to all other economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes so, when the lender does not allow the borrower “such a proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth require, but … will live at ease upon his labours”; or when, in spite of the borrower’s misfortune, he rigorously exacts his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for a loan which charity would require to be free. Masters must discipline their servants for their good; but it is “an odious oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deserveth.” As the descendant of a family of yeomen, “free,” as he says, “from the temptations of poverty and riches,”
346 Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under the general rubric of “Cases of oppression, especially of tenants,” oppression being defined as the “injuring of inferiors who are unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is too common a sort of oppression for the rich in all places to domineer too insolently over the poor, and force them to follow their wills and to serve their interest, be it right or wrong. … Especially unmerciful landlords are the common and sore oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get money enough to purchase all the land in a county, they think that they may do with their own as they list, and set such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that they are all but as their servants. … An oppressor is an Antichrist and an Anti-God … not only the agent of the Devil, but his image.” As in his discussion of prices, the gist of Baxter’s analysis of the cases of conscience which arise in the relations of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his neighbor. Except in unusual circumstances, a landlord must not let his land at the full competitive rent which it would fetch in the market: “Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in England should have so much abated of the fullest worth that they may comfortably live on it, and follow their labours with cheerfulness of mind and liberty to serve God in their families, and to mind the matters of their salvation, and not to be necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want as shall make them liker slaves than free men.” He must not improve (
i.e., enclose) his land without considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation; nor must a newcomer take a holding over the sitting tenant’s head by offering “a greater rent than he can give or than the landlord hath just cause to require of him.” The Christian, in short, while eschewing “causeless, perplexing, melancholy scruples, which would stop a man in the course of his duty,” must so manage his business as to “avoid sin rather than loss,” and seek first to keep his conscience in peace.
The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic and political revolutions of the past two centuries, how small, after all, the change in the presentation of the social ethics of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance of the Christian Directory, the Stop of the Exchequer tore a hole in the already intricate web of London finance, and sent a shiver through the money-markets of Europe. But Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of equity in bargaining, of just prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of usury, in the same tone, if not with quite the same conclusions, as a medieval Schoolman, and he differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven years later Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Among the vices which it pilloried were the sin of extortion, “most commonly committed by men of trade, who without all conscience, when they have an advantage, will make a prey of their neighbour,” the covetousness of “hucksters, that buy up the poor man’s victual wholesale and sell it to him again for unreasonable gains,” the avarice of usurers, who watch till “the poor fall into their mouths,” and “of those vile wretches called pawnbrokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who are by necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or another the interest of what they so lend amount to thirty and forty, yea, sometimes fifty pounds by the year.” As Christian and Christiana watched Mr. Badman thus bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, before they took staff and scrip for their journey to a more distant City, they remembered that the Lord himself will plead the cause of the afflicted against them that oppress them, and reflected, taught by the dealings of Ephron the son of Zohar, and of David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there is a “wickedness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap.”347 Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the same four centuries before in his racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of the idea that “business is business,” and that the world of commercial transactions is a closed compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed, did not win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested. Puritan as well as Catholic accepted without demur the view which set all human interests and activities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as Catholics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian casuistry of economic conduct.
They essayed it. But they succeeded even
