In any scheme of things where the churches, as agents of God, assert the right to speak with authority about the conduct of life they should be able to lay down rules about the way business shall be carried on. The churches once did just that. In some degree they still attempt to do it. But the attempts have grown feebler and feebler. In the last six hundred years the churches have fought a losing battle against the emancipation of business from religious control. The early Christian writers looked upon business as a peril to the soul. Although the church was in itself, among other things, a large business corporation, they did not countenance business enterprise. Money-making they called avarice and money-lending usury, just as they spoke of lust when they meant sexual desire. They had sound reasons of their own for this attitude. They knew from observation, perhaps even from introspection, that the desire for riches is so strong a passion that men possessed by it will devote only their odd moments to God. The objection to a business career was like the objection to fornication; it diverted the energies of the soul. There were, no doubt, worldly reasons as well which account for the long resistance of the mediæval Church [p085] to what we now regard as the highest form of capitalistic endeavor. The Church belonged to the feudal system. The Pope and his bishops were in fact great feudal lords. They thrived best in a social order where men lived upon the land. They had a premonition that the rise of capitalism, with its large cities, its financiers, merchants, and proletarian workers, was bound to weaken the secular authority of the church and to dissolve the influence of religion in men’s lives. They failed in their resistance, but surely one can hardly say that their vision was not prophetic. The drastic legislation of the church against business was enacted in the early days of capitalism; it was inspired, like the English corn laws and many another agrarian measure, by a determination to preserve a landed order of society. Thus in discussing whether money might properly be loaned out at interest Pope Innocent IV argued that if this were permitted “men would not give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when they could do naught else ... even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, both for the sake of profit and security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more risky investments.” The argument is the same as that which the American farmer makes when he complains that the bankers in Wall Street prefer to lend money to business men and to speculators rather than to farmers.