But then came the
modern commercial system, and the money-lenders became the masters of
the world! There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of
human thought than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from
the dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trapped them.

Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of the
eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church, now worshipped as St.
Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of "mental usury";
concluding 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 pays, not out of gratitude, but out of fear
that otherwise loans will be refused to him in future, Ligouri says
that "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 price." Again the great saint and doctor tells
us that "it is not usury to exact something in return for the danger
and expense of regaining the principal!" Could the house of J. P.
Morgan and Company ask more of their ecclesiastical department?

The reader may think that such sophistications are now out of date;
but he will find precisely the same knavery in the efforts of
present-day Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of competitive
commercialism. Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a carpenter's son, a
thoroughly class-conscious proletarian. He denounced the exploiters of
his own time with ferocious bitterness, he drove the money-changers
out of the temple with whips, and he finally died the death of a
common criminal. If he had forseen the whole modern cycle of
capitalism and wage-slavery, he could hardly have been more precise in
his exortations to his followers to stand apart from it. But did all
this avail him? Not in the least!

I place upon the witness-stand an exponent of Bible-Christianity whom
all readers of our newspapers know well: a scholar of learning, a
publicist of renown; once pastor of the most famous church in
Brooklyn; now editor of our most influential religious weekly; a
liberal both in theology and politics; a modernist, an advocate of
what he calls industrial democracy. His name is Lyman Abbott, and he
is writing under his own signature in his own magazine, his subject
being "The Ethical Teachings of Jesus". Several times I have tried to
persuade people that the words I am abo