Chapter II: The Continental Reformers (3)

Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for the same reasons which made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars of religion, the city was a financial center of some importance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In order to secure command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the capital to do exchange business and make advances, the rate of interest being fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To the establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been consulted, agreed; against the profitable business of advancing money at high rates of interest to private persons they protested, especially when the loans were made to spendthrifts who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in 1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some company promoters of establishing a second bank in the city, the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the danger of covetousness as revealed by the moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however, the commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist who borrowed in order to invest and make a profit could take care of himself, and the ministers explained that they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur argent aux marchands pour emploier en marchandise.” The crucial issue was that of the money-lender who makes advances “simplement à un qui aura besoin,” and who thereby exploits the necessities of his poorer neighbors.[II-72]

Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as _larrons, brigands, loups et tigres_, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but what they are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of God.... One has cried in the market-place, ‘a curse on those who bring us dearth.’... The Lord has heard that cry ... and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence!... A cut-purse shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet Amos ... ‘Famine is come upon my people of Israel, O ye who devour the poor.’ The threats there uttered have been executed against his people.”[II-73] They demand that for his second offense the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that, if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least be required to testify his repentance publicly in church, before being admitted to the sacrament. They remind their fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momentarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly, they propose to deprive him of his victims by removing the causes which create them. _Pour tarir les ruisseaux il faut escouper la source._ Men borrow because of “idleness, foolish extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be established at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among rich as well as among poor, how each household earns its livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litigation, and to “bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the necessities of their poor neighbors.”[II-74]

The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and they concluded it by expressing to the City Fathers the pious hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of your honorable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question the right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and finance. The pulpit was press and platform in one; ministers had the public behind them, and, conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel submission by threatening to resign _en masse_. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves on the yielding down of official procrastination, and its first reply was normally _qu’on y pense un peu_. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of complicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he accused members of the Council of having intelligence with speculators who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were reproaching the Council with laxity in administration, and they finally denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social reform.

The prosperous _bourgeoisie_ who governed Geneva had no objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to exhorting the public to attend sermons and to send their children to catechism. But they heard denunciations of covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers concerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do creditors, they would make no concession to the complaint that debtors were subjected to a “double usury,” since they were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths. Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. They informed the Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding up supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons against avarice, with appropriate topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich.[II-75]

The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza’s remarks as a personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty, condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty crowns which he had lent at 10 per cent. interest. Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The Council and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of the local hospital. On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied politely that they would be well advised to mind their own business.

So monstrous a suggestion--as though there were any human activity which was not the business of the Church!--evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and for refusing the sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps his corn in time of scarcity”? To the charge of intemperate language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should be silent,” said Beza, “what would the people say? That they are dumb dogs.... As to the question of causing scandals, for the last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have been punished.... It is notorious everywhere that the city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is 10 per cent. or more.”[II-76] The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.[II-77] But at the godly proposal to make capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, “most men are debtors.” If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed the ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied in the language of Nathan, we are not informed.

Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the omnicompetent State. The principle on which the collectivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the omnicompetent Church.[II-78] The religious community formed a closely organized society, which, while using the secular authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting down offences against public order and public morals, providing for the education of youth and for the relief of the poor. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which for a short time made the system possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a minority in a national State organized on principles quite different from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion, civil war or the abandonment of the pretension to control society was the inevitable consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, whatever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations to a lapse into immorality.

The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Reformed Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in 1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted, certain difficult matters of economic casuistry were discussed, and similar questions continued to receive attention at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to lax the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the time.”[II-79] Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves compliance with a standard of economic morality which the Church must enforce, the problems of interpretation which arise are innumerable, and the religious community finds itself committed to developing something like a system of case law, by the application of its general principles to a succession of varying situations. The elaboration of such a system was undertaken; but it was limited in the sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the economic structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva, being concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on which specific guidance was demanded by the Churches.

Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards those who have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord’s Supper? May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows moderate interest: what is to be the attitude of the Church? What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are lotteries permissible? Is it legitimate to invest at interest monies bequeathed for the benefit of the poor? The answers which the French Synods made to such questions show the persistence of the idea that the transactions of business are the province of the Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an impracticable rigor. All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others must make restitution before they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and tradesmen are to seek only “indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the same division of opinion is visible in the French Reformed Church as existed at the same time in England and Holland, and Calvin’s advice on the subject was requested. The stricter school would not hear of confining the prohibition of usury to “excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of raising money for the poor by interest on capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the day for these heroic rigors had passed, and the common-sense view prevailed. The brethren were required to demand no more than the law allowed and than was consistent with charity. Within these limits interest was not to be condemned.[II-80]

Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the views of the reformers as to economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the Church before the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline denounced covetousness with the same vehemence as did the “accursed Popery” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches are required to make provision for the poor. “Oppression of the poor by exactions,” it is declared, “[and] deceiving of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure ... do properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God’s word commandeth.”[II-81] The interpretation given to these offences is shown by the punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St. Andrews.[II-82] The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven years after it had in England been finally transferred to the State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament or Council, but by the Church of Knox.

Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of New England. Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden, where men desired only to worship God “according to the simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of God’s word,”[II-83] not only were “tobacco and immodest fashions and costly apparel,” and “that vain custom of drinking one to another,” forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers adopted towards that “notorious evil ... whereby most men walked in all their commerce--to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can,”[II-84] an attitude which possibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business-like descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachusetts a minister had called attention to the recrudescence of the old Adam--“profit being the chief aim and not the propagation of religion”--and Governor Bradford, observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward estates,” remarked that the increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New England, at least of the Churches of God there.”[II-85] Sometimes Providence smote the exploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American Trust--he owned the only milch cow on board and sold the milk at 2_d._ a quart--“being after at a sermon wherein oppression was complained of ... fell distracted.”[II-86] Those who escaped the judgment of Heaven had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which, in the infancy of the colony, were the same thing.

Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate of interest, fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What was more distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to apply the same wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business profits. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return to the seller.[II-87] Against those who charged more, their wrath was that of Moses descending to find the chosen people worshipping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to spare from their rage against religious freedom, they turned against economic license. Roger Williams touched a real affinity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he argued that, though extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of which should be left to the discretion of the civil authorities.[II-88]

Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in which he took “in some ... above 6_d._ in the shilling profit; in some above 8_d._; and in some small things above two for one”; and this, though he was “an ancient professor of the gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having come over for conscience’ sake and for the advancement of the gospel.” The scandal was terrible. Profiteers were unpopular--“the cry of the country was great against oppression”--and the grave elders reflected that a reputation for greed would injure the infant community, lying as it did “under the curious observation of all Churches and civil States in the world.” In spite of all, the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine what profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law of God required no more than double restitution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him only £200.

Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all “did with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how could he live, if he might not make up for a loss on one article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error of such false principles, and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were these:--

“1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.

“2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest.

“3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc.

“4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or necessity.

“5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompence of one as of another.”

The rules for trading were not less explicit:--

“1. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which every man will take, etc.

“2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another.

“3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not the person.

“4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is worth thus much.”

It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not remembered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appropriate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.

The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The question was only whether he had erred through ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his conscience or the very light of nature”--whether, in short, his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with his fine and admonition.[II-89]

If the only Christian documents which survived were the New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection between them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the _ancien régime_, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts.

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was accepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even the savage superstition of New England, that result was only to be expected.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron.[II-90]

CHAPTER III

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.”

LAUD, _Sermon before His Majesty_, June 19, 1621.