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.”148 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.”149 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?”150
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
