open disposition is preserved. Honest productive toil drives out the spirit of speculation. Under usury, both lender and borrower are in the att.i.tude of expectants of unearned gain.

3. It discourages the spirit of self-reliance.

Usury causes a broad separation between a man of property and the man of mere muscle or brain. It makes such large combinations of capital possible in immense shops and department stores and other enterprises, that the individual workman is belittled. Under the principle of usury, property can produce as well as brain or muscle. One having property can control both.

His property places him in a position as a superior. He comes to forget the relations he bears to men as equals, and requires that those who have only their natural gifts shall be cringing supplicants before him or be denied his favor. The borrower or the laborer who a.s.serts his rights is endangered by the man controlling property, who has him in his power.

That independent, self-reliant spirit, that looks every man in the face as an equal yet lingers in the country among the hills and mountains, but is fast disappearing from the city. There has come to the laborer in the town or city a feeling of dependence upon others and a desire to secure their favor. They almost feel that they must apologize for being laborers, and beg for an opportunity to earn a living in some one's employ. One of the saddest facts, and most threatening of disaster in these present commercial conditions, is the common desire to be employed, to get a job, dependent on the whim of another, instead of a determination to direct one's own labor and be the manager of one's own business. The sound educational development is wanting in the daily occupation of the hired laborer, and there is a loss of manhood that has no compensation.

The independent spirit slips away so gradually that its going is scarcely noticed, but when once gone the degradation is complete.

A family of free Hebrews went down into Egypt, and for a long time was in favor with the rulers, but they gradually lost their independence and became more and more servile and cringing until the Egyptian masters dared to go into their homes and pick up their boy babies and take them out and drown them as if they were worthless puppies.

The hopelessness of the Ottoman Empire today is more in the cringing subordination and broken spirit of the people than in the oppression of the Sultan. His government might be overthrown in a day, but it would take ages to lift up that empire of prostrate slaves and to cultivate in them the self-a.s.sertion and self-reliance necessary to a free people.

Every man who loves his country and his race must view with alarm this growing feeling of subordination and cringing disposition. It is the very reverse of that democratic spirit or consciousness of equality that must prevail to secure the permanency of our republican inst.i.tutions.

4. It destroys fraternal sympathy. Two cla.s.ses are found in every modern community. The one is the laborers with muscle or brain, the other cla.s.s, those whose property produces for them. Between these cla.s.ses there is a great wall fixed. It cannot be expected that they will mingle harmoniously and be in sympathy in civil and social relations. Producing and non-producing cla.s.ses can never be congenially a.s.sociated.

The question is frequently discussed in church circles, "How can the laboring man be attracted to the churches?" The discussion often presumes that the non-laboring man does find the church congenial. If he does, all efforts to win the other cla.s.s will be in vain. The church itself needs to correct its teachings and reform its spirit.

The moral law commands "Six days shalt thou work," and there is no release because a man has property. So long as a man has brain or brawn he is bound by that law. If he is not, he is not a moral man, and has no rightful place in the church of G.o.d. Honest, upright, industrious Christian men, engaged in all lines of production for human needs, may be congenial and co-operate most harmoniously, but they never can be made comfortable in a.s.sociation with those who are unproductive and idle, yet living in luxury.

5. Usury promotes that "Covetousness which is idolatry."

"As heathens place their confidence in idols, so doth the avaricious man place his confidence in silver and gold. The covetous person, though he doth not indeed believe his riches or his money to be G.o.d, yet by so loving and trusting in them, as G.o.d alone ought to be loved and trusted in, he is as truly guilty of idolatry as if he so believed."

Idolatry is the act of ascribing to things or persons properties that are peculiar to G.o.d. The princ.i.p.al objects of wors.h.i.+p are those things which bring to men the greatest good.

The sun has been the most general object of idolatrous wors.h.i.+p in all the ages. It is the most conspicuous object, and is the source of light and heat, and rules the seasons. Its wors.h.i.+p was so general that the Hebrew people, when they lapsed from the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d, turned to the wors.h.i.+p of the sun or Baal. No natural object is more worthy of wors.h.i.+p. Job declaring his integrity and freedom from idolatry, said that he had not kissed his hand in salute of the sun in his rising.

The river Nile was an object of idolatrous wors.h.i.+p for ages. Its source was a mystery, and its annual rise in its rainless valley was so beneficent, that it was given the wors.h.i.+p which belonged to the Divine alone. All the hope of the harvest depended on its annual overflow. It moistened and fertilized and prepared the ground, and then receded until the harvest was grown and gathered. Moses showed the Egyptians the impotence of their idols by making this chief idol, and the things that came out of it, a curse. The cow was wors.h.i.+ped because it was the most useful and necessary of their animals. A real or supposed power to give or withhold favors has been from the beginning the source and spring of idolatry.

Riches, property, as the means of supplying our needs, is an object more coveted than any other. The principle of usury greatly aggravates this tendency. The principle of usury makes it imperishable; it can be perpetuated, unimpaired from year to year and from age to age; it is a constant source of benefit; it is productive of all that is necessary to supply human needs.

It supplies, too, without effort on the part of the recipient. The sun, with his light and heat, makes the labor of the farmer successful. The rising Nile moistening and fertilizing the land, prepares the way for the sower. The cow draws the plow and the harrow, and threshes the grain, but usury makes property bring all needed material good without effort on the part of the owner. It brings him the matured fruits of the farm, though he neither plows or sows nor reaps. No labor on his part is needed. His property clothes and feeds him, and yet does not grow less, but is endowed with perpetual youth, ever giving yet never exhausted or diminished. He may die, but his idol knows no decay, and may continue to bless his children through the generations. This quality of riches makes them a greater source of blessing than the sun or any other object of idolatrous wors.h.i.+p. This leads to unlimited self-denial and sacrifice to gain and retain property. The devotees subordinate their own ease and physical comfort, their own intellectual development, to secure it, they will themselves shrivel in body and soul; like other idolaters they will even yield the highest interests of their children, when this idol demands their sacrifice.

6. It destroys spirituality. Property is matter and not spirit. With the thought and heart and effort directed to a material thing, the spirit is neglected. The heathen Greek artist directed his whole attention to the material part of man. The symmetry of the human physical form was his study. The perfect man was the most symmetrically developed specimen of physical form. His thought of man was matter. The Christian directs his thought to the spirit, his mind and heart, his n.o.ble purposes, and all the qualities of true manhood.

The material part is subordinated to the spiritual.

The tendency now is to appreciate a man for what he has rather than for what he is, to ignore both symmetry of form and the graces of the n.o.ble character, and to wors.h.i.+p what he holds in his hands. The truly spiritual loves true manhood and is indifferent to the possessions.

If a n.o.ble soul is found in a Lazarus, the true child of Abraham will take him to his bosom. A perverted manhood will receive no favor though clothed and surrounded with all material splendor.

It destroys spirituality, too, because it holds the mind to a material thing as the source of all good. The spiritual man rises to the true source of our blessings, the author of all temporal good, from whose hand every living thing is fed.

This, as all idolatry, leads to a breaking away from the restraints of the moral law. The devotion to the material leads, logically and practically, to a neglect of the restraints of the spiritual, and a preponderance of subserviency to the material. Practices that will promote the material are indulged though the moral law may be broken.

The material is not held subject to the needs of the higher nature, nor subject to the promotion of the kingdom of G.o.d, but man's n.o.blest gifts and the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d are all made, if possible, to minister to the material interests.

To break this idol's power, the true nature of property must be shown.

It is not immortal, but perishable. It can not preserve itself, but must be carefully preserved by man's own effort. It can not protect him, but he must protect it. It is but a thing which man has himself made. It must be shown absurd, as Isaiah ridiculed it, "They wors.h.i.+p the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made."

Other forms of gross external idolatry are exposed by the advancing light of these progressive years, but this musty old form has taken new life and now receives the service of the race. The whole world is running pell-mell after this idol. It stands in the market places, it is not a stranger in the courts of justice, and is in high favor in legislative halls. Solon is relegated and Croesus is elected.

It is given a high place in the temple of G.o.d. Pious Lazarus is neglected but Dives is promoted.

"What agreement hath the temple of G.o.d with idols?"

Until this idol is cast out the church will and must languish.

Spiritual life will be low and fervor impossible.