“What you are taking involves the last
extremity of inhumanity. You are making your profit out of
misfortune; you are levying a tax upon tears. You are strangling
the naked. You are dealing blows on the starving. There is
no pity anywhere, no sense of your kinship to the hungry, and you call
the profit you get from these sources kindly and humane! Wo unto
them that ‘put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter,’ Is. v. 20. and call inhumanity
humanity! This surpasses even the riddle which Samson proposed to
his boon companions:—‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and
out of the strong came forth sweetness.’ Judges xiv. 14. Out of the inhuman came forth
humanity! Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of
thistles, Matt. vii. 16. nor humanity of
usury. A corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. cf.
Matt. vii.
18. There are such people as
twelve-per-cent-men and ten-per-cent-men: I shudder to mention
their names. They are exactors by the month, like the demons
who produce epilepsy, attacking the poor as the changes of the moon
come round. On the connexion
between σεληνιασμός
and ἐπιληψία,
cf. Origen iii. 575–577, and Cæsarius,
Quæst. 50. On the special attribution of epilepsy
to dæmoniacal influence illustrated by the name
ἱερὰ
νοσος, see Hippocrates, De
Morbo Sacro.