All the more strongly in this writing, the tone of which is only surpassed by the attacks on the usury of the Jews contained in his last polemics, does he storm against the evils of that usury which was stifling Germany. The pastors and preachers were to “stick to the text,” where the Gospel forbids the taking of anything in return for loans.[297] That this will bring him into conflict with the existing custom he takes for granted. In his then mood of pessimistic defiance he was anxious that the preachers should boldly hurl at all the powers that be the words of that Bible which cannot lie: where evil is so rampant “God must intervene and make an end, as He did with Sodom, with the world at the Deluge, with Babylon, with Rome and such like cities, that were utterly destroyed. This is what we Germans are asking for, nor shall we cease to rage until people shall say: Germany _was_, just as we now say of Rome and of Babylon.”[298] He nevertheless gives the preachers a valuable hint as to how they were to proceed in order to retain their peace of mind and get over difficulties. Here “it seems to me better … for the sake of your own peace and tranquillity, that you should send them to the lawyers whose duty and office it is to teach and to decide on such wretched, temporal, transitory, worldly matters, particularly when they [your questioners] are disposed to haggle about the Gospel text.”[299] “For this reason, according to our preaching, usury with all its sins should be left to the lawyers, for, unless they whose duty it is to guard the dam help in defending it, the petty obstacles we can set up will not keep back the flood.” But, after all, “the world cannot go on without usury, without avarice, without pride … otherwise the world would cease to be the world nor would the devil be the devil.”[300] The difficulties which beset Luther’s attitude on the question of interest were in part of his own creation. “In the question of commerce and the charging of interest,” says Julius Köstlin in his “Theologie Luthers,” “he displays, for all his acumen, an unmistakable lack of insight into the true value for social life of trade—particularly of that trade on a large scale with which we are here specially concerned—in spite of all the sins and vexations which it brings with it, or into the importance of loans at interest—something very different from loans to the poor—for the furthering of work and the development of the land.”[301]