"When did friendship take A _breed_ of barren metal of his friend?" And his practice was "neither to lend nor borrow by taking nor giving of excess," which brought upon him the malice and vindictiveness of the Jew-- "that in low simplicity He lends out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usance here with us in Venice." Philip, in Tennyson's "Brook "--a simple man in later times-- "Could not understand how money breeds, Thought it a dead thing." But there were men, too, who saw that the taking of moderate interest was a blameless act. Calvin was a contemporary of Bishop Jewell, and his mind exhibits a curious mixture of feelings upon the subject. Blaxton triumphantly places a sentence from Calvin's "Epistola de Usura" as a battle-flag in his title-page:-- "In republica bene constituta nemo fænerator tolerabilis est; sed omnino debet e consortio hominum rejici." "An usurer is not tolerable in a well-established Commonwealth, but utterly to be rejected out of the company of men." So again, in his Commentary on Deuteronomy. But again, in a passage quoted from the same author, without reference, in Dugald Stewart's Preliminary Dissertation (Encyd. Brit.) we come across a different view. "'Money begets not money!'--What does the sea beget? What the house for which I receive rent? Is silver brought forth from the walls and the roof? But that is produced from land, and that is drawn forth from the sea, which shall produce money; and the convenience of a house is paid for with a stipulated sum. Now if better profit can be derived from the letting out of money than by the letting of an estate, shall a profit be made by letting perhaps some barren land to a farmer, and shall it not be allowed to him who lends a sum of money? He who gets an estate by purchase, shall he not from that money derive an annual profit? Whence then is the merchant's profit? You will say, from his diligence and industry. Does anyone suppose that money ought to lie idle and unprofitable? He who borrows of me is not going to let the loan lie idle. He is not going to draw profit from the money itself, but from the goods bought with it. Those reasonings, therefore, against usury are subtle, and have a certain plausibility; but they fall as soon as they are examined more narrowly. I therefore conclude that we are to judge of usury, not from any particular passage of Scripture, but by the ordinary rules of justice and equity."