common, all but universal, but there is no record found anywhere of its direct approval by any ecclesiastical body. The Church has come to tolerate it but has never given it official approval.
Usury has not been included in any creed or confession of faith, nor has it been directly approved by any council or general assembly.
The truth has not been left in any age without its witness. There have always been those more or less prominent in the Church who contended that it was unjust and oppressive. Some of them have been of world-wide distinction. The writer has a letter written him by John Clark Ridpath, the historian, expressing his agreement with the views presented in these pages. Another of these is brilliant John Ruskin, recently deceased. Quotations from him will close this review.
"I have not so perverted my soul nor palsied my brain as to expect to be advantaged by that adhesion (usury). I do not expect that because I have gathered much to find Nature or man gathering more for me; to find eighteen pence in my box in the morning instead of the shilling as a reward of my continence, or to make an income of my Koran by lending it to poor scholars. If I think he can read it and will carefully turn the leaves by the outside, he is welcome to read it for nothing."
"Thus in all other possible or conceivable cases, the moment our capital is increased by having lent it, be it but the estimation of a hair, that hair-breadth of increase is usury, just as much as stealing a farthing is theft no less than stealing a million."