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When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas and very little do these reminiscences have in common with those of Hellas. It was indeed a different world, with quite different fundamental presuppositions.
If we should suppose the case of a nation taking three equidistant meals all of the same material and the same quantity, all milk, for instance, it would be impossible for Thomas Aquinas himself to say which was or was not dinner.
He maintained, like Thomas Aquinas, the physiological influence of the celestial bodies, and regarded the planets as signs telling us what God has decreed from eternity to come to pass either by natural processes or by acts of human will or directly at his own good pleasure.
Now Ambrose was not a great scholar, nor a subtle theologian. Nor was he dexterous in the use of dialectical weapons, like Athanasius, Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas. But he was sufficiently intelligent to know what the authorities declared to be orthodox. He knew that the fashionable speculations about the Trinity were not the doctrines of Paul.
The Romish communion has, by its representatives, declared its right to compel men to renounce heterodoxy and embrace Catholicism, and to consign the obstinate to the civil power to be banished, tortured, or killed." St. Aquinas, whom Romanists call the "angelic Doctor," says, "Heretics are to be compelled by corporeal punishments, that they may adhere to the faith."
Augustine and Aquinas accepted substantially the same doctrines, but they were not made so prominent in their systems, nor were they so elaborately worked out.
Thomas Aquinas, there the Triumph of the Church, have no existence for us as painting; they have passed into literature, and in the pages of Ruskin have found a new beauty that for the first time has given them some semblance of life. For in the autumn of 1907 the chapel was destroyed by fools and the Madonna just an old panel picture after all set up in the cold daylight .
To increase the price in return for the giving of credit was not allowed, as it was deemed usurious as indeed it was. It was held that the seller, in not taking his money immediately, was simply making a loan of that amount to the buyer, and that to receive anything more than the sum lent would be usury. Aquinas is quite clear on this point.
When the element of labour entered into the transaction the matter was clearly beyond doubt, and the lengthy discussion devoted to the question of commerce by Aquinas and his followers shows that in justifying commercial gains they were justifying a gain resting not on the remuneration for the labour, but on an independent title. Cambium.
It was Aquinas who really put the teaching on usury upon the new foundation, which was destined to support it for so many hundred years, and which even at the present day appeals to many sympathetic and impartial inquirers. Mr. Lecky apologises for the obscurity of his account of the argument of Aquinas, but adds that the confusion is chiefly the fault of the latter; but the fact that Mr.
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