Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

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.”229 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.230 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 marketplace. “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.”231

“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.”232 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.”233 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.234 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.235 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.”236 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 everyone 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;