s did not answer theological argument; they simply overrode it. In
spite of theology, great banks were established, and especially that
of Venice at the end of the twelfth century, and those of Barcelona and
Genoa at the beginning of the fifteenth. Nowhere was commerce carried
on in more complete defiance of this and other theological theories
hampering trade than in the very city where these great treatises
were published. The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the
Mohammedans, seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants
on their deathbeds; and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent
churches and ecclesiastical adornments of the city.

By the seventeenth century the clearest thinkers in the Roman Church saw
that her theology must be readjusted to political economy: so began a
series of amazing attempts to reconcile a view permitting usury with the
long series of decrees of popes and councils forbidding it.

In Spain, the great Jesuit casuist Escobar led the way, and rarely
had been seen such exquisite hair-splitting. But his efforts were not
received with the gratitude they perhaps deserved. Pascal, revolting at
their moral effect, attacked them unsparingly in his Provincial Letters,
citing especially such passages as the following: "It is usury to
receive profit from those to whom one lends, if it be exacted as justly
due; but, if it be exacted as a debt of gratitude, it is not usury."
This and a multitude of similar passages Pascal covered with the keen
ridicule and indignant denunciation of which he was so great a master.

But even the genius of Pascal could not stop such efforts. In the
eighteenth century they were renewed by a far greater theologian than
Escobar--by him who was afterward made a saint and proclaimed a doctor
of the Church--Alphonso Liguori.

Starting with bitter denunciations of usury, Liguori soon developed a
multitude of subtle devices for escaping the guilt of it. Presenting
a long and elaborate theory of "mental, usury" he arrives at the
conclusion that, if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the
lender may keep it. In answer to the question whether the lender may
keep what the borrower paid, not out of gratitude but out of fear--fear
that otherwise loans might be refused him in future--Liguori says, "To
be usury it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due;
payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid
as an actual pri