“Christian dealings with temporal possessions,” he there says, “consist in three things, in giving for nothing, lending free of interest and lovingly allowing our belongings to be taken from us [Matt. v. 40, 42; Luke vi. 30]; for there is no merit in your buying something, inheriting it, or gaining possession of it in some other honest way, since, if this were piety, then the heathen and Turks would also be pious.”[232] This extravagant notion of the Christian’s duties led to his rigid and untimely vindication of the mediæval prohibition of the charging of interest, of which we shall have to speak more fully later. It also led him to assail all commercial enterprise. Greatly incensed at the action of the trading companies he set about writing his “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher” (1524). Here, speaking of the wholesale traders and merchants, he says: “The foreign trade that brings wares from Calicut, India and so forth, such as spices and costly fabrics of silk and cloth of gold, which serve only for display and are of no use, but merely suck the money out of our country and people, would not be allowed had we a government and real rulers.” The Old Testament patriarchs indeed bought and sold, he says, but “only cattle, wool, grain, butter, milk and such like; these are God’s gifts which He raises from the earth and distributes among men”; but the present trade means only the “throwing away of our gold and silver into foreign countries.”[233] Traders were, according to him, in a bad case from the moral point of view: “Let no one come and ask how he may with a good conscience belong to one of these companies. There is no other counsel than this: ‘Drop it’; there is no other way. If the companies are to go on, then that will be the end of law and honesty; if law and honesty are to remain, then the companies must cease.” The companies, so he had already said, are through and through “unstable and without foundation, all rank avarice and injustice, so that they cannot even be touched with a good conscience.… They hold all the goods in their hands and do with them as they please.” They aim “at making sure of their profit in any case, which is contrary to the nature, not only of commercial wares but of all temporal goods which God wishes to be ever in danger and uncertainty. They, however, have discovered a means of securing a sure profit even on uncertain temporal goods.” A man can thus “in a short time become so rich as to be able to buy up kings and emperors”; such a thing cannot possibly be “right or godly.”[234] As a further reason for condemning profit from trade and money transactions he points out, that such profit does not arise from the earth or from cattle.[235]