Indeed this comparison is scarcely a valid one; for taking interest was conceived as a much worse sin than plain robbery. It is perhaps worth noting that the moral distinction between interest and usury is of very late development. The credit, if it be such, of making it, is to be ascribed to Calvin and is not unconnected with the predilection of certain types of pecuniary interest for that reformer's system of ecclesiastical polity. The Roman law did indeed fix a maximum legal rate of interest, varying at different times and even at the same time for different forms of commercial risk. During the first three centuries A.D. it was, for example, consistently twelve percent on ships and varied from six to twelve percent on other forms of investment. But this has little moral connotation. Early Christian condemnation of interest on loans was by no means confined to the expression of opinion by church writers. Council after council legislated against it with ever increasing severity. The forty-fourth Apostolic Canon prohibited the practice to clerics. The Council of Elvira 310 A.D. forbade it to both clerics and laity. The Council of Arles 314 A.D. provided that clerics guilty of the practice should be deposed from the ministry. The seventeenth canon of the Council of Nicea 325 A.D. provided that they should be excommunicated. The penalty is reiterated in the twelfth canon of the First Council of Carthage 345 A.D. There is no need to continue the list. It is sufficient to say that nearly every council whose canons have come down to us has legislation against interest. Again and again it is absolutely forbidden to clergy and laity alike under the severest ecclesiastical penalties--and it is necessary to remember that after 325 A.D. these penalties could, if need be, be enforced by governmental authority. This attitude of the early Church toward interest on loans is a matter of very considerable historical importance. Although, as we shall endeavor to show later, the ecclesiastical laws were frequently and largely evaded, they still had such influence that their contribution to the sum of economic forces which accomplished the overthrow of ancient civilization is by no means an insignificant one. Nor did the influence of this attitude cease at the fall of Rome. It rather increased thereafter and for several centuries, the so-called "Dark Ages," civilization was strangled by the power of this idea of the sin of usury. To this day the Roman Church regards interest on money as a reprehensible thing which, however, is not, for practical reasons, to be spoken of as sinful by the clergy.[20] This attitude has been no inconsiderable factor in the relatively late industrial development in Catholic countries.