Occasionally in rural districts a day-labourer is condemned to imprisonment for desecrating the Sabbath by working in his front garden.  The same labourer is punished for breach of contract if he remains away from his metal, paper or glass works on the Sunday, even if it be from a religious whim.  The orthodox Parliament will hear nothing of Sabbath-breaking if it occurs in the process of expanding capital.

Or consider the attitude of the Church in the matter of usury.  Throughout ancient Hebrew history the money-lender was an outcast; both the law and the prophets denounced him without mercy, and it was made perfectly clear that what was meant was, not the taking of high interest, but the taking of any interest whatsoever.  The early church fathers were explicit, and the Catholic Church for a thousand years consigned money-lenders unhesitatingly to hell.  But then came the modern commercial system, and the money-lenders became the masters of the world!  There is no more amusing illustration of the perversion of human thought than the efforts of the Jesuit casuists to escape from the dilemma into which their Heavenly Guides had trapped them.

Here, for example is Alphonso Ligouri, a Spanish Jesuit of the eighteenth century, a doctor of the Church, now worshipped as St. Alphonsus, presenting a long and elaborate theory of “mental usury”; concluding that, if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the lender may keep it.  In answer to the question whether the lender may keep what the borrower pays, not out of gratitude, but out of fear that otherwise loans will be refused to him in future, Ligouri says that “to be usury, it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual price.”  Again the great saint and doctor tells us that “it is not usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of regaining the principal!” Could the house of J. P. Morgan and Company ask more of their ecclesiastical department?

The reader may think that such sophistications are now out of date; but he will find precisely the same knavery in the efforts of present-day Slavers to fit Jesus Christ into the system of competitive commercialism.  Jesus, as we have pointed out, was a carpenter’s son, a thoroughly class-conscious proletarian.  He denounced the exploiters of his own time with ferocious bitterness, he drove the money-changers out of the temple with whips, and he finally died the death of a common criminal.  If he had forseen the whole modern cycle of capitalism and wage-slavery, he could hardly have been more precise in his exortations to his followers to stand apart from it.  But did all this avail him?  Not in the least!