This action of Jesus was not only the righteous purification of the sanctuary, but also the public manifestation of His detestation for Mammon and the servants of Mammon. Business, that modern god, was for Him a form of theft. A marketplace was therefore a cave of obsequious brigands, of tolerated thieves. Among all the elements of the legalized theft which is called commerce, none is more detestable and shameful than the use of money. If some one gives you a sheep in exchange for money, you can be sure that he has made you pay more money than the sheep really cost, but at least he gives you something which is not a hateful mineral symbol of wealth. He gives you a living being, which will furnish you wool in the spring time, which will bear you a lamb, and which you can eat if you like. But the exchange of money for money, of coined metal for coined metal, is something unnatural, paradoxical and demoniac. Everything that is known of banks, rates of exchange, discount and usury, is a shameful and repellent mystery which has always been the terror of simple souls, that is, of upright and deep souls. The peasant who sows his grain, the tailor who makes a garment, the weaver who weaves wool or linen, have up to a certain limit a real right that their wealth should increase, because they have added something which before was not in the world, in cloth, in wool. But that a mountain of money should bring forth other money without labor or effort, without production by man of any object to be seen, to be consumed, to be enjoyed, is a scandal which goes beyond, and confounds human imagination. Money-changers, bankers, amassers of silver and gold, are slaves of the witchcraft of the Demon more than all others. And it is to those men, the men of banks and of finance, that the grateful Demon gives power on this earth: they are the ones even to-day who rule nations, instigate wars, who starve nations, and who, by an infernal system of their own, suck out the life of the poor, transformed into gold, dripping with sweat and blood.