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Updated: June 29, 2025
But spiritual authority should look to it, that adultery, unchastity, usury, gluttony, worldly show, excessive adornment, and such like open sin and shame might be most severely punished and corrected; and they should properly manage the endowments, monastic houses, parishes and schools, and earnestly maintain worship in them, provide for the young people, boys and girls, in schools and cloisters, with learned, pious men as teachers, that they might all be well trained, and so the older people give a good example and Christendom be filled and adorned with fine young people.
For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly by suppressing, or at least keeping a strait hand, upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.
Then held they their peace, and found nothing to answer. Also I said, It is not good that ye do: ought ye not to walk in the fear of our God because of the reproach of the heathen our enemies? I likewise, and my brethren, and my servants, might exact of them money and corn: I pray you, let us leave off this usury.
This law of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, with the rate of interest reduced, was the statute law of England until 1854, when all the usury laws were repealed. In 1694 William and Mary II entered into a contract to secure a permanent loan and pledged the kingdom to pay interest on it forever. The loan marked the turning point in the popular mind with regard to usury.
They did not seek to prevent irreligion, luxury, slavery, and usury, the encroachments of the rich upon the poor, the tyranny of foolish fashions, demoralizing sports and pleasures, money-making, and all the follies which lax principles of morality allowed; they fed the rabble with corn, oil, and wine, and thus encouraged idleness and dissipation.
It is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and, when Antonio is gone there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spit on the Jewish gaberdine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the Jewish Sabbath.
Lev. 25:35, 36: "And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God: that thy brother may live with thee." The sojourner or denizen is here distinguished from the stranger who had been naturalized, adopting their faith.
If the account could not be balanced now, the obligation was treasured up for a time to come and, when least expected, the debtor came, and paid with usury! It has been said, perhaps truly, that a fierce, bloody spirit ruled the settlers in those early days.
He does not give ethical and moral reasons. He does not mention the want of sympathy for the poor and their oppression. In his statement of the arguments in defence he implies that the usurer is less grasping than the man he knew who said "The devil take this usury." This is the very opposite of the picture of the usurer given by his contemporary, Shakespeare, in his character, Shylock.
From the short dissertation on usury found in the works of Bacon we learn that the taking of usury was a recognized evil and odious in his time. It will be noticed that he eliminates risk from usury and sees that "In the game of certainties against uncertainties" usury is sure to win. It will be noticed also that he mentions only economic arguments against usury.
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