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