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Hilary and Jerome still base their objection on the ground of its being an offence against charity; and St. Augustine, though he would like to make restitution of usury a duty, treats the matter from the same point of view. On the other hand, there are to be found patristic utterances in favour of the legality of usury, and episcopal approbations of civil codes which permitted it.
The apologetic work of the patristic writers was chiefly done in the ante-Nicene age; after that discussion turned more upon questions within the scope of the Christian Faith. The function of the age of the Councils was the formulation and definition of Christian dogma upon the admitted basis of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation, undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality to possess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build its fabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave the patristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline of the Church was too strong for it.
Moreover, on going into Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic literature by finding at the bookseller's some volumes of the Fathers which had been left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood. As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on fifteenth-century brasses and tombs.
Most of the statements of these early patristic writers, as well as possibly all of the early Christian legislative enactments, deal solely with the practice of usury by the clergy; still, there is sufficient evidence to show that in those days it was reprobated even for the Christian laity, for the Didache and Tertullian clearly teach or presuppose its prohibition, while the oecumenical Council of Nice certainly presupposed its illegality for the laity, though it failed to sustain its doctrinal presuppositions with corresponding ecclesiastical penalties.
It played a greater rôle in Christian dogma than it ever did in Judaism prior to the philosophic era in the middle ages. To be sure, the Patristic writers were much indebted to Philo, in whose writings the germ of the mediæval doctrine of attributes is plainly evident. But the Mohammedan schools did not read Philo.
The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics, the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediæval history."
But the Free Inquirer's freedom had its limits; and he draws a sharp line of demarcation between the patristic and the New Testament miracles on the professed ground that the accounts of the latter, being inspired, are out of the reach of criticism.
The second class of patristic texts which are relied on by socialists are, as we have said, those 'where the practice of almsgiving is recommended in the rhetorical and persuasive language of the missioner where the faithful are exhorted to exercise their charity to such a degree that it may be said that the rich and poor have all things in common. Such passages are very frequent throughout the writings of the Fathers, but we may give as examples two, which are most frequently relied on by socialists.
It is a notorious fact, abundantly established by certain quotations from the Old Testament and elsewhere, that the last thing regarded by the early patristic writers was context. But in this case the context is perfectly in keeping, and to a clear and unprejudiced eye it presents no difficulty.
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