society, the cream of honesty! Moderation in robbery is the height of virtue! [28] But what, then, is usury? Nothing is more amusing than to see these INSTRUCTORS OF NATIONS hesitate between the authority of the Gospel, which, they say, NEVER CAN HAVE SPOKEN IN VAIN, and the authority of economical demonstrations. Nothing, to my mind, is more creditable to the Gospel than this old infidelity of its pretended teachers. Salmasius, having assimilated interest to rent, was REFUTED by Grotius, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Wolf, and Heineccius; and, what is more curious still, Salmasius ADMITTED HIS ERROR. Instead of inferring from this doctrine of Salmasius that all increase is illegitimate, and proceeding straight on to the demonstration of Gospel equality, they arrived at just the opposite conclusion; namely, that since everybody acknowledges that rent is permissible, if we allow that interest does not differ from rent, there is nothing left which can be called usury, and, consequently, that the commandment of Jesus Christ is an ILLUSION, and amounts to NOTHING, which is an impious conclusion. If this memoir had appeared in the time of Bossuet, that great theologian would have PROVED by scripture, the fathers, traditions, councils, and popes, that property exists by Divine right, while usury is an invention of the devil; and the heretical work would have been burned, and the author imprisoned. We rob,--13. By farm-rent, house-rent, and leases of all kinds. The author of the "Provincial Letters" entertained the honest Christians of the seventeenth century at the expense of Escobar, the Jesuit, and the contract Mohatra. "The contract Mohatra," said Escobar, "is a contract by which goods are bought, at a high price and on credit, to be again sold at the same moment to the same person, cash down, and at a lower price." Escobar found a way to justify this kind of usury. Pascal and all the Jansenists laughed at him. But what would the satirical Pascal, the learned Nicole, and the invincible Arnaud have said, if Father Antoine Escobar de Valladolid had answered them thus: "A lease is a contract by which real estate is bought, at a high price and on credit, to be again sold, at the expiration of a certain time, to the same person, at a lower price; only, to simplify the transaction, the buyer is content to pay the difference between the first sale and the second. Either deny the identity of the lease and the contract Mohatra, and then I will annihilate you in a moment; or, if you admit the similarity, admit also the soundness of my doctrine: otherwise you proscribe both interest and rent at one blow"? In reply to this overwhelming argument of the Jesuit, the sire of Montalte would have sounded the tocsin, and would have shouted that society was in peril,--that the Jesuits were sapping its very foundations. We rob,--14. By commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his legitimate salary.