Note 14 — LETTER LIII.

“P.S. (Sunday morning). Some fancy has been haunting me in the night of its being presumptuous, or your thinking it presumptuous, in me to say that David, or whoever wrote the fifteenth Psalm, spoke, on the subject of interest, pure nonsense. After carefully going over the matter again, I believe that I am accurately correct. Not knowing what lending and borrowing, as a normal industrial transaction, or trading transaction, was, the Psalmist spoke in vague ethical terms, meaning ‘you should be friendly to your neighbour’; just as a lady economist of to-day might shriek against the pawn-shop, which, with all its defects, had, in capacity of Poor Man’s Bank, saved many a child, or woman, or man, from sheer starvation. Not understanding the matter, the Psalmist could not distinguish between use and abuse, and so talked nonsense. It is exquisitely interesting to me to observe that Christ hits the Psalmist exactly on the point where he goes wrong. Τὸ ἀργύριον ἀυτοῦ οὐκ ἔδωκεν ἐπὶ τόκῳ, says the Psalmist; Πονηρὲ δοῦλε .… ἔδει σε οὖν βαλεῖν τὸ ἀργύριόν μου τοῖς τραπαζίταις, καὶ ἐλθὼν ἐγὼ ἐκομισάμην ἂν τὸ ἐμὸν συν τόκῳ, says Christ. The use of the same word in the Septuagint (the only Old Testament circulating in Palestine in Christ’s time) and in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, to denote in the one case what no good man would take, in the other, what it was a flagrant dereliction of duty not to secure, is most precious as illustrating the simple common sense with which Christ used the old Scriptures, and the infinite falsity of the modern doctrine of infallibility, whether of church, book, or man. One of those transcendencies of rightness which I find in Fors (amid things about Marmontel and Drury Lane, and Darwin and Huxley, worthy only of a Psalmist or pretty economist of fifteen) was your idea of policemen-bishops. I always agree also with what you say about the entirely obsolete and useless bishops at £5000 a-year.… But what I was going to say is, that you ought to ask your bishop, or the whole bench of them, to find a place, in their cart-loads of sermons, for one on ‘usury,’14 as condemned by the Psalmist and enjoined by Christ. Compare Luke xix., ver. 23. The only sound basis of banking is the fruitful, industrial use of money. I by no means maintain that the present banking system of Europe is safe and sound.”