e characteristics of a
noble manhood are perverted. There comes a wrong idea of true
greatness. There arises a false measure of manhood. That measure is
wealth, and of all the grounds of distinction among men, wealth is the
most sordid. Success is accumulation of wealth. Prosperity is getting
rich. Whatever else a man may accomplish in life, if he remains poor
he is accounted a failure. Yet to this pass, such a pass, have we
come, that our national and age characteristic is that of material
gain, commonly called commercialism. This was not the thought of our
fathers who subordinated material gain to the development of noble
manhood. This is a perversion of our American traditions, and is a
menace to better development of the individual and of the state.

11. Wrong laws mislead the judgment and pervert the conscience. If
there is a want of harmony between the moral and statute law when
selfish interests are served, the moral law will be ignored. State
laws ease the conscience that would be otherwise troubled. The rate of
usury fixed by a state is used as a moral guide. When the legal rate
is six per cent. it is wrong to take eight, but when the legal rate is
ten per cent. then it is not wrong to take ten. The familiarity of our
people with laws recognizing and enforcing interest rates has
perverted their ideas of right and justice by substituting the statute
for the divine moral law. But state laws can also trouble the
conscience that is at ease and be a teacher of righteousness. Let the
ancient laws forbidding usury be placed upon our statute books and
enforced, and it would not be half a generation till the conscience
and reason both approved.

Nothing in history more shocked the conscience of Christendom than the
compact of William and Mary with usurers in 1694. That was in direct
conflict with the teachings and practice of all the ages among
Christians. It has taken two hundred years for courts and states and
financial institutions to first dull the Christian conscience and then
secure its approval. The world now awaits the coming of some captain
of righteousness, equal in authority and influence in church and
state, who will organize a return to the faith and practice of the
fathers.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

CRUSHED TRUTH WILL RISE AGAIN.

The practice of usury is so general, and it is apparently so fully
approved and sanctioned by many of the most intelligent and virtuous
of our people, that those who believ