# The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism/Notes

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NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Ständestaat. The term refers to the late form taken by feudalism in Europe in its transition to absolute monarchy.—Translator's Note.
2. Here, as on some other points, I differ from our honoured master, Lujo Brentano (in his work to be cited later). Chiefly in regard to terminology, but also on questions of fact. It does not seem to me expedient to bring such different things as acquisition of booty and acquisition by management of a factory together under the same category; still less to designate every tendency to the acquisition of money as the spirit of capitalism as against other types of acquisition. The second sacrifices all precision of concepts, and the first the possibility of clarifying the specific difference between Occidental capitalism and other forms. Also in Simmel's Philosophie des Geldes money economy and capitalism are too closely identified, to the detriment of his concrete analysis. In the writings of Werner Sombart, above all in the second edition of his most important work. Der moderne Kapitalismus, the differentia specifica of Occidental capitalism—at least from the view-point of my problem—the rational organization of labour, is strongly overshadowed by genetic factors which have been operative everywhere in the world.
3. Commenda was a form of mediæval trading association, entered into ad hoc for carrying out one sea voyage. A producer or exporter of goods turned them over to another who took them abroad (on a ship provided sometimes by one party, sometimes by the other) and sold them, receiving a share in the profits. The expenses of the voyage were divided between the two in agreed proportion, while the original shipper bore the risk. See Weber, "Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter", Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pp. 323-8.—Translator's Note.
4. The sea loan, used in maritime commerce in the Middle Ages, was "a method of insuring against the risks of the sea without violating the prohibitions against usury. ... When certain risky maritime ventures were to be undertaken, a certain sum ... was obtained for the cargo belonging to such and such a person or capitalist. If the ship was lost, no repayment was exacted by the lender; if it reached port safely, the borrower paid a considerable premium, sometimes 50 per cent." Henri Sée, Modern Capitalism, p. 189.—Translator's Note.
5. A form of company between the partnership and the limited liability corporation. At least one of the participants is made liable without limit, while the others enjoy limitation of liability to the amount of their investment.—Translator's Note.
​6. Naturally the difference cannot be conceived in absolute terms. The politically oriented capitalism (above all tax-farming) of Mediterranean and Oriental antiquity, and even of China and India, gave rise to rational, continuous enterprises whose book-keeping—though known to us only in pitiful fragments—probably had a rational character. Furthermore, the politically oriented adventurers' capitalism has been closely associated with rational bourgeois capitalism in the development of modern banks, which, including the Bank of England, have tor the most part originated in transactions of a political nature, often connected with war. The difference between the characters of Paterson, for instance—a typical promoter—and of the members of the directorate of the Bank who gave the keynote to its permanent policy, and very soon came to be known as the "Puritan usurers of Grocers' Hall", is characteristic of it. Similarly, we have the aberration of the policy of this most solid bank at the time of the South Sea Bubble. Thus the two naturally shade off into each other. But the difference is there. The great promoters and financiers have no more created the rational organization of labour than—again in general and with individual exceptions—those other typical representatives of financial and political capitalism, the Jews. That was done, typically, by quite a different set of people.
7. For Weber's discussion of the ineffectiveness of slave labour, especially so far as calculation is concerned, see his essay, "Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum", in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.—Translator's Note.
8. That is, in the whole series of Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, not only in the essay here translated. See translator's preface.—Translator's Note.
9. The remains of my knowledge of Hebrew are also quite inadequate.
10. I need hardly point out that this does not apply to attempts like that of Karl Jasper's (in his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 1919), nor to Klages's Charakterologie, and similar studies which differ from our own in their point of departure. There is no space here for a criticism of them.
11. The only thing of this kind which Weber ever wrote is the section on "Religionssoziologie" in his large work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. It was left unfinished by him and does not really close the gap satisfactorily.—Translator's Note.
12. Some years ago an eminent psychiatrist expressed the same opinion to me.
CHAPTER I
1. From the voluminous literature which has grown up around this essay I cite only the most comprehensive criticisms, (1) F. Rachfahl, "Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus", Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik (1909), Nos. 39-43. In ​reply, my article: "Antikritisches zum Geist des Kapitalismus," Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen), XX, 1910. Then Rachfahl's reply to that: "Nochmals Kalvinismus und Kapitalismus", 1910, Nos. 22-25, of the Internationale Wochenschrift. Finally my "Antikritisches Schlusswort", Archiv, XXXI. (Brentano, in the criticism presently to be referred to, evidently did not know of this last phase of the discussion, as he does not refer to it.) I have not incorporated anything in this edition from the somewhat unfruitful polemics against Rachfahl. He is an author whom I otherwise admire, but who has in this instance ventured into a field which he has not thoroughly mastered. I have only added a few supplementary references from my anti-critique, and have attempted, in new passages and footnotes, to make impossible any future misunderstanding. (2) W. Sombart, in his book Der Bourgeois (Munich and Leipzig, 1913, also translated into English under the title The Quintessence of Capitalism, London, 1915), to which I shall return in footnotes below. Finally (3) Lujo Brentano in Part II of the Appendix to his Munich address (in the Academy of Sciences, 1913) on Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, which was published in 1916. (Since Weber's death Brentano has somewhat expanded these essays and incorporated them into his recent book Der wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte.—Translator's Note.) I shall also refer to this criticism in special footnotes in the proper places. I invite anyone who may be interested to convince himself by comparison that I have not in revision left out, changed the meaning of, weakened, or added materially different statements to, a single sentence of my essay which contained any essential point. There was no occasion to do so, and the development of my exposition will convince anyone who still doubts. The two latter writers engaged in a more bitter quarrel with each other than with me. Brentano's criticism of Sombart's book, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, I consider in many points well founded, but often very unjust, even apart from the fact that Brentano does not himself seem to understand the real essence of the problem of the Jews (which is entirely omitted from this essay, but will be dealt with later [in a later section of the Religionssoziologie.—Translator's Note.]).
From theologians I have received numerous valuable suggestions in connection with this study. Its reception on their part has been in general friendly and impersonal, in spite of wide differences of opinion on particular points. This is the more welcome to me since I should not have wondered at a certain antipathy to the manner in which these matters must necessarily be treated here. What to a theologian is valuable in his religion cannot play a very large part in this study. We are concerned with what, from a religious point of view, are often quite superficial and unrefined aspects of religious life, but which, and precisely because they were superficial and unrefined, have often influenced outward behaviour most profoundy.
​Another book which, besides containing many other things, is a very welcome confirmation of and supplement to this essay in so far as it deals with our problem, is the important work of E. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tübingen, 1912). It deals with the history of the ethics of Western Christianity from a very comprehensive point of view of its own. I here refer the reader to it for general comparison instead of making repeated references to special points. The author is principally concerned with the doctrines of religion, while I am interested rather in their practical results.
2. The exceptions are explained, not always, but frequently, by the fact that the religious leanings of the labouring force of an industry are naturally, in the first instance, determined by those of the locality in which the industry is situated, or from which its labour is drawn. This circumstance often alters the impression given at first glance by some statistics of religious adherence, for instance in the Rhine provinces. Furthermore, figures can naturally only be conclusive if individual specialized occupations are carefully distinguished in them. Otherwise very large employers may sometimes be grouped together with master craftsmen who work alone, under the category of "proprietors of enterprises". Above all, the fully developed capitalism of the present day, especially so far as the great unskilled lower strata of labour are concerned, has become independent of any influence which religion may have had in the past. I shall return to this point.
3. Compare, for instance, Schell, Der Katholizismus als Prinzip des Fortschrittes (Würzburg, 1897), p. 31, and V. Hertling, Das Prinzip des Katholizismus und die Wissenschaft (Freiburg, 1899), p. 58.
4. One of my pupils has gone through what is at this time the most complete statistical material we possess on this subject: the religious statistics of Baden. See Martin Offenbacher, "Konfession und soziale Schichtung", Eine Studie über die wirtschaftliche Lage der Katholiken und Protestanten in Baden (Tübingen und Leipzig, 1901), Vol. IV, part v, of the Volkswirtschaftliche Abhandlungen der badischen Hochschulen. The facts and figures which are used for illustration below are all drawn from this study.
5. For instance, in 1895 in Baden there was taxable capital available for the tax on returns from capital:
| Per 1,000 Protestants | .. .. .. | 954,000 marks |
| Per 1,000 Catholics | .. .. .. | 589,000 marks |
It is true that the Jews, with over four millions per 1,000, were far ahead of the rest. (For details see Offenbacher, op. cit., p. 21.)
6. On this point compare the whole discussion in Offenbacher's study.
7. On this point also Offenbacher brings forward more detailed evidence for Baden in his first two chapters.
8. The population of Baden was composed in 1895 as follows: ​Protestants, 37.0 per cent.; Catholics, 61.3 per cent.; Jewish, 1.5 per cent. The students of schools beyond the compulsory public school stage were, however, divided as follows (Offenbacher, p. 16):
| | Protestant. | Catholic. | Jews. |
| | Per Cent. | Per Cent. | Per Cent. |
| Gymnasien | 43 | 46 | 9.5 |
| Realgymnasien | 69 | 31 | 9.5 |
| Oberrealschulen | 52 | 41 | 7.5 |
| Realschulen | 49 | 40 | 11.5 |
| Höhere Bürgerschulen | 51 | 37 | 12.5 |
| Average | 48 | 42 | 10.5 |
(In the Gymnasium the main emphasis is on the classics. In the Realgymnasium Greek is dropped and Latin reduced in favour of modern languages, mathematics and science. The Realschule and Oberrealschule are similar to the latter except that Latin is dropped entirely in favour of modern languages. See G. E. Bolton, The Secondary School System in Germany, New York, 1900.—Translator's Note.)
The same thing may be observed in Prussia, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Alsace-Lorraine, and Hungary (see figures in Offenbacher, pp. 16 ff.).
9. See the figures in the preceding note, which show that the Catholic attendance at secondary schools, which is regularly less than the Catholic share of the total population by a third, only exceeds this by a few per cent. in the case of the grammar schools (mainly in preparation for theological studies). With reference to the subsequent discussion it may further be noted as characteristic that in Hungary those affiliated with the Reformed Church exceed even the average Protestant record of attendance at secondary schools. (See Offenbacher, p. 19, note.)
10. For the proofs see Offenbacher, p. 54, and the tables at the end of his study.
11. Especially well illustrated by passages in the works of Sir William Petty, to be referred to later.
12. Petty's reference to the case of Ireland is very simply explained by the fact that the Protestants were only involved in the capacity of absentee landlords. If he had meant to maintain more he would have been wrong, as the situation of the Scotch-Irish shows. The typical relationship between Protestantism and capitalism existed in Ireland as well as elsewhere. (On the Scotch-Irish see C. A. Hanna, The Scotch-Irish, two vols.; Putnam, New York.)
13. This is not, of course, to deny that the latter facts have had exceedingly important consequences. As I shall show later, the fact ​that many Protestant sects were small and hence homogeneous minorities, as were all the strict Calvinists outside of Geneva and New England, even where they were in possession of political power, was of fundamental significance for the development of their whole character, including their manner of participation in economic life. The migration of exiles of all the religions of the earth, Indian, Arabian, Chinese, Syrian, Phoenician, Greek, Lombard, to other countries as bearers of the commercial lore of highly developed areas, has been of universal occurrence and has nothing to do with our problem. Brentano, in the essay to which I shall often refer, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, calls to witness his own family. But bankers of foreign extraction have existed at all times and in all countries as the representatives of commercial experience and connections. They are not peculiar to modern capitalism, and were looked upon with ethical mistrust by the Protestants (see below). The case of the Protestant families, such as the Muralts, Pestalozzi, etc., who migrated to Zurich from Locarno, was different. They very soon became identified with a specifically modern (industrial) type of capitalistic development.
14. Offenbacher, op. cit., p. 58.
15. Unusually good observations on the characteristic peculiarities of the different religions in Germany and France, and the relation of these differences to other cultural elements in the conflict of nationalities in Alsace are to be found in the fine study of W. Wittich, "Deutsche und französische Kultur im Elsass", Illustrierte Elsässische Rundschau (1900, also published separately).
16. This, of course, was true only when some possibility of capitalistic development in the area in question was present.
17. On this point see, for instance, Dupin de St. André, "L'ancienne église réformée de Tours. Les membres de l'église", Bull. de la soc. de l'hist. du Protest., 4, p. 10. Here again one might, especially from the Catholic point of view, look upon the desire for emancipation from monastic or ecclesiastical control as the dominant motive. But against that view stands not only the judgment of contemporaries (including Rabelais), but also, for instance, the qualms of conscience of the first national synods of the Huguenots (for instance 1st Synod, C. partic. qu. 10 in Aymon, Synod. Nat., p. 10), as to whether a banker might become an elder of the Church; and in spite of Calvin's own definite stand, the repeated discussions in the same bodies of the permissibility of taking interest occasioned by the questions of ultra-scrupulous members. It is partly explained by the number of persons having a direct interest in the question, but at the same time the wish to practise usuraria pravitas without the necessity of confession could not have been alone decisive. The same, see below, is true of Holland. Let it be said explicitly that the prohibition of interest in the canon law will play no part in this investigation.
​18. Gothein, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Schwarzwaldes, I, p. 67.
19. In connection with this see Sombart's brief comments (Der moderne Kapitalismus, first edition, p. 380). Later, under the influence of a study of F. Keller (Unternehmung und Mehrwert, Publications of the Goerres-Gesellschaft, XII), which, in spite of many good observations (which in this connection, however, are not new), falls below the standard of other recent works of Catholic apologetics, Sombart, in what is in these parts in my opinion by far the weakest of his larger works (Der Bourgeois), has unfortunately maintained a completely untenable thesis, to which I shall refer in the proper place.
20. That the simple fact of a change of residence is among the most effective means of intensifying labour is thoroughly established (compare note 13 above). The same Polish girl who at home was not to be shaken loose from her traditional laziness by any chance of earning money, however tempting, seems to change her entire nature and become capable of unlimited accomplishment when she is a migratory worker in a foreign country. The same is true of migratory Italian labourers. That this is by no means entirely explicable in terms of the educative influence of the entrance into a higher cultural environment, although this naturally plays a part, is shown by the fact that the same thing happens where the type of occupation, as in agricultural labour, is exactly the same as at home. Furthermore, accommodation in labour barracks, etc., may involve a degradation to a standard of living which would never be tolerated at home. The simple fact of working in quite different surroundings from those to which one is accustomed breaks through the tradition and is the educative force. It is hardly necessary to remark how much of American economic development is the result of such factors. In ancient times the similar significance of the Babylonian exile for the Jews is very striking, and the same is true of the Parsees. But for the Protestants, as is indicated by the undeniable difference in the economic characteristics of the Puritan New England colonies from Catholic Maryland, the Episcopal South, and mixed Rhode Island, the influence of their religious belief quite evidently plays a part as an independent factor. Similarly in India, for instance, with the Jains.
21. It is well known in most of its forms to be a more or less moderated Calvinism or Zwinglianism.
22. In Hamburg, which is almost entirely Lutheran, the only fortune going back to the seventeenth century is that of a well-known Reformed family (kindly called to my attention by Professor A. Wahl).
23. It is thus not new that the existence of this relationship is maintained here. Lavelye, Matthew Arnold, and others already perceived it. What is new, on the contrary, is the quite unfounded denial of it. Our task here is to explain the relation.
24. Naturally this does not mean that official Pietism, like other religious tendencies, did not at a later date, from a patriarchal point ​of view, oppose certain progressive features of capitalistic development, for instance, the transition from domestic industry to the factory system. What a religion has sought after as an ideal, and what the actual result of its influence on the lives of its adherents has been, must be sharply distinguished, as we shall often see in the course of our discussion. On the specific adaptation of Pietists to industrial labour, I have given examples from a Westphalian factory in my article, "Zur Psychophysik der gewerblichen Arbeit", Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXVIII, and at various other times.
CHAPTER II
1. These passages represent a very brief summary of some aspects of Weber's methodological views. At about the same time that he wrote this essay he was engaged in a thorough criticism and revaluation of the methods of the Social Sciences, the result of which was a point of view in many ways different from the prevailing one, especially outside of Germany. In order thoroughly to understand the significance of this essay in its wider bearings on Weber's sociological work as a whole it is necessary to know what his methodological aims were. Most of his writings on this subject have been assembled since his death (in 1920) in the volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. A shorter exposition of the main position is contained in the opening chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, III.—Translator's Note.
2. The final passage is from Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich (written 1736, Works, Sparks edition, II, p. 80), the rest from Advice to a Young Tradesman (written 1748, Sparks edition, II, pp. 87 ff.). The italics in the text are Franklin's.
3. Der Amerikamüde (Frankfurt, 1855), well known to be an imaginative paraphrase of Lenau's impressions of America. As a work of art the book would to-day be somewhat difficult to enjoy, but it is incomparable as a document of the (now long since blurred-over) differences between the German and the American outlook, one may even say of the type of spiritual life which, in spite of everything, has remained common to all Germans, Catholic and Protestant alike, since the German mysticism of the Middle Ages, as against the Puritan capitalistic valuation of action.
4. Sombart has used this quotation as a motto for his section dealing with the genesis of capitalism (Der moderne Kapitalismus, first edition, I, p. 193. See also p. 390).
5. Which quite obviously does not mean either that Jacob Fugger was a morally indifferent or an irreligious man, or that Benjamin Franklin's ethic is completely covered by the above quotations. It scarcely required Brentano's quotations (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, pp. 150 ff.) to protect this well-known philanthropist ​from the misunderstanding which Brentano seems to attribute to me. The problem is just the reverse: how could such a philanthropist come to write these particular sentences (the especially characteristic form of which Brentano has neglected to reproduce) in the manner of a moralist?
6. This is the basis of our difference from Sombart in stating the problem. Its very considerable practical significance will become clear later. In anticipation, however, let it be remarked that Sombart has by no means neglected this ethical aspect of the capitalistic entrepreneur. But in his view of the problem it appears as a result of capitalism, whereas for our purposes we must assume the opposite as an hypothesis. A final position can only be taken up at the end of the investigation. For Sombart's view see op. cit., pp. 357, 380, etc. His reasoning here connects with the brilliant analysis given in Simmel's Philosophie des Geldes (final chapter). Of the polemics which he has brought forward against me in his Bourgeois I shall come to speak later. At this point any thorough discussion must be postponed.
7. "I grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I formed written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book to practise them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such; but I entertained an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us in their own nature, all the circumstances of things considered." Autobiography (ed. F. W. Pine, Henry Holt, New York, 1916), p. 112.
8. "I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight and started it”—that is the project of a library which he had initiated—"as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on smoothly, and I ever after practised it on such occasions; and from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid. If it remains awhile uncertain to whom the merit belongs, someone more vain than yourself will be encouraged to claim it, and then even envy will be disposed to do you justice by plucking those assumed feathers and restoring them to their right owner." Autobiography, p. 140.
9. Brentano (op. cit., pp. 125, 127, note 1) takes this remark as an occasion to criticize the later discussion of "that rationalization and discipline" to which worldly asceticism has subjected men. That, ​he says, is a rationalization toward an irrational mode of life. He is, in fact, quite correct. A thing is never irrational in itself, but only from a particular rational point of view. For the unbeliever every religious way of life is irrational, for the hedonist every ascetic standard, no matter whether, measured with respect to its particular basic values, that opposing asceticism is a rationalization. If this essay makes any contribution at all, may it be to bring out the complexity of the only superficially simple concept of the rational.
10. In reply to Brentano's (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, pp. 150 ff.) long and somewhat inaccurate apologia for Franklin, whose ethical qualities I am supposed to have misunderstood, I refer only to this statement, which should, in my opinion, have been sufficient to make that apologia superfluous.
11. The two terms profession and calling I have used in translation of the German Beruf, whichever seemed best to fit the particular context. Vocation does not carry the ethical connotation in which Weber is interested. It is especially to be remembered that profession in this sense is not contrasted with business, but it refers to a particular attitude toward one's occupation, no matter what that occupation may be. This should become abundantly clear from the whole of Weber's argument.—Translator's Note.
12. I make use of this opportunity to insert a few anti-critical remarks in advance of the main argument. Sombart (Bourgeois) makes the untenable statement that this ethic of Franklin is a word-for-word repetition of some writings of that great and versatile genius of the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, who besides theoretical treatises on Mathematics, Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, and Love (he was personally a woman-hater), wrote a work in four books on household management (Della Famiglia). (Unfortunately, I have not at the time of writing been able to procure the edition of Mancini, but only the older one of Bonucci.) The passage from Franklin is printed above word for word. Where then are corresponding passages to be found in Alberti's work, especially the maxim "time is money", which stands at the head, and the exhortations which follow it? The only passage which, so far as I know, bears the slightest resemblance to it is found towards the end of the first book of Della Famiglia (ed. Bonucci, II, p. 353), where Alberti speaks in very general terms of money as the nervus rerum of the household, which must hence ​be handled with special care, just as Cato spoke in De Re Rustica. To treat Alberti, who was very proud of his descent from one of the most distinguished cavalier families of Florence (Nobilissimi Cavalieri, op. cit., pp. 213, 228, 247, etc.), as a man of mongrel blood who was filled with envy for the noble families because his illegitimate birth, which was not in the least socially disqualifying, excluded him as a bourgeois from association with the nobility, is quite incorrect. It is true that the recommendation of large enterprises as alone worthy of a nobile è onesta famiglia and a libero è nobile animo, and as costing less labour is characteristic of Alberti (p. 209; compare Del governo della Famiglia, IV, p. 55, as well as p. 116 in the edition for the Pandolfini). Hence the best thing is a putting-out business for wool and silk. Also an ordered and painstaking regulation of his household, i.e. the limiting of expenditure to income. This is the santa masserizia, which is thus primarily a principle of maintenance, a given standard of life, and not of acquisition (as no one should have understood better than Sombart). Similarly, in the discussion of the nature of money, his concern is with the management of consumption funds (money or possessioni), not with that of capital; all that is clear from the expression of it which is put into the mouth of Gianozzo. He recommends, as protection against the uncertainty of fortuna, early habituation to continuous activity, which is also (pp. 73-4) alone healthy in the long run, in cose magnifiche è ample, and avoidance of laziness, which always endangers the maintenance of one's position in the world. Hence a careful study of a suitable trade in case of a change of fortune, but every opera mercenaria is unsuitable (op. cit., I, p. 209). His idea of tranquillita dell' animo and his strong tendency toward the Epicurean λάθε βιώσας (vivere a sè stesso, p. 262); especially his dislike of any office (p. 258) as a source of unrest, of making enemies, and of becoming involved in dishonourable dealings; the ideal of life in a country villa; his nourishment of vanity through the thought of his ancestors; and his treatment of the honour of the family (which on that account should keep its fortune together in the Florentine manner and not divide it up) as a decisive standard and ideal—all these things would in the eyes of every Puritan have been sinful idolatry of the flesh, and in those of Benjamin Franklin the expression of incomprehensible aristocratic nonsense. Note, further, the very high opinion of literary things (for the industria is applied principally to literary and scientific work), which is really most worthy of a man's efforts. And the expression of the masserizia, in the sense of "rational conduct of the household" as the means of living independently of others and avoiding destitution, is in general put only in the mouth of the illiterate Gianozzo as of equal value. Thus the origin of this concept, which comes (see below) from monastic ethics, is traced back to an old priest (p. 249).
Now compare all this with the ethic and manner of life of Benjamin ​Franklin, and especially of his Puritan ancestors; the works of the Renaissance littérateur addressing himself to the humanistic aristocracy, with Franklin's works addressed to the masses of the lower middle class (he especially mentions clerks) and with the tracts and sermons of the Puritans, in order to comprehend the depth of the difference. The economic rationalism of Alberti, everywhere supported by references to ancient authors, is most clearly related to the treatment of economic problems in the works of Xenophon (whom he did not know), of Cato, Varro, and Columella (all of whom he quotes), except that especially in Cato and Varro, acquisition as such stands in the foreground in a different way from that to be found in Alberti. Furthermore, the very occasional comments of Alberti on the use of the fattori, their division of labour and discipline, on the unreliability of the peasants, etc., really sound as if Cato's homely wisdom were taken from the field of the ancient slave-using household and applied to that of free labour in domestic industry and the metayer system. When Sombart (whose reference to the Stoic ethic is quite misleading) sees economic rationalism as "developed to its farthest conclusions" as early as Cato, he is, with a correct interpretation, not entirely wrong. It is possible to unite the diligens pater familias of the Romans with the ideal of the massajo of Alberti under the same category. It is above all characteristic for Cato that a landed estate is valued and judged as an object for the investment of consumption funds. The concept of industria, on the other hand, is differently coloured on account of Christian influence. And there is just the difference. In the conception of industria, which comes from monastic asceticism and which was developed by monastic writers, lies the seed of an ethos which was fully developed later in the Protestant worldly asceticism. Hence, as we shall often point out, the relationship of the two, which, however, is less close to the official Church doctrine of St. Thomas than to the Florentine and Siennese mendicantmoralists. In Cato and also in Alberti's own writings this ethos is lacking; for both it is a matter of worldly wisdom, not of ethic. In Franklin there is also a utilitarian strain. But the ethical quality of the sermon to young business men is impossible to mistake, and that is the characteristic thing. A lack of care in the handling of money means to him that one so to speak murders capital embryos, and hence it is an ethical defect.
An inner relationship of the two (Alberti and Franklin) exists in fact only in so far as Alberti, whom Sombart calls pious, but who actually, although he took the sacraments and held a Roman benefice, like so many humanists, did not himself (except for two quite colourless passages) in any way make use of religious motives as a justification of the manner of life he recommended, had not yet, Franklin on the other hand no longer, related his recommendation of economy to religious conceptions. Utilitarianism, in Alberti's preference for ​wool and silk manufacture, also the mercantilist social utilitarianism "that many people should be given employment" (see Alberti, op. cit., p. 292), is in this field at least formally the sole justification for the one as for the other. Alberti's discussions of this subject form an excellent example of the sort of economic rationalism which really existed as a reflection of economic conditions, in the work of authors interested purely in "the thing for its own sake" everywhere and at all times; in the Chinese classicism and in Greece and Rome no less than in the Renaissance and the age of the Enlightenment. There is no doubt that just as in ancient times with Cato, Varro, and Columella, also here with Alberti and others of the same type, especially in the doctrine of industria, a sort of economic rationality is highly developed. But how can anyone believe that such a literary theory could develop into a revolutionary force at all comparable to the way in which a religious belief was able to set the sanctions of salvation and damnation on the fulfillment of a particular (in this case methodically rationalized) manner of life? What, as compared with it, a really religiously oriented rationalization of conduct looks like, may be seen, outside of the Puritans of all denominations, in the cases of the Jains, the Jews, certain ascetic sects of the Middle Ages, the Bohemian Brothers (an offshoot of the Hussite movement), the Skoptsi and Stundists in Russia, and numerous monastic orders, however much all these may differ from each other.
The essential point of the difference is (to anticipate) that an ethic based on religion places certain psychological sanctions (not of an economic character) on the maintenance of the attitude prescribed by it, sanctions which, so long as the religious belief remains alive, are highly effective, and which mere worldly wisdom like that of Alberti does not have at its disposal. Only in so far as these sanctions work, and, above all, in the direction in which they work, which is often very different from the doctrine of the theologians, does such an ethic gain an independent influence on the conduct of life and thus on the economic order. This is, to speak frankly, the point of this whole essay, which I had not expected to find so completely overlooked.
Later on I shall come to speak of the theological moralists of the late Middle Ages, who were relatively friendly to capital (especially Anthony of Florence and Bernhard of Siena), and whom Sombart has also seriously misinterpreted. In any case Alberti did not belong to that group. Only the concept of industria did he take from monastic lines of thought, no matter through what intermediate links. Alberti, Pandolfini, and their kind are representatives of that attitude which, in spite of all its outward obedience, was inwardly already emancipated from the tradition of the Church. With all its resemblance to the current Christian ethic, it was to a large extent of the antique pagan character, which Brentano thinks I have ignored in its significance for the development of modern economic thought (and ​also modern economic policy). That I do not deal with its influence here is quite true. It would be out of place in a study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. But, as will appear in a different connection, far from denying its significance, I have been and am for good reasons of the opinion that its sphere and direction of influence were entirely different from those of the Protestant ethic (of which the spiritual ancestry, of no small practical importance, lies in the sects and in the ethics of Wyclif and Hus). It was not the mode of life of the rising bourgeoisie which was influenced by this other attitude, but the policy of statesmen and princes; and these two partly, but by no means always, convergent lines of development should for purposes of analysis be kept perfectly distinct. So far as Franklin is concerned, his tracts of advice to business men, at present used for school reading in America, belong in fact to a category of works which have influenced practical life, far more than Alberti's large book, which hardly became known outside of learned circles. But I have expressly denoted him as a man who stood beyond the direct influence of the Puritan view of life, which had paled considerably in the meantime, just as the whole English enlightenment, the relations of which to Puritanism have often been set forth.
13. Unfortunately Brentano (op. cit.) has thrown every kind of struggle for gain, whether peaceful or warlike, into one pot, and has then set up as the specific criterion of capitalistic (as contrasted, for instance, with feudal) profit-seeking, its acquisitiveness of money (instead of land). Any further differentiation, which alone could lead to a clear conception, he has not only refused to make, but has made against the concept of the spirit of (modern) capitalism which we have formed for our purposes, the (to me) incomprehensible objection that it already includes in its assumptions what is supposed to be proved.
14. Compare the, in every respect, excellent observations of Sombart, Die deutsche Volkswirtschaft im 19ten Jahrhundert, p. 123. In general I do not need specially to point out, although the following studies go back in their most important points of view to much older work, how much they owe in their development to the mere existence of Sombart's important works, with their pointed formulations and this even, perhaps especially, where they take a different road. Even those who feel themselves continually and decisively disagreeing with Sombart's views, and who reject many of his theses, have the duty to do so only after a thorough study of his work.
15. Of course we cannot here enter into the question of where these limits lie, nor can we evaluate the familiar theory of the relation between high wages and the high productivity of labour which was first suggested by Brassey, formulated and maintained theoretically by Brentano, and both historically and theoretically by Schulze-Gaevernitz. The discussion was again opened by Hasbach's penetrating studies (Schmollers Jahrbuch, 1903, pp. 385-91 and 417 ff.), ​and is not yet finally settled. For us it is here sufficient to assent to the fact which is not, and cannot be, doubted by anyone, that low wages and high profits, low wages and favourable opportunities for industrial development, are at least not simply identical, that generally speaking training for capitalistic culture, and with it the possibility of capitalism as an economic system, are not brought about simply through mechanical financial operations. All examples are purely illustrative.
16. It must be remembered that this was written twenty-five years ago, when the above statement was by no means the commonplace that it is now, even among economists, to say nothing of business men.—Translator's Note.
17. The establishment even of capitalistic industries has hence often not been possible without large migratory movements from areas of older culture. However correct Sombart's remarks on the difference between the personal skill and trade secrets of the handicraftsman and the scientific, objective modern technique may be, at the time of the rise of capitalism the difference hardly existed. In fact the, so to speak, ethical qualities of the capitalistic workman (and to a certain extent also of the entrepreneur) often had a higher scarcity value than the skill of the craftsman, crystallized in traditions hundreds of years old. And even present-day industry is not yet by any means entirely independent in its choice of location of such qualities of the population, acquired by long-standing tradition and education in intensive labour. It is congenial to the scientific prejudices of to-day, when such a dependence is observed to ascribe it to congenital racial qualities rather than to tradition and education, in my opinion with very doubtful validity.
18. See my "Zur Psychophysik der gewerblichen Arbeit", Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XXVIII.
19. The foregoing observations might be misunderstood. The tendency of a well-known type of business man to use the belief that "religion must be maintained for the people" for his own purpose, and the earlier not uncommon willingness of large numbers, especially of the Lutheran clergy, from a general sympathy with authority, to offer themselves as black police when they wished to brand the strike as sin and trade unions as furtherers of cupidity, all these are things with which our present problem has nothing to do. The factors discussed in the text do not concern occasional but very common facts, which, as we shall see, continually recur in a typical manner.
20. Der moderne Kapitalismus, first edition, I, p. 62.
21. Ibid., p. 195.
22. Naturally that of the modern rational enterprise peculiar to the Occident, not of the sort of capitalism spread over the world for three thousand years, from China, India, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Florence, to the present, carried on by usurers, military contractors ​traders in offices, tax-farmers, large merchants, and financial magnates. See the Introduction.
23. The assumption is thus by no means justified a priori, that is all I wish to bring out here, that on the one hand the technique of the capitalistic enterprise, and on the other the spirit of professional work which gives to capitalism its expansive energy, must have had their original roots in the same social classes. Similarly with the social relationships of religious beliefs. Calvinism was historically one of the agents of education in the spirit of capitalism. But in the Netherlands, the large moneyed interests were, for reasons which will be discussed later, not predominately adherents of strict Calvinism, but Arminians. The rising middle and small bourgeoisie, from which entrepreneurs were principally recruited, were for the most part here and elsewhere typical representatives both of capitalistic ethics and of Calvinistic religion. But that fits in very well with our present thesis: there were at all times large bankers and merchants. But a rational capitalistic organization of industrial labour was never known until the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times took place.
24. On this point see the good Zurich dissertation of J. Maliniak (1913).
25. The following picture has been put together as an ideal type from conditions found in different industrial branches and at different places. For the purposes of illustration which it here serves, it is of course of no consequence that the process has not in any one of the examples we have in mind taken place in precisely the manner we have described.
26. For this reason, among others, it is not by chance that this first period of incipient (economic) rationalism in German industry was accompanied by certain other phenomena, for instance the catastrophic degradation of taste in the style of articles of everyday use.
27. This is not to be understood as a claim that changes in the supply of the precious metals are of no economic importance.
28. This is only meant to refer to the type of entrepreneur (business man) whom we are making the object of our study, not any empirical average type. On the concept of the ideal type see my discussion in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XIX, No. 1. (Republished since Weber's death in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. The concept was first thoroughly developed by Weber himself in these essays, and is likely to be unfamiliar to non-German readers. It is one of the most important aspects of Weber's methodological work, referred to in a note above.—Translator's Note.
29. This is perhaps the most appropriate place to make a few remarks concerning the essay of F. Keller, already referred to (volume 12 of the publications of the Görres-Gesellschaft), and Sombart's observations (Der Bourgeois) in following it up, so far as they are relevant in the present context. That an author should ​criticize a study in which the canonical prohibition of interest (except in one incidental remark which has no connection with the general argument) is not even mentioned, on the assumption that this prohibition of interest, which has a parallel in almost every religious ethic in the world, is taken to be the decisive criterion of the difference between the Catholic and Protestant ethics, is almost inconceivable. One should really only criticize things which one has read, or the argument of which, if read, one has not already forgotten. The campaign against usuraria pravitas runs through both the Huguenot and the Dutch Church history of the sixteenth century; Lombards, i.e. bankers, were by virtue of that fact alone often excluded from communion (see Chap. I, note 17). The more liberal attitude of Calvin (which did not, however, prevent the inclusion of regulations against usury in the first plan of the ordinances) did not gain a definite victory until Salmasius. Hence the difference did not lie at this point; quite the contrary. But still worse are the author's own arguments on this point. Compared to the works of Funck and other Catholic scholars (which he has not, in my opinion, taken as fully into consideration as they deserve), and the investigations of Endemann, which, however obsolete in certain points to-day, are still fundamental, they make a painful impression of superficiality. To be sure, Keller has abstained from such excesses as the remarks of Sombart (Der Bourgeois, p. 321) that one noticed how the "pious gentlemen" (Bernard of Siena and Anthony of Florence) "wished to excite the spirit of enterprise by every possible means", that is, since they, just like nearly everyone else concerned with the prohibition of interest, interpreted it in such a way as to exempt what we should call the productive investment of capital. That Sombart, on the one hand, places the Romans among the heroic peoples, and on the other, what is for his work as a whole an impossible contradiction, considers economic rationalism to have been developed to its final consequences in Cato (p. 267), may be mentioned by the way as a symptom that this is a book with a thesis in the worst sense.
He has also completely misrepresented the significance of the prohibition of interest. This cannot be set forth here in detail. At one time it was often exaggerated, then strongly underestimated, and now, in an era which produces Catholic millionaires as well as Protestant, has been turned upside down for apologetic purposes. As is well known, it was not, in spite of Biblical authority, abolished until the last century by order of the Congregatio S. Officii, and then only temporum ratione habita and indirectly, namely, by forbidding confessors to worry their charges by questions about usuraria pravitas, even though no claim to obedience was given up in case it should be restored. Anyone who has made a thorough study of the extremely complicated history of the doctrine cannot claim, considering the endless controversies over, for instance, the justification of the ​purchase of bonds, the discounting of notes and various other contracts (and above all considering the order of the Congregatio S. Officii, mentioned above, concerning a municipal loan), that the prohibition of interest was only intended to apply to emergency loans, nor that it had the intention of preserving capital, or that it was even an aid to capitalistic enterprise (p. 25). The truth is that the Church came to reconsider the prohibition of interest comparatively late. At the time when this happened the forms of purely business investment were not loans at fixed interest rate, but the fœnus nauticum, commenda, societas maris, and the dare ad proficuum de mari (a loan in which the shares of gain and loss were adjusted according to degrees of risk), and were, considering the character of the return on loans to productive enterprise, necessarily of that sort. These were not (or only according to a few rigorous canonists) held to fall under the ban, but when investment at a definite rate of interest and discounting became possible and customary, the first sort of loans also encountered very troublesome difficulties from the prohibition, which led to various drastic measures of the merchant guilds (black lists). But the treatment of usury on the part of the canonists was generally purely legal and formal, and was certainly free from any such tendency to protect capital as Keller ascribes to it. Finally, in so far as any attitude towards capitalism as such can be ascertained, the decisive factors were: on the one hand, a traditional, mostly inarticulate hostility towards the growing power of capital which was impersonal, and hence not readily amenable to ethical control (as it is still reflected in Luther's pronouncements about the Fuggers and about the banking business); on the other hand, the necessity of accommodation to practical needs. But we cannot discuss this, for, as has been said, the prohibition of usury and its fate can have at most a symptomatic significance for us, and that only to a limited degree.
The economic ethic of the Scotists, and especially of certain mendicant theologians of the fourteenth century, above all Bernhard of Siena and Anthony of Florence, that is monks with a specifically rational type of asceticism, undoubtedly deserves a separate treatment, and cannot be disposed of incidentally in our discussion. Otherwise I should be forced here, in reply to criticism, to anticipate what I have to say in my discussion of the economic ethics of Catholicism in its positive relations to capitalism. These authors attempt, and in that anticipate some of the Jesuits, to present the profit of the merchant as a reward for his industria, and thus ethically to justify it. (Of course, even Keller cannot claim more.)
The concept and the approval of industria come, of course, in the last analysis from monastic asceticism, probably also from the idea of masserizia, which Alberti, as he himself says through the mouth of Gianozzo, takes over from clerical sources. We shall later speak more fully of the sense in which the monastic ethics is a forerunner ​of the worldly ascetic denominations of Protestantism. In Greece, among the Cynics, as shown by late-Hellenic tombstone inscriptions, and, with an entirely different background, in Egypt, there were suggestions of similar ideas. But what is for us the most important thing is entirely lacking both here and in the case of Alberti. As we shall see later, the characteristic Protestant conception of the proof of one's own salvation, the certitudo salutis in a calling, provided the psychological sanctions which this religious belief put behind the industria. But that Catholicism could not supply, because its means to salvation were different. In effect these authors are concerned with an ethical doctrine, not with motives to practical action, dependent on the desire for salvation. Furthermore, they are, as is very easy to see, concerned with concessions to practical necessity, not, as was worldly asceticism, with deductions from fundamental religious postulates. (Incidentally, Anthony and Bernhard have long ago been better dealt with than by Keller.) And even these concessions have remained an object of controversy down to the present. Nevertheless the significance of these monastic ethical conceptions as symptoms is by no means small.
But the real roots of the religious ethics which led the way to the modern conception of a calling lay in the sects and the heterodox movements, above all in Wyclif; although Brodnitz (Englische Wirtschaftsgeschichte), who thinks his influence was so great that Puritanism found nothing left for it to do, greatly overestimates his significance. All that cannot be gone into here. For here we can only discuss incidentally whether and to what extent the Christian ethic of the Middle Ages had in fact already prepared the way for the spirit of capitalism.
30. The words μηδὲν ἀπελπίζοντες (Luke vi. 35) and the translation of the Vulgate, nihil inde sperantes, are thought (according to A. Merx) to be a corruption of μηδένα ἀπελπίζοντες (or meminem desperantes), and thus to command the granting of loans to all brothers, including the poor, without saying anything at all about interest. The passage Deo placere vix potest is now thought to be of Arian origin (which, if true, makes no difference to our contentions).
31. How a compromise with the prohibition of usury was achieved is shown, for example, in Book I, chapter 65, of the statutes of the Arte di Calimala (at present I have only the Italian edition in Emiliani-Guidici, Stor. dei Com. Ital., III, p. 246). "Procurino i consoli con quelli frate, che parrà loro, che perdono si faccia e come fare si possa il meglio per l'amore di ciascuno, del dono, merito o guiderdono, ovvero interesse per l'anno presente e secondo che altra volta fatto fue." It is thus a way for the guild to secure exemption for its members on account of their official positions, without defiance of authority. The suggestions immediately following, as well as the immediately preceding idea to book all interest and profits as gifts, are very characteristic of the amoral attitude towards profits on ​capital. To the present stock exchange black list against brokers who hold back the difference between top price and actual selling price, often corresponded the outcry against those who pleaded before the ecclesiastical court with the exceptio usurariæ pravitatis.
CHAPTER III
1. Of the ancient languages, only Hebrew has any similar concept. Most of all in the word מְלָאבָה. It is used for sacerdotal funntions (Exod. xxxv. 21; Neh. xi. 22; 1 Chron. ix. 13; xxiii. 4; xxvi. 30), for business in the service of the king (especially 1 Sam. viii. 16; 1 Chron. iv. 23; xxix. 6), for the service of a royal official (Esther iii. 9; ix. 3), of a superintendant of labour (2 Kings xii. 12), of a slave (Gen. xxxix. 11), of labour in the fields (1 Chron. xxvii. 26), of craftsmen (Exod. xxxi. 5; xxxv. 21; Kings vii. 14), for traders (Psa. cvii. 23), and for worldly activity of any kind in the passage, Sirach xi. 20, to be discussed later. The word is derived from the root לאךְ, to send, thus meaning originally a task. That it originated in the ideas current in Solomon's bureaucratic kingdom of serfs (Fronstaat), built up as it was according to the Egyptian model, seems evident from the above references. In meaning, however, as I learn from A. Merx, this root concept had become lost even in antiquity. The word came to be used for any sort of labour, and in fact became fully as colourless as the German Beruf, with which it shared the fate of being used primarily for mental and not manual functions. The expression (חק), assignment, task, lesson, which also occurs in Sirach xi. 20, and is translated in the Septuagint with διαθήκη, is also derived from the terminology of the servile bureaucratic regime of the time, as is דבַר־יום (Exod. v. 13, cf. Exod. v. 14), where the Septuagint also uses διαθήκη for task. In Sirach xliii. 10 it is rendered in the Septuagint with κρίμα. In Sirach xi. 20 it is evidently used to signify the fulfillment of God's commandments, being thus related to our calling. On this passage in Jesus Sirach reference may here be made to Smend's well-known book on Jesus Sirach, and for the words διαθήκη, ἔργον, πόνος, to his Index zur Weisheit des Jesus Sirach (Berlin, 1907). As is well known, the Hebrew text of the Book of. Sirach was lost, but has been rediscovered by Schechter, and in part supplemented by quotations from the Talmud. Luther did not possess it, and these two Hebrew concepts could not have had any influence on his use of language. (See below on Prov. xxii. 29.)
In Greek there is no term corresponding in ethical connotation to the German or English words at all. Where Luther, quite in the spirit of the modern usage (see below), translates Jesus Sirach xi. 20 and 21, bleibe in deinem Beruf, the Septuagint has at one point ἔργον, at the other, which however seems to be an entirely corrupt passage, ​πόνος (the Hebrew original speaks of the shining of divine help!). Otherwise in antiquity τὰ προσήκοντο is used in the general sense of duties. In the works of the Stoics κάματος occasionally carries similar connotations, though its linguistic source is indifferent (called to my attention by A. Dieterich). All other expressions (such as τάξις, etc.) have no ethical implications.
In Latin what we translate as calling, a man's sustained activity under the division of labour, which is thus (normally) his source of income and in the long run the economic basis of his existence, is, aside from the colourless opus, expressed with an ethical content, at least similar to that of the German word, either by officium (from opificium, which was originally ethically colourless, but later, as especially in Seneca de benef, IV, p. 18, came to mean Beruf); or by munus, derived from the compulsory obligations of the old civic community; or finally by professio. This last word was also characteristically used in this sense for public obligations, probably being derived from the old tax declarations of the citizens. But later it came to be applied in the special modern sense of the liberal professions (as in professio bene dicendi), and in this narrower meaning had a significance in every way similar to the German Beruf, even in the more spiritual sense of the word, as when Cicero says of someone "non intelligit quid profiteatur", in the sense of "he does not know his real profession". The only difference is that it is, of course, definitely secular without any religious connotation. That is even more true of ars, which in Imperial times was used for handicraft. The Vulgate translates the above passages from Jesus Sirach, at one point with opus, the other (verse 21) with locus, which in this case means something like social station. The addition of mandaturam tuorum comes from the ascetic Jerome, as Brentano quite rightly remarks, without, however, here or elsewhere, calling attention to the fact that this was characteristic of precisely the ascetic use of the term, before the Reformation in an otherworldly, afterwards in a worldly, sense. It is furthermore uncertain from what text Jerome's translation was made. An influence of the old liturgical meaning of מְלָאכָה does not seem to be impossible.
In the Romance languages only the Spanish vocacion in the sense of an inner call to something, from the analogy of a clerical office, has a connotation partly corresponding to that of the German word, but it is never used to mean calling in the external sense. In the Romance Bible translations the Spanish vocacion, the Italian vocazione and chiamamento, which otherwise have a meaning partly corresponding to the Lutheran and Calvinistic usage to be discussed presently, are used only to translate the κλῆσις of the New Testament, the call of the Gospel to eternal salvation, which in the Vulgate is vocatio. Strange to say, Brentano, op. cit., maintains that this fact, which I have myself adduced to defend my view, is evidenced for the existence ​of the concept of the calling in the sense which it had later, before the Reformation. But it is nothing of the kind. κλῆσις had to be translated by vocatio. But where and when in the Middle Ages was it used in our sense? The fact of this translation, and in spite of it, the lack of any application of the word to worldly callings is what is decisive. Chiamamento is used in this manner along with vocazione in the Italian Bible translation of the fifteenth century, which is printed in the Collezione di opere inedite e rare (Bologna, 1887), while the modern Italian translations use the latter alone. On the other hand, the words used in the Romance languages for calling in the external worldly sense of regular acquisitive activity carry, as appears from all the dictionaries and from a report of my friend Professor Baist (of Freiburg), no religious connotation whatever. This is so no matter whether they are derived from ministerium or officium, which originally had a certain religious colouring, or from ars, professio, and implicare (impeigo), from which it has been entirely absent from the beginning. The passages in Jesus Sirach mentioned above, where Luther used Beruf, are translated: in French, v. 20, office; v. 21, labeur (Calvinistic translation); Spanish, v. 20, obra; v. 21, lugar (following the Vulgate); recent translations, posto (Protestant). The Protestants of the Latin countries, since they were minorities, did not exercise, possibly without even making the attempt, such a creative influence over their respective languages as Luther did over the still less highly rationalized (in an academic sense) German official language.
2. On the other hand, the Augsburg Confession only contains the idea implicitly and but partially developed. Article XVI (ed. by Kolde, p. 43) teaches: "Meanwhile it (the Gospel) does not dissolve the ties of civil or domestic economy, but strongly enjoins us to maintain them as ordinances of God and in such ordinances (ein jeder nach seinem Beruf) to exercise charity." (Translated by Rev. W. H. Teale, Leeds, 1842.)
(In Latin it is only "et in talibus ordinationibus exercere caritatem". The English is evidently translated directly from the Latin, and does not contain the idea which came into the German version.—Translator's Note.)
The conclusion drawn, that one must obey authority, shows that here Beruf is thought of, at least primarily, as an objective order in the sense of the passage in 1 Cor. vii. 20.
And Article XXVII (Kolde, p. 83) speaks of Beruf (Latin in vocatione sua) only in connection with estates ordained by God: clergy, magistrates, princes, lords, etc. But even this is true only of the German version of the Konkordienbuch, while in the German Ed. princeps the sentence is left out.
Only in Article XXVI (Kolde, p. 81) is the word used in a sense which at least includes our present meaning: "that he did chastise his body, not to deserve by that discipline remission of sin, but to ​have his body in bondage and apt to spiritual things, and to do his calling". Translated by Richard Taverner, Philadelphia Publications Society, 1888. (Latin juxta vocationem suam.)
3. According to the lexicons, kindly confirmed by my colleagues Professors Braune and Hoops, the word Beruf (Dutch beroep, English calling, Danish kald, Swedish kallelse) does not occur in any of the languages which now contain it in its present worldly (secular) sense before Luthur's translation of the Bible. The Middle High German, Middle Low German, and Middle Dutch words, which sound like it, all mean the same Ruf in modern German, especially inclusive, in late mediævel times, of the calling (vocation) of a candidate to a clerical benefice by those with the power of appointment. It is a special case which is also often mentioned in the dictionaries of the Scandinavian languages. The word is also occasionally used by Luther in the same sense. However, even though this special use of the word may have promoted its change of meaning, the modern conception of Beruf undoubtedly goes linguistically back to the Bible translations by Protestants, and any anticipation of it is only to be found, as we shall see later, in Tauler (died 1361). All the languages which were fundamentally influenced by the Protestant Bible translations have the word, all of which this was not true (like the Romance languages) do not, or at least not in its modern meaning.
Luther renders two quite different concepts with Beruf. First the Pauline κλήσις in the sense of the call to eternal salvation theough God. Thus: 1 Cor. i. 26; Eph. i. 18; iv. 1, 4; 2 Thess. i, 11; Heb. iii. 1; 2 Peter i. 10. All these cases concern the purelt religious idea of the call through the Gospel taught by the apostle; the word κλήσις has nothing to do with worldly callings in the modern sense. The German Bibles before Luther use in this case ruffunge (so in all those in the Heidelberg Library), and sometimes instead of "von Gott geruffet" say "von Gott gefordert". Secondly, however, he, as we have already seen, translates the words in Jesus Sirach discussed in the previous note (in the Septuagiant ἓν τῷ ἔργῳ σου παλαιώθητι and καί ἕμμενε τῷ πόνῳ σον), with "beharre in deinem Beruf" and "bliebe in deinem Beruf", instead of "bliebe bei deiner Arbeit". The later (authorised) Catholic translations (for instance that of Fleischütz, Fluda, 1781) have (as in the New Testament passages) simply followed him. Luthur's translation of the passage in the Book of Sirach is, so gar as I know, the first case in which the German word Beruf appears in its presant purely secular sense. The preceding exhortation, verse 20, στήΟι εν διαθήκη σου, he translates "bliebe in Gottes Wort", although Sirach xiv. 1 and xliii. 10 show tthat, corresponding to the Hebrew תק, which (according to quotations in the Talmud) Sirach used, διαθήκη really did mean something similar to our calling, namely one's fate or assigned task. In its later and present sense the word Beruf did not exist in the German language, nor, so far as I can learn, ​in the works of the older Bible translators or preachers. The German Bibles before Luther rendered the passage from Sirach with Werk. Berthold of Regensburg, at the points in his sermons where the modern would say Beruf, uses the word Arbeit. The usage was thus the same as in antiquity. The first passage I know, in which not Beruf but Ruf (as a translation of κλῆσις) is applied to purely worldly labour, is in the fine sermon of Tauler on Ephesians iv (Works, Basle edition, f. 117. v), of peasants who misten go: they often fare better "so sie folgen einfeltiglich irem Ruff denn die geistlichen Menschen, die auf ihren Ruf nicht Acht haben". The word in this sense did not find its way into everyday speech. Although Luther's usage at first vacillates between Ruf and Beruf (see Werke, Erlangen edition, p. 51.), that he was directly influenced by Tauler is by no means certain, although the Freiheit eines Christenmenschen is in many respects similar to this sermon of Tauler. But in the purely worldly sense of Tauler, Luther did not use the word Ruf. (This against Denifle, Luther, p. 163.)
Now evidently Sirach's advice in the version of the Septuagint contains, apart from the general exhortation to trust in God, no suggestion of a specifically religious valuation of secular labour in a calling. The term πόνος, toil, in the corrupt second passage would be rather the opposite, if it were not corrupted. What Jesus Sirach says simply corresponds to the exhortation of the psalmist (Psa. xxxvii. 3), "Dwell in the land, and feed on his faithfulness", as also comes out clearly in the connection with the warning not to let oneself be blinded with the works of the godless, since it is easy for God to make a poor man rich. Only the opening exhortation to remain in the הק (verse 20) has a certain resemblance to the κλῆσις of the Gospel, but here Luther did not use the word Beruf for the Greek διαθήκη. The connection between Luther's two seemingly quite unrelated uses of the word Beruf is found in the first letter to the Corinthians and its translation.
In the usual modern editions, the whole context in which the passage stands is as follows, 1 Cor. vii. 17 (English, King James version [American revision, 1901]): "(17) Only as the Lord hath distributed to each man, as God hath called each, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all churches. (18) Was any man called being circumcised? let him not become uncircumcised. Hath any man been called in uncircumcision? let him not be circumcised. (19) Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing; but the keeping of the commandments of God. (20) Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called (ἐν τῇ κλήσει ῃ ἐκλήθη; an undoubted Hebraism, as Professor Merx tells me). (21) Wast thou called being a bondservant? care not for it; nay even if thou canst become free use it rather. (22) For he that was called in the Lord being a bondservant is the Lord's freedman; likewise he that was called being free is ​Christ's bondservant. (23) Ye were bought with a price; become not bondservants of men. (24) Brethren, let each man, wherein he was called, therein abide with God."
In verse 29 follows the remark that time is shortened, followed by the well-known commandments motivated by eschatological expectations: (31) to possess women as though one did not have them, to buy as though one did not have what one had bought, etc. In verse 20 Luther, following the older German translations, even in 1523 in his exigesis of this chapter, renders κλῆσις with Beruf, and interprets it with Stand. (Erlangen ed., LI, p. 51.)
In fact it is evident that the word κλῆσις at this point, and only at this, corresponds approximately to the Latin status and the German Stand (status of marriage, status of a servant, etc.). But of course not as Brentano, op. cit., p. 137, assumes, in the modern sense of Beruf. Brentano can hardly have read this passage, or what I have said about it, very carefully. In a sense at least suggesting it this word, which is etymologically related to ἐκκλησία, an assembly which has been called, occurs in Greek literature, so far as the lexicons tell, only once in a passage from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, where it corresponds to the Latin classis, a word borrowed from the Greek, meaning that part of the citizenry which has been called to the colours. Theophylaktos (eleventh-twelfth century) interprets 1 Cor. vii. 20: ἐν οἷῳ βιῳ καὶ ἐν οἷῳ τάγματι καὶ πολιτεύματι ὢν ἐπίστευσεν. (My colleague Professor Deissmann called my attention to this passage.) Now, even in our passage, κλῆσις does not correspond to the modern Beruf. But having translated κλῆσις with Beruf in the eschatologically motivated exhortation, that everyone should remain in his present status, Luther, when he later came to translate the Apocrypha, would naturally, on account of the similar content of the exhortations alone, also use Beruf for πόνος in the traditionalistic and anti-chrematistic commandment of Jesus Sirach, that everyone should remain in the same business. This is what is important and characteristic. The passage in I Cor. vii. 17 does not, as has been pointed out, use κλῆσις at all in the sense of Beruf, a definite field of activity.
In the meantime (or about the same time), in the Augsburg Confession, the Protestant dogma of the uselessness of the Catholic attempt to excel worldly morality was established, and in it the expression "einem jeglichen nach seinem Beruf" was used (see previous note). In Luther's translation, both this and the positive valuation of the order in which the individual was placed, as holy, which was gaining ground just about the beginning of the 1530's, stand out. It was a result of his more and more sharply defined belief in special Divine Providence, even in the details of life, and at the same time of his increasing inclination to accept the existing order of things in the world as immutably willed by God. Vocatio, in the traditional Latin, meant the divine call to a life of holiness, ​especially in a monastery or as a priest. But now, under the influence of this dogma, life in a worldly calling came for Luther to have the same connotation. For he now translated πόνος and ἔργον in Jesus Sirach with Beruf, for which, up to that time, there had been only the (Latin) analogy, coming from the monastic translation. But a few years earlier, in Prov. xxii. 29, he had still translated the Hebrew מְלָאכָה, which was the original of ἔργον in the Greek text of Jesus Sirach, and which, like the German Beruf and the Scandinavian kald, kallelse, originally related to a spiritual call (Beruf), as in other passages (Gen. xxxix. 11), with Geschäft (Septuagint ἔργον, Vulgate opus, English Bibles business, and correspondingly in the Scandinavian and all the other translations before me).
The word Beruf, in the modern sense which he had finally created, remained for the time being entirely Lutheran. To the Calvinists the Apocrypha are entirely uncanonical. It was only as a result of the development which brought the interest in proof of salvation to the fore that Luther's concept was taken over, and then strongly emphasized by them. But in their first (Romance) translations they had no such word available, and no power to create one in the usage of a language already so stereotyped.
As early as the sixteenth century the concept of Beruf in its present sense became established in secular literature. The Bible translators before Luther had used the word Berufung for κλῆσις (as for instance in the Heidelberg versions of 1462-66 and 1485), and the Eck translation of 1537 says "in dem Ruf, worin er beruft ist". Most of the later Catholic translators directly follow Luther. In England, the first of all, Wyclif's translation (1382), used cleping (the Old English word which was later replaced by the borrowed calling). It is quite characteristic of the Lollard ethics to use a word which already corresponded to the later usage of the Reformation. Tyndale's translation of 1534, on the other hand, interprets the idea in terms of status: "in the same state wherein he was called", as also does the Geneva Bible of 1557. Cranmer's official translation of 1539 substituted calling for state, while the (Catholic) Bible of Rheims (1582), as well as the Anglican Court Bibles of the Elizabethan era, characteristically return to vocation, following the Vulgate.
That for England, Cranmer's Bible translation is the source of the Puritan conception of calling in the sense of Beruf, trade, has already, quite correctly, been pointed out by Murray. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century calling is used in that sense. In 1588 unlawful callings are referred to, and in 1603 greater callings in the sense of higher occupations, etc. (see Murray). Quite remarkable is Brentano's idea (op. cit., p. 139), that in the Middle Ages vocatio was not translated with Beruf, and that this concept was not known, because only a free man could engage in a Beruf, and freemen, in the middle-class professions, did not exist at that time. Since the ​whole social structure of the mediæval crafts, as opposed to those of antiquity, rested upon free labour, and, above all, almost all the merchants were freemen, I do not clearly understand this thesis.
4. Compare with the following the instructive discussion in K. Eger, Die Anschauung Luthers vom Beruf (Giessen, 1900). Perhaps its only serious fault, which is shared by almost all other theological writers, is his insufficiently clear analysis of the concept of lex natura. On this see E. Troeltsch in his review of Seeberg's Dogmengeschichte, and now above all in the relevant parts of his Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen.
5. For when Thomas Aquinas represents the division of men into estates and occupational groups as the work of divine providence, by that he means the objective cosmos of society. But that the individual should take up a particular calling (as we should say; Thomas, however, says ministerium or officium) is due to causæ naturales. Quæst. quodlibetal, VII, Art. 17c: "Hæc autem diversificatio hominum in diversis officiis contingit primo ex divina providentia, quæ ita hominum status distribuit . . . secundo etiam ex causis naturalibus, ex quibus contingit, quod in diversis hominibus sunt diversæ inclinationes ad diversa officia. . . ."
Quite similar is Pascal's view when he says that it is chance which determines the choice of a calling. See on Pascal, A. Koester, Die Ethik Pascals (1907). Of the organic systems of religious ethics, only the most complete of them, the Indian, is different in this respect. The difference between the Thomistic and the Protestant ideas of the calling is so evident that we may dismiss it for the present with the above quotation. This is true even as between the Thomistic and the later Lutheran ethics, which are very similar in many other respects, especially in their emphasis on Providence. We shall return later to a discussion of the Catholic view-point. On Thomas Aquinas, see Maurenbrecher, Thomas von Aquino's Stellung zum Wirtschaftsleben seiner Zeit, 1888. Otherwise, where Luther agrees with Thomas in details, he has probably been influenced rather by the general doctrines of Scholasticism than by Thomas in particular. For, according to Denifle's investigations, he seems really not to have known Thomas very well. See Denifle, Luther und Luthertum (1903), p. 501, and on it, Koehler, Ein Wort zu Denifles Luther (1904), p. 25.
6. In Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, (1) the double nature of man is used for the justification of worldly duties in the sense of the lex natura (here the natural order of the world). From that it follows (Erlangen edition, 27, p. 188) that man is inevitably bound to his body and to the social community. (2) In this situation he will (p. 196: this is a second justification), if he is a believing Christian, decide to repay God's act of grace, which was done for pure love, by love of his neighbour. With this very loose connection between faith and love is conibined (3) (p. 190) the old ascetic justification ​of labour as a means of securing to the inner man mastery over the body. (4) Labour is hence, as the reasoning is continued with another appearance of the idea of lex naturæ in another sense (here, natural morality), an original instinct given by God to Adam (before the fall), which he has obeyed "solely to please God". Finally (5) (pp. 161 and 199), there appears, in connection with Matt. vii. 18 f., the idea that good work in one's ordinary calling is and must be the result of the renewal of life, caused by faith, without, however, developing the most important Calvinistic idea of proof. The powerful emotion which dominates the work explains the presence of such contradictory ideas.
7. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love; and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages" (Wealth of Nations, Book I, chap. ii).
8. "Omnia enim per te operabitur (Deus), mulgebit per te vaccam et servilissima quæque opera faciet, ac maxima pariter et minima ipsi grata erunt" (Exigesis of Genesis, Opera lat. exeget., ed. Elsperger, VII, p. 213). The idea is found before Luther in Tauler, who holds the spiritual and the worldly Ruf to be in principle of equal value. The difference from the Thomistic view is common to the German mystics and Luther. It may be said that Thomas, principally to retain the moral value of contemplation, but also from the view-point of the mendicant friar, is forced to interpret Paul's doctrine that "if a man will not work he shall not eat" in the sense that labour, which is of course necessary lege naturæ, is imposed upon the human race as a whole, but not on all individuals. The gradation in the value of forms of labour, from the opera servilia of the peasants upwards, is connected with the specific character of the mendicant friars, who were for material reasons bound to the town as a place of domicile. It was equally foreign to the German mystics and to Luther, the peasant's son; both of them, while valuing all occupations equally, looked upon their order of rank as willed by God. For the relevant passages in Thomas see Maurenbrecher, op. cit., pp. 65 ff.
9. It is astonishing that some investigators can maintain that such a change could have been without effect upon the actions of men. I confess my inability to understand such a view.
10. "Vanity is so firmly imbedded in the human heart that a camp-follower, a kitchen-helper, or a porter, boast and seek admirers. . . ."(Faugeres edition, I, p. 208. Compare Koester, op. cit., pp. 17, 136 ff.). On the attitude of Port Royal and the Jansenists to the calling, to which we shall return, see now the excellent study of Dr. Paul Honigsheim, Die Staats- und Soziallehren der französischen Jansenisten im 17ten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg Historical Dissertation, 1914. It is a separately printed part of a more comprehensive work on the Vorgeschichte der französischen Aufklärung. Compare especially pp. 138 ff.).
​11. Apropos of the Fuggers, he thinks that it "cannot be right and godly for such a great and regal fortune to be piled up in the lifetime of one man". That is evidently the peasant's mistrust of capital. Similarly (Grosser Sermon vom Wucher, Erlangen edition, XX, p. 109) investment in securities he considers ethically undesirable, because it is "ein neues behendes erfunden Ding"—i.e. because it is to him economically incomprehensible; somewhat like margin trading to the modern clergyman.
12. The difference is well worked out by H. Levy (in his study, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, Jena, 1912). Compare also, for instance, the petition of the Levellers in Cromwell's army of 1653 against monopolies and companies, given in Gardiner, Commonwealth, II, p. 179. Laud's regime, on the other hand, worked for a Christian, social, economic organization under the joint leadership of Crown and Church, from which the King hoped for political and fiscal-monopolistic advantages. It was against just this that the Puritans were struggling.
13. What I understand by this may be shown by the example of the proclamation addressed by Cromwell to the Irish in 1650, with which he opened his war against them and which formed his reply to the manifestos of the Irish (Catholic) clergy of Clonmacnoise of December 4 and 13, 1649. The most important sentences follow: “Englishmen had good inheritances (namely in Ireland) which many of them purchased with their money . . . they had good leases from Irishmen for long time to come, great stocks thereupon, houses and plantations erected at their cost and charge. . . . You broke the union .. at a time when Ireland was in perfect peace and when, through the example of English industry, through commerce and traffic, that which was in the nation's hands was better to them than if all Ireland had been in their possession. . . . Is God, will God be with you? I am confident He will not."
This proclamation, which is suggestive of articles in the English Press at the time of the Boer War, is not characteristic, because the capitalistic interests of Englishmen are held to be the justification of the war. That argument could, of course, have just as well been made use of, for instance, in a quarrel between Venice and Genoa over their respective spheres of influence in the Orient (which, in spite of my pointing it out here, Brentano, op. cit., p. 142, strangely enough holds against me). On the contrary, what is interesting in the document is that Cromwell, with the deepest personal conviction, as everyone who knows his character will agree, bases the moral justification of the subjection of the Irish, in calling God to witness, on the fact that English capital has taught the Irish to work. (The proclamation is in Carlyle, and is also reprinted and analysed in Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, I, pp. 163 f.)
​14. This is not the place to follow the subject farther. Compare the authors cited in Note 16 below.
15. Compare the remarks in Jülicher's fine book, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, II, pp. 108, 636 f.
16. With what follows, compare above all the discussion in Eger, op. cit. Also Schneckenburger's fine work, which is even to-day not yet out of date (Vergleichende Darstellung der lutherischen und reformierten Lehrbegriffe, Grüder, Stuttgart, 1855). Luthardt's Ethik Luthers, p. 84 of the first edition, the only one to which I have had access, gives no real picture of the development. Further compare Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, II, pp. 262 ff. The article on Beruf in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche is valueless. Instead of a scientific analysis of the conception and its origin, it contains all sorts of rather sentimental observations on all possible subjects, such as the position of women, etc. Of the economic literature on Luther, I refer here only to Schmoller's studies ("Geschichte der Nationalökonomischen Ansichten in Deutschland während der Reformationszeit", Zeitschrift f. Staatswiss., XVI, 1860); Wiskemann's prize essay (1861); and the study of Frank G. Ward ("Darstellung und Würdigung von Luthers Ansichten vom Staat und seinen wirtschaftlichen Aufgaben", Conrads Abhandlungen, XXI, Jena, 1898). The literature on Luther in commemoration of the anniversary of the Reformation, part of which is excellent, has, so far as I can see, made no definite contribution to this particular problem. On the social ethics of Luther (and the Lutherans) compare, of course, the relevant parts of Troeltsch's Soziallehren.
17. Analysis of the Seventh Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, 1523, Erlangen edition, LI, p. 1. Here Luther still interprets the idea of the freedom of every calling before God in the sense of this passage, so as to emphasize (1) that certain human institutions should be repudiated (monastic vows, the prohibition of mixed marriages, etc.), (2) that the fulfillment of traditional worldly duties to one's neighbour (in itself indifferent before God) is turned into a commandment of brotherly love. In fact this characteristic reasoning (for instance pp. 55, 56) fundamentally concerns the question of the dualism of the lex naturæ in its relations with divine justice.
18. Compare the passage from Von Kaufhandlung und Wucher, which Sombart rightly uses as a motto for his treatment of the handicraft spirit (= traditionalism): "Darum musst du dir fürsetzen, nichts denn deine ziemliche Nahrung zu suchen in solchem Handel, danach Kost, Mühe, Arbeit und Gefahr rechnen und überschlagen und also dann die Ware selbst setzen, steigern oder niedern, dass du solcher Arbeit und Mühe Lohn davon hasst." The principle is formulated in a thoroughly Thomistic spirit.
19. As early as the letter to H. von Sternberg of 1530, in which he dedicates the Exigesis of the 117th Psalm to him, the estate of the ​lower nobility appears to him, in spite of its moral degradation, as ordained of God (Erlangen edition, XL, pp. 282 ff.). The decisive influence of the Münzer disturbances in developing this view-point can clearly be seen in the letter (p. 282). Compare also Eger, op. cit., p. 150.
20. Also in the analysis of the 111th Psalm, verses 5 and 6 (Erlangen edition, XL, pp. 215-16), written in 1530, the starting-point is the polemics against withdrawal from the world into monasteries. But in this case the lex naturæ (as distinct from positive law made by the Emperor and the Jurists) is directly identical with divine justice. It is God's ordinance, and includes especially the division of the people into classes (p. 215). The equal value of the classes is emphasized, but only in the sight of God.
21. As taught especially in the works Von Konzilien und Kirchen (1539) and Kurzer Bekenntnis vom heiligen Sakrament (1545).
22. How far in the background of Luther's thought was the most important idea of proof of the Christian in his calling and his worldly conduct, which dominated Calvinism, is shown by this passage from Von Konzilien und Kirchen (1539, Erlangen edition, XXV, p. 376): "Besides these seven principal signs there are more superficial ones by which the holy Christian Church can be known. If we are not unchaste nor drunkards, proud, insolent, nor extravagant, but chaste, modest, and temperate." According to Luther these signs are not so infallible as the others (purity of doctrine, prayer, etc.). "Because certain of the heathen have borne themselves so and sometimes even appeared holier than Christians." Calvin's personal position was, as we shall see, not very different, but that was not true of Puritanism. In any case, for Luther the Christian serves God only in vocatione, not per vocationem (Eger, pp. 117 ff.). Of the idea of proof, on the other hand (more, however, in its Pietistic than its Calvinistic form), there are at least isolated suggestions in the German mystics (see for instance in Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, p. 195, the passage from Suso, as well as those from Tauler quoted above), even though it was understood only in a psychological sense.
23. His final position is well expressed in some parts of the exegesis of Genesis (in the op. lat. exeget. edited by Elsperger).
Vol. IV, p. 109: "Neque hæc fuit levis tentatio, intentum esse suæ vocationi et de aliis non esse curiosum. . . . Paucissimi sunt, qui sua sorte vivant contenti . . . (p. 111). Nostrum autem est, ut vocanti Deo pareamus . . . (p. 112). Regula igitur hæc servanda est, ut unusquisque maneat in sua vocatione et suo dono contentus vivat, de aliis autem non sit curiosus." In effect that is thoroughly in accordance with Thomas Aquinas's formulation of traditionalism (Secunda secundæ, Quest. 118, Art. 1): "Unde necesse est, quod bonum hominis circa ea consistat in quadam mensura, dum scilicet homo . . . quærit habere exteriores divitas, prout sunt necessariæ ad vitam ejus secundum suam conditionem. Et ideo in excessu hujus mensuræ ​consistit peccatum, dum scilicet aliquis supra debitum modum vult eas vel acquirere vel retinere, quod pertinet ad avaritiam." The sinfulness of the pursuit of acquisition beyond the point set by the needs of one's station in life is based by Thomas on the lex naturæ as revealed by the purpose (ratio) of external goods; by Luther, on the other hand, on God's will. On the relation of faith and the calling in Luther see also Vol. VII, p. 225: ". . . quando es fidelis, tum placent Deo etiam physica, carnalia, animalia, officia, sive edas, sive bibas, sive vigiles, sive dormias, quæ mere corporalia et animalia sunt. Tanta res est fides. Verum est quidem, placere Deo etiam in impiis sedulitatem et industriam in officio [This activity in practical life is a virtue lege naturæ] sed obstat incredulitas et vana gloria, ne possint opera sua referre ad gloriam Dei [reminiscent of Calvinistic ways of speaking]. . . . Merentur igitur etiam impiorum bona opera in hac quidem vita præmia sua [as distinct from Augustine's 'vitia specie virtutum palliata'] sed non numerantur, non colliguntur in altero."
24. In the Kirchenpostille it runs (Erlangen edition, X, pp. 233, 235-6): "Everyone is called to some calling." He should wait for this call (on p. 236 it even becomes command) and serve God in it. God takes pleasure not in man's achievements but in his obedience in this respect.
25. This explains why, in contrast to what has been said above about the effects of Pietism on women workers, modern business men sometimes maintain that strict Lutheran domestic workers to-day often, for instance in Westphalia, think very largely in traditional terms. Even without going over to the factory system, and in spite of the temptation of higher earnings, they resist changes in methods of work, and in explanation maintain that in the next world such trifles won't matter anyway. It is evident that the mere fact of Church membership and belief is not in itself of essential significance for conduct as a whole. It has been much more concrete religious values and ideals which have influenced the development of capitalism in its early stages and, to a lesser extent, still do.
26. Compare Tauler, Basle edition, Bl., pp. 161 ff.
27. Compare the peculiarly emotional sermon of Tauler referred to above, and the following one, 17, 18, verse 20.
28. Since this is the sole purpose of these present remarks on Luther, I have limited them to a brief preliminary sketch, which would, of course, be wholly inadequate as an appraisal of Luther's influence as a whole.
29. One who shared the philosophy of history of the Levellers would be in the fortunate position of being able to attribute this in turn to racial differences. They believed themselves to be the defenders of the Anglo-Saxon birthright, against the descendants of William the Conqueror and the Normans. It is astonishing enough that it ​has not yet occurred to anyone to maintain that the plebeian Round-heads were round-headed in the anthropometric sense!
30. Especially the English national pride, a result of Magna Charta and the great wars. The saying, so typical to-day, "She looks like an English girl" on seeing any pretty foreign girl, is reported as early as the fifteenth century.
31. These differences have, of course, persisted in England as well. Especially the Squirearchy has remained the centre of "merrie old England" down to the present day, and the whole period since the Reformation may be looked upon as a struggle of the two elements in English society. In this point I agree with M. J. Bonn's remarks (in the Frankfurter Zeitung) on the excellent study of v. Schulze-Gaevernitz on British Imperialism. Compare H. Levy in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 46, 3.
32. In spite of this and the following remarks, which in my opinion are clear enough, and have never been changed, I have again and again been accused of this.
CHAPTER IV
1. Zwinglianism we do not discuss separately, since after a short lease of power it rapidly lost in importance. Arminianism, the dogmatic peculiarity of which consisted in the repudiation of the doctrine of predestination in its strict form, and which also repudiated worldly asceticism, was organized as a sect only in Holland (and the United States). In this chapter it is without interest to us, or has only the negative interest of having been the religion of the merchant patricians in Holland (see below). In dogma it resembled the Anglican Church and most of the Methodist denominations. Its Erastian position (i.e. upholding the sovereignty of the State even in Church matters) was, however, common to all the authorities with purely political interests: the Long Parliament in England, Elizabeth, the Dutch States-General, and, above all, Oldenbarnereldt.
2. On the development of the concept of Puritanism see, above all, Sanford, Studies and Reflections of the Great Rebellion, p. 65 f. When we use the expression it is always in the sense which it took on in the popular speech of the seventeenth century, to mean the ascetically inclined religious movements in Holland and England without distinction of Church organization or dogma, thus including Independents, Congregationalists, Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers.
3. This has been badly misunderstood in the discussion of these questions. Especially Sombart, but also Brentano, continually cite the ethical writers (mostly those of whom they have heard through me) as codifications of rules of conduct without ever asking which of them were supported by psychologically effective religious sanctions.
​4. I hardly need to emphasize that this sketch, so far as it is concerned solely with the field of dogma, falls back everywhere on the formulations of the literature of the history of the Church and of doctrine. It makes no claim whatever to originality. Naturally I have attempted, so far as possible, to acquaint myself with the sources for the history of the Reformation. But to ignore in the process the intensive and acute theological research of many decades, instead of, as is quite indispensable, allowing oneself to be led from it to the sources, would have been presumption indeed. I must hope that the necessary brevity of the sketch has not led to incorrect formulations, and that I have at least avoided important misunderstandings of fact. The discussion contributes something new, for those familiar with theological literature only in the sense that the whole is, of course, considered from the point of view of our problem. For that reason many of the most important points, for instance the rational character of this asceticism and its significance for modern life, have naturally not been emphasized by theological writers.
This aspect, and in general the sociological side, has, since the appearance of this study, been systematically studied in the work of E. Troeltsch, mentioned above, whose Gerhard und Melancthon, as well as numerous reviews in the Gött. Gel. Anz., contained several preliminary studies to his great work. For reasons of space the references have not included everything which has been used, but for the most part only those works which that part of the text follows, or which are directly relevant to it. These are often older authors, where our problems have seemed closer to them. The insufficient pecuniary resources of German libraries have meant that in the provinces the most important source materials or studies could only be had from Berlin or other large libraries on loan for very short periods. This is the case with Voët, Baxter, Tyermans, Wesley, all the Methodist, Baptist, and Quaker authors, and many others of the earlier writers not contained in the Corpus Reformatorum. For any thorough study the use of English and American libraries is almost indispensable. But for the following sketch it was necessary (and possible) to be content with material available in Germany. In America recently the characteristic tendency to deny their own sectarian origins has led many university libraries to provide little or nothing new of that sort of literature. It is an aspect of the general tendency to the secularization of American life which will in a short time have dissolved the traditional national character and changed the significance of many of the fundamental institutions of the country completely and finally. It is now necessary to fall back on the small orthodox sectarian colleges.
5. On Calvin and Calvinism, besides the fundamental work of Kampschulte, the best source of information is the discussion of Erick Marcks (in his Coligny). Campbell, The Puritans in Holland, ​England, and America (2 vols.), is not always critical and unprejudiced. A strongly partisan anti-Calvinistic study is Pierson, Studien over Johan Calvijn. For the development in Holland compare, besides Motley, the Dutch classics, especially Groen van Prinsterer, Geschiedenis v.h. Vaderland; La Hollande et l'influence de Calvin (1864); Le parti anti-révolutionnaire et confessionnel dans l'église des P.B. (1860) (for modern Holland); further, above all, Fruin's Tien jaren mit den tachtigjarigen oorlog, and especially Naber, Calvinist of Libertijnsch. Also W. J. F. Nuyens, Gesch, der kerkel. an pol. geschillen in de Rep. d. Ver. Prov. (Amsterdam, 1886); A. Köhler, Die Niederl. ref. Kirche (Erlangen, 1856), for the nineteenth century. For France, besides Polenz, now Baird, Rise of the Huguenots. For England, besides Carlyle, Macaulay, Masson, and, last but not least, Ranke, above all, now the various works of Gardiner and Firth. Further, Taylor, A Retrospect of the Religious Life in England (1854), and the excellent book of Weingarten, Die englischen Revolutionskirchen. Then the article on the English Moralists by E. Troeltsch in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, third edition, and of course his Soziallehren. Also E. Bernstein's excellent essay in the Geschichte des Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1895, I, p. 50 ff.). The best bibliography (over seven thousand titles) is in Dexter, Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years (principally, though not exclusively, questions of Church organization). The book is very much better than Price (History of Nonconformism), Skeats, and others. For Scotland see, among others, Sack, Die Kirche von Schottland (1844), and the literature on John Knox. For the American colonies the outstanding work is Doyle, The English in America. Further, Daniel Wait Howe, The Puritan Republic; J. Brown, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors (third edition, Revell). Further references will be given later.
For the differences of doctrine the following presentation is especially indebted to Schneckenburger's lectures cited above. Ritschl's fundamental work, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (references to Vol. III of third edition), in its mixture of historical method with judgments of value, shows the marked peculiarities of the author, who with all his fine acuteness of logic does not always give the reader the certainty of objectivity. Where, for instance, he differs from Schneckenburger's interpretation I am often doubtful of his correctness, however little I presume to have an opinion of my own. Further, what he selects out of the great variety of religious ideas and feelings as the Lutheran doctrine often seems to be determined by his own preconceptions. It is what Ritschl himself conceives to be of permanent value in Lutheranism. It is Lutheranism as Ritschl would have had it, not always as it was. That the works of Karl Müller, Seeberg, and others have everywhere been made use of it is unnecessary to mention particularly. If in ​the following I have condemned the reader as well as myself to the penitence of a malignant growth of footnotes, it has been done in order to give especially the non-theological reader an opportunity to check up the validity of this sketch by the suggestion of related lines of thought.
6. In the following discussion we are not primarily interested in the origin, antecedents, or history of these ascetic movements, but take their doctrines as given in a state of full development.
7. For the following discussion I may here say definitely that we are not studying the personal views of Calvin, but Calvinism, and that in the form to which it had evolved by the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries in the great areas where it had a decisive influence and which were at the same time the home of capitalistic culture. For the present, Germany is neglected entirely, since pure Calvinism never dominated large areas here. Reformed is, of course, by no means identical with Calvinistic.
8. Even the Declaration agreed upon between the University of Cambridge and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the 17th Article of the Anglican Confession, the so-called Lambeth Article of 1595, which (contrary to the official version) expressly held that there was also predestination to eternal death, was not ratified by the Queen. The Radicals (as in Hanserd Knolly's Confession) laid special emphasis on the express predestination to death (not only the admission of damnation, as the milder doctrine would have it).
9. Westminster Confession, fifth official edition, London, 1717. Compare the Savoy and the (American) Hanserd Knolly's Declarations. On predestination and the Huguenots see, among others, Polenz, I, pp. 545 ff.
10. On Milton's theology see the essay of Eibach in the Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1879. Macaulay's essay on it, on the occasion of Sumner's translation of the Doctrina Christiana, rediscovered in 1823 (Tauchnitz edition, 185, pp. 1 ff.), is superficial. For more detail see the somewhat too schematic six-volume English work of Masson, and the German biography of Milton by Stern which rests upon it. Milton early began to grow away from the doctrine of predestination in the form of the double decree, and reached a wholly free Christianity in his old age. In his freedom from the tendencies of his own time he may in a certain sense be compared to Sebastian Franck. Only Milton was a practical and positive person, Franck predominantly critical. Milton is a Puritan only in the broader sense of the rational organization of his life in the world in accordance with the divine will, which formed the permanent inheritance of later times from Calvinism. Franck could be called a Puritan in much the same sense. Both, as isolated figures, must remain outside our investigation.
11. "Hic est fides summus gradus; credere Deum esse clementum, ​qui tarn paucos salvat, justum, qui sua voluntate nos damnabiles facit", is the text of the famous passage in De servo arbitrio.
12. The truth is that both Luther and Calvin believed fundamentally in a double God (see Ritschl's remarks in Geschichte des Pietismus and Kostlin, Gott in Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, third edition), the gracious and kindly Father of the New Testament, who dominates the first books of the Institutio Christiana, and behind him the Deus absconditus as an arbitrary despot. For Luther, the God of the New Testament kept the upper hand, because he avoided reflection on metaphysical questions as useless and dangerous, while for Calvin the idea of a transcendental God won out. In the popular development of Calvinism, it is true, this idea could not be maintained, but what took his place was not the Heavenly Father of the New Testament but the Jehovah of the Old.
13. Compare on the following: Scheibe, Calvins Prädestinationslehre (Halle, 1897). On Calvinistic theology in general, Heppe, Dogmatik der evangelisch-reformierten Kirche (Elberfeld, 1861).
14. Corpus Reformatorurm, LXXVII, pp. 186 ff.
15. The preceding exposition of the Calvinistic doctrine can be found in much the same form as here given, for instance in Hoornbeek's Theologia practica (Utrecht, 1663), L. II, c. I; de predestinatione, the section stands characteristically directly under the heading De Deo. The Biblical foundation for it is principally the first chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. It is unnecessary for us here to analyse the various inconsistent attempts to combine with the predestination and providence of God the responsibility and free will of the individual. They began as early as in Augustine's first attempt to develop the doctrine.
16. "The deepest community (with God) is found not in institutions or corporations or churches, but in the secrets of a solitary heart", as Dowden puts the essential point in his fine book Puritan and Anglican (p. 234). This deep spiritual loneliness of the individual applied as well to the Jansenists of Port Royal, who were also predestinationists.
17. "Contra qui huiusmodi ccetum [namely a Church which maintains a pure doctrine, sacraments, and Church discipline] contemnunt . . . salutis suae certi esse non possunt; et qui in illo contemtu perseverat electus non est." Olevian, De subst. feed., p. 222.
18. "It is said that God sent His Son to save the human race, but that was not His purpose. He only wished to help a few out of their degradation—and I say unto you that God died only for the elect" (sermon held in 1609 at Broek, near Rogge, Wtenbogaert, II, p. 9. Compare Nuyens, op. cit., II, p. 232). The explanation of the rôle of Christ is also confused in Hanserd Knolly's Confession. It is everywhere assumed that God did not need His instrumentality.
19. Entzauberung der Welt. On this process see the other essays in my Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. The peculiar position of ​the old Hebrew ethic, as compared with the closely related ethics of Egypt and Babylon, and its development after the time of the prophets, rested, as is shown there, entirely on this fundamental fact, the rejection of sacramental magic as a road to salvation. (This process is for Weber one of the most important aspects of the broader process of rationalization, in which he sums up his philosophy of history. See various parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and H. Grab, Der Begriff des Rationalen bei Max Weber.—Translator's Note.)
20. Similarly the most consistent doctrine held that baptism was required by positive ordinance, but was not necessary to salvation. For that reason the strictly Puritan Scotch and English Independents were able to maintain the principle that children of obvious reprobates should not be baptized (for instance, children of drunkards). An adult who desired to be baptized, but was not yet ripe for the communion, the Synod of Edam of 1586 (Art. 32, 1) recommended should be baptized only if his conduct were blameless, and he should have placed his desires sonder superstitie.
21. This negative attitude toward all sensuous culture is, as Dowden, op. cit., shows, a very fundamental element of Puritanism.
22. The expression individualism includes the most heterogeneous things imaginable. What is here understood by it will, I hope, be clear from the following discussion. In another sense of the word, Lutheranism has been called individualistic, because it does not attempt any ascetic regulation of life. In yet another quite different sense the word is used, for example, by Dietrich Schafer when in his study, "Zur Beurteilung des Wormser Konkordats", Abh. d. Berl. Akad. (1905), he calls the Middle Ages the era of pronounced individuality because, for the events relevant for the historian, irrational factors then had a significance which they do not possess to-day. He is right, but so perhaps are also those whom he attacks in his remarks, for they mean something quite different, when they speak of individuality and individualism. Jacob Burchhardt's brilliant ideas are to-day at least partly out of date, and a thorough analysis of these concepts in historical terms would at the present time be highly valuable to science. Quite the opposite is, of course, true when the play impulse causes certain historians to define the concept in such a way as to enable them to use it as a label for any epoch of history they please.
23. And in a similar, though naturally less sharp, contrast to the later Catholic doctrine. The deep pessimism of Pascal, which also rests on the doctrine of predestination, is, on the other hand, of Jansenist origin, and the resulting individualism of renunciation by no means agrees with the official Catholic position. See the study by Honigsheim on the French Jansenists, referred to in Chap. III, note 10.
24. The same holds for the Jansenists.
25. Bailey, Praxis pietatis (German edition, Leipzig, 1724), p. 187. Also P. J. Spener in his Theologische Bedenken (according to third ​edition, Halle, 1712) adopts a similar standpoint. A friend seldom gives advice for the glory of God, but generally for mundane (though not necessarily egotistical) reasons. "He [the knowing man] is blind in no man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers into needless fires. He sees the falseness of it [the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment", is the philosophy of Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 11). Baily (Praxis pietatis, p. 176) furthur recommends every morning before going out among people to imagine oneself going into a wild forest full of dangers, and to pray God for the "cloak of foresight and righteousness". This feeling is characteristic of all the ascetic denominations without exception, and in the case of many Pietists led directly to a sort of hermit's life within the world. Even Spangenburg in the (Moravian) Idea fides fratum, p. 382, calls attention with emphasis to Jer. xvii. 5: "Cursed is the man who trusteth in man." To grasp the peculiar misanthropy of this attitude, note also Hoornbeek's remarks (Theologia practica, I, p. 882) on the duty to love one's enemy: "Denique hoc magis nos ulicisimur, quo proximum, inultium nobis, tradimus ultori Deo—Quo quis plus se ulscitur, eo minus id pro ispo agis Deus." It is the same transfer of vengeance that is found in the parts of the Old Testament written after the exile; a subtle intensification and refinement of the spirit of revenge compared to the older "eye for an eye". On brotherly love, see below, note 34.
26. Of course the confessional did not have only that effect. The explanations, for instance, of Muthmann, Z. f. Rel. Psych., I, Heft 2, p. 65, are too simple for such a highly complex psychological problem as the confessional.
27. This is a fact which is of especial importance for the interpretation of the psychological basis of Calvinistic social organizations. They all rest on spiritually individualistic, rational motives. The individual never enters emotionally into them. The glory of God and one's own salvation always remain above the threshold of consciousness. This accounts for certain characteristic features of the social organization of peoples with a Puritan past even today.
28. The fundamentally anti-authoritarian tendency of the doctrine, which at bottom undermined every responsibility for ethical conduct or spiritual salvation on the part of Church or State as useless, led again and again to its proscription, as, for instance, led by States General of the Netherlands. The result was always the formation of conventicles (as after 1614).
29. On Bunyan compare the biography of Froude in the English Men of Letters series, also Macaulay's superficial sketch (Miscel. Works, II, p. 227). Bunyan was indifferent to the denominational distinctions within Calvinism, but was himself a strict Calvinistic Baptist.
​30. It is tempting to refer to the undoubted importance for the social character of Reformed Christianity of the necessity for salvation, following from the Calvinistic idea of "incorporation into the body of Christ" (Calvin, Instit. Christ, III, 11, 10), of reception into a community conforming to the divine prescriptions. From our point of view, however, the centre of the problem is somewhat different. That doctrinal tenet could have been developed in a Church of purely institutional character (anstaltsmässig), and, as is well known, this did happen. But in itself it did not possess the psychological force to awaken the initiative to form such communities nor to imbue them with the power which Calvinism possessed. Its tendency to form a community worked itself out very largely in the world outside the Church organizations ordained by God. Here the belief that the Christian proved (see below) his state of grace by action in majorem Dei gloriam was decisive, and the sharp condemnation of idolatry of the flesh and of all dependence on personal relations to other men was bound unperceived to direct this energy into the field of objective (impersonal) activity. The Christian who took the proof of his state of grace seriously acted in the service of God's ends, and these could only be impersonal. Every purely emotional, that is not rationally motivated, personal relation of man to man easily fell in the Puritan, as in every ascetic ethic, under the suspicion of idolatry of the flesh. In addition to what has already been said, this is clearly enough shown for the case of friendship by the following warning: "It is an irrational act and not fit for a rational creature to love any one farther than reason will allow us. . . . It very often taketh men's minds so as to hinder their love of God" (Baxter, Christian Directory, IV, p. 253). We shall meet such arguments again and again.
The Calvinist was fascinated by the idea that God in creating the world, including the order of society, must have willed things to be objectively purposeful as a means of adding to His glory; not the flesh for its own sake, but the organization of the things of the flesh under His will. The active energies of the elect, liberated by the doctrine of predestination, thus flowed into the struggle to rationalize the world. Especially the idea that the public welfare, or as Baxter (Christian Directory, IV, p. 262) puts it, quite in the sense of later liberal rationalism, "The good of the many" (with a somewhat forced reference to Rom. ix. 3), was to be preferred to any personal or private good of the individual, followed, although not in itself new, for Puritanism from the repudiation of idolatry of the flesh. The traditional American objection to performing personal service is probably connected, besides the other important causes resulting from democratic feelings, at least indirectly with that tradition. Similarly, the relative immunity of formerly Puritan peoples to Cæsarism, and, in general, the subjectively free attitude of the English to their great statesmen as compared with many things which we ​have experienced since 1878 in Germany positively and negatively. On the one hand, there is a greater willingness to give the great man his due, but, on the other, a repudiation of all hysterical idolization of him and of the naïve idea that political obedience could be due anyone from thankfulness. On the sinfulness of the belief in authority, which is only permissible in the form of an impersonal authority, the Scriptures, as well as of an excessive devotion to even the most holy and virtuous of men, since that might interfere with obedience to God, see Baxter, Christian Directory (second edition, 1678), I, p. 56. The political consequences of the renunciation of idolatry of the flesh and the principle which was first applied only to the Church but later to life in general, that God alone should rule, do not belong in this investigation.
31. Of the relation between dogmatic and practical psychological consequence we shall often have to speak. That the two are not identical it is hardly necessary to remark.
32. Social, used of course without any of the implications attached to the modern sense of the word, meaning simply activity within the Church, politics, or any other social organization.
33. "Good works performed for any other purpose than the glory of God are sinful" (Hanserd Knolly's Confession, chap. xvi).
34. What such an impersonality of brotherly love, resulting from the orientation of life solely to God's will, means in the field of religious group life itself may be well illustrated by the attitude of the China Inland Mission and the International Missionaries Alliance (see Warneck, Gesch. d. prot. Missionären, pp. 99, 111). At tremendous expense an army of missionaries was fitted out, for instance one thousand for China alone, in order by itinerant preaching to offer the Gospel to all the heathen in a strictly literal sense, since Christ had commanded it and made His second coming dependent on it. Whether these heathen should be converted to Christianity and thus attain salvation, even whether they could understand the language in which the missionary preached, was a matter of small importance and could be left to God, Who alone could control such things. According to Hudson Taylor (see Warneck, op. cit.), China has about fifty million families; one thousand missionaries could each reach fifty families per day (!) or the Gospel could be presented to all the Chinese in less than three years. It is precisely the same manner in which, for instance, Calvinism carried out its Church discipline. The end was not the salvation of those subject to it, which was the affair of God alone (in practice their own) and could not be in any way influenced by the means at the disposal of the Church, but simply the increase of God's glory. Calvinism as such is not responsible for those feats of missionary zeal, since they rest on an interdenominational basis. Calvin himself denied the duty of sending missions to the heathen since a further expansion of the ​Church is unius Dei opus. Nevertheless, they obviously originate in the ideas, running through the whole Puritan ethic, according to which the duty to love one's neighbour is satisfied by fulfilling God's commandments to increase His glory. The neighbour thereby receives all that is due him, and anything further is God's affair. Humanity in relation to one's neighbour has, so to speak, died out. That is indicated by the most various circumstances.
Thus, to mention a remnant of that atmosphere, in the field of charity of the Reformed Church, which in certain respects is justly famous, the Amsterdam orphans, with (in the twentieth century!) their coats and trousers divided vertically into a black and a red, or a red and a green half, a sort of fool's costume, and brought in parade formation to church, formed, for the feelings of the past, a highly uplifting spectacle. It served the glory of God precisely to the extent that all personal and human feelings were necessarily insulted by it. And so, as we shall see later, even in all the details of private life. Naturally all that signified only a tendency and we shall later ourselves have to make certain qualifications. But as one very important tendency of this ascetic faith, it was necessary to point it out here.
35. In all these respects the ethic of Port Royal, although predestinationist, takes quite a different standpoint on account of its mystical and otherworldly orientation, which is in so far Catholic (see Honigsheim, op. cit.).
36. Hundeshagen (Beitr. z. Kirchenverfassungsgesch. u. Kirchenpolitik, 1864, I, p. 37) takes the view, since often repeated, that predestination was a dogma of the theologians, not a popular doctrine. But that is only true if the people is identified with the mass of the uneducated lower classes. Even then it has only limited validity. Köhler (op. cit.) found that in the forties of the nineteenth century just those masses (meaning the petite bourgeoisie of Holland) were thoroughly imbued with predestination. Anyone who denied the double decree was to them a heretic and a condemned soul. He himself was asked about the time of his rebirth (in the sense of predestination). Da Costa and the separation of de Kock were greatly influenced by it. Not only Cromwell, in whose case Zeller (Das Theologische System Zwinglis, p. 17) has already shown the effects of the dogma most effectively, but also his army knew very well what it was about. Moreover, the canons of the synods of Dordrecht and Westminster were national questions of the first importance. Cromwell's tryers and ejectors admitted only believers in predestination, and Baxter (Life, I, p. 72), although he was otherwise its opponent, considers its effect on the quality of the clergy to be important. That the Reformed Pietists, the members of the English and Dutch conventicles, should not have understood the doctrine is quite impossible. It was precisely what drove them together to seek the certitudo salutis.
​What significance the doctrine of predestination does or does not have when it remains a dogma of the theologians is shown by perfectly orthodox Catholicism, to which it was by no means strange as an esoteric doctrine under various forms. What is important is that the idea of the individual's obligation to consider himself of the elect and prove it to himself was always denied. Compare for the Catholic doctrine, for instance, A. Van Wyck, Tract. de prædestinatione (Cologne, 1708). To what extent Pascal's doctrine of predestination was correct, we cannot inquire here.
Hundeshagen, who dislikes the doctrine, evidently gets his impressions primarily from German sources. His antipathy is based on the purely deductive opinion that it necessarily leads to moral fatalism and antinomianism. This opinion has already been refuted by Zeller, op. cit. That such a result was possible cannot, of course, be denied. Both Melanchthon and Wesley speak of it. But it is characteristic that in both cases it is combined with an emotional religion of faith. For them, lacking the rational idea of proof, this consequence was in fact not unnatural.
The same consequences appeared in Islam. But why? Because the Mohammedan idea was that of predetermination, not predestination, and was applied to fate in this world, not in the next. In consequence the most important thing, the proof of the believer in predestination, played no part in Islam. Thus only the fearlessness of the warrior (as in the case of moira) could result, but there were no consequences for rationalization of life; there was no religious sanction for them. See the (Heidelberg) theological dissertation of F. Ullrich, Die Vorherbestimmungslehre im Islam u. Christenheit, 1900. The modifications of the doctrine which came in practice, for instance Baxter, did not disturb it in essence so long as the idea that the election of God, and its proof, fell upon the concrete individual, was not shaken. Finally, and above all, all the great men of Puritanism (in the broadest sense) took their departure from this doctrine, whose terrible seriousness deeply influenced their youthful development. Milton like, in declining order it is true, Baxter, and, still later, the free-thinker Franklin. Their later emancipation from its strict interpretation is directly parallel to the development which the religious movement as a whole underwent in the same direction. And all the great religious revivals, at least in Holland, and most of those in England, took it up again.
37. As is true in such a striking way of the basic atmosphere of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
38. This question meant less to the later Lutheran, even apart from the doctrine of predestination, than to the Calvinist. Not because he was less interested in the salvation of his soul, but because, in the form which the Lutheran Church had taken, its character as an institution for salvation (Heilsanstalt) came to the fore. The individual ​thus felt himself to be an object of its care and dependent on it. The problem was first raised within Lutheranism characteristically enough through the Pietist movement. The question of certitudo salutis itself has, however, for every non-sacramental religion of salvation, whether Buddhism, Jainism, or anything else, been absolutely fundamental; that must not be forgotten. It has been the origin of all psychological drives of a purely religious character.
39. Thus expressly in the letter to Bucer, Corp. Ref. 29, p. 883 f. Compare with that again Scheibe, op. cit., p. 30.
40. The Westminster Confession (XVIII, p. 2) also assures the elect of indubitable certainty of grace, although with all our activity we remain useless servants and the struggle against evil lasts one's whole life long. But even the chosen one often has to struggle long and hard to attain the certitudo which the consciousness of having done his duty gives him and of which a true believer will never entirely be deprived.
41. The orthodox Calvinistic doctrine referred to faith and the consciousness of community with God in the sacraments, and mentioned the "other fruits of the Spirit" only incidentally. See the passages in Heppe, op. cit., p. 425. Calvin himself most emphatically denied that works were indications of favour before God, although he, like the Lutherans, considered them the fruits of belief (Instit. Christ, III, 2, 37, 38). The actual evolution to the proof of faith through works, which is characteristic of asceticism, is parallel to a gradual modification of the doctrines of Calvin. As with Luther, the true Church was first marked off primarily by purity of doctrine and sacraments, but later the disciplina came to be placed on an equal footing with the other two. This evolution may be followed in the passages given by Heppe, op. cit., pp. 194-5, as well as in the manner in which Church members were acquired in the Netherlands by the end of the sixteenth century (express subjection by agreement to Church discipline as the principal prerequisite).
42. For example, Olevian, De substantia fœderis gratuiti inter Deum et electos (1585), p. 257; Heidegger, Corpus Theologiæ, XXIV, p. 87; and other passages in Heppe, Dogmatik der ev. ref. Kirche (1861), p. 425.
43. On this point see the remarks of Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 48.
44. Thus, for example, in Baxter the distinction between mortal and venial sin reappears in a truly Catholic sense. The former is a sign of the lack of grace which can only be attained by the conversion of one's whole life. The latter is not incompatible with grace.
45. As held in many different shades by Baxter, Bailey, Sedgwick, Hoornbeek. Further see examples given by Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 262.
46. The conception of the state of grace as a sort of social estate (somewhat like that of the ascetics of the early Church) is very common.
​See for instance Schortinghuis, Het innige Christendom (1740 proscribed by the States-General)!
47. Thus, as we shall see later, in countless passages, especially the conclusion, of Baxter's Christian Directory. This recommendation of worldly activity as a means of overcoming one's own feeling of moral inferiority is reminiscent of Pascal's psychological interpretation of the impulse of acquisition and ascetic activity as means to deceive oneself about one's own moral worthlessness. For him the belief in predestination and the conviction of the original sinfulness of everything pertaining to the flesh resulted only in renunciation of the world and the recommendation of contemplation as the sole means of lightening the burden of sin and attaining certainty of salvation. Of the orthodox Catholic and the Jansenist versions of the idea of calling an acute analysis has been made by Dr. Paul Honigsheim in the dissertation cited above (part of a larger study, which it is hoped will be continued). The Jansenists lacked every trace of a connection between certainty of salvation and worldly activity. Their concept of calling has, even more strongly than the Lutheran or even the orthodox Catholic, the sense of acceptance of the situation in life in which one finds oneself, sanctioned not only, as in Catholicism by the social order, but also by the voice of one's own conscience (Honigsheim, op. cit., pp. 139 ff.).
48. The very lucidly written sketch of Lobstein in the Festgabe für H. Holtzmann, which starts from his view-point, may also be compared with the following. It has been criticized for too sharp an emphasis on the certitudo salutis. But just at this point Calvin's theology must be distinguished from Calvinism, the theological system from the needs of religious practice. All the religious movements which have affected large masses have started from the question, "How can I become certain of my salvation?" As we have said, it not only plays a central part in this case but in the history of all religions, even in India. And could it well be otherwise?
49. Of course it cannot be denied that the full development of this conception did not take place until late Lutheran times (Prætorius, Nicolai, Meisner). It is present, however, even in Johannes Gerhard, quite in the sense meant here. Hence Ritschl in Book IV of his Geschichte des Pietismus (II, pp. 3 ff.) interprets the introduction of this concept into Lutheranism as a Renaissance or an adoption of Catholic elements. He does not deny (p. 10) that the problem of individual salvation was the same for Luther as for the Catholic Mystics, but he believes that the solution was precisely opposite in the two cases. I can, of course, have no competent opinion of my own. That the atmosphere of Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen is different, on the one hand, from the sweet flirtation with the liebem Jesulein of the later writers, and on the other from Tauler's religious feeling, is naturally obvious to anyone. Similarly the retention of ​the mystic-magical element in Luther's doctrines of the Communion certainly has different religious motives from the Bernhardine piety, the "Song of Songs feeling" to which Ritschl again and again returns as the source of the bridal relations with Christ. But might not, among other things, that doctrine of the Communion have favoured the revival of mystical religious emotions? Further, it is by no means accurate to say that (p. 11, op. cit.) the freedom of the mystic consisted entirely in isolation from the world. Especially Tauler has, in passages which from the point of view of the psychology of religion are very interesting, maintained that the order which is thereby brought into thoughts concerning worldly activities is one practical result of the nocturnal contemplation which he recommends, for instance, in case of insomnia. "Only thereby [the mystical union with God at night before going to sleep] is reason clarified and the brain strengthened, and man is the whole day the more peacefully and divinely guided by virtue of the inner discipline of having truly united himself with God: then all his works shall be set in order. And thus when a man has forewarned (= prepared) himself of his work, and has placed his trust in virtue; then if he comes into the world, his works shall be virtuous and divine" (Predigten, fol. 318). Thus we see, and we shall return to the point, that mystic contemplation and a rational attitude toward the calling are not in themselves mutually contradictory. The opposite is only true when the religion takes on a directly hysterical character, which has not been the case with all mystics nor even all Pietists.
50. On this see the introduction to the following essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen (not included in this translation: German in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie.—Translator's Note).
51. In this assumption Calvinism has a point of contact with official Catholicism. But for the Catholics there resulted the necessity of the sacrament of repentance; for the Reformed Church that of practical proof through activity in the world.
52. See, for instance, Beza (De prædestinat doct. ex prælect. in Rom 9a, Raph. Eglino exc. 1584), p. 133: "Sicut ex operibus vere bonis ad sanctificationis donum, a sanctificatione ad fidem—ascendimus: ita ex certis illis effectis non quamvis vocationem, sed efficacem illam et ex hac vocatione electionem et ex electione donum prædestinationis in Christo tam firmam quam immotus est Dei thronus certissima connexione effectorum et causarum colligimus. . . ." Only with regard to the signs of damnation is it necessary to be careful, since it is a matter of final judgment. On this point the Puritans first differed. See further the thorough discussion of Schneckenburger, op. cit., who to be sure only cites a limited category of literature. In the whole Puritan literature this aspect comes out. "It will not be said, did you believe?—but: were you Doers or Talkers only?" says Bunyan. According to Baxter (The Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. xii), ​who teaches the mildest form of predestination, faith means subjection to Christ in heart and in deed. “Do what you are able first, and then complain of God for denying you grace if you have cause", was his answer to the objection that the will was not free and God alone was able to insure salvation (Works of the Puritan Divines, IV, p. 155). The investigation of Fuller (the Church historian) was limited to the one question of practical proof and the indications of his state of grace in his conduct. The same with Howe in the passage referred to elsewhere. Any examination of the Works of the Puritan Divines gives ample proofs.
Not seldom the conversion to Puritanism was due to Catholic ascetic writings, thus, with Baxter, a Jesuit tract. These conceptions were not wholly new compared with Calvin's own doctrine (Instit. Christ, chap. i, original edition of 1536, pp. 97, 113). Only for Calvin himself the certainty of salvation could not be attained in this manner (p. 147). Generally one referred to 1 John iii. 5 and similar passages. The demand for fides efficax is not—to anticipate—limited to the Calvinists. Baptist confessions of faith deal, in the article on predestination, similarly with the fruits of faith ("and that its—of regeneration proper evidence appears in the holy fruits of repentance and faith and newness of life"—Article 7 of the Confession printed in the Baptist Church Manual by J. N. Brown, D.D., Philadelphia, Am. Bapt. Pub. Soc.). In the same way the tract (under Mennonite influence), Oliif-Tacxken, which the Harlem Synod adopted in 1649, begins on page 1 with the question of how the children of God are to be known, and answers (p. 10): "Nu al is't dat dasdanigh vruchtbare ghelove alleene zii het seker fondamentale kennteeken—om de conscientien der gelovigen in het nieuwe verbondt der genade Gods te versekeren."
53. Of the significance of this for the material content of social ethics some hint has been given above. Here we are interested not in the content, but in the motives of moral action.
54. How this idea must have promoted the penetration of Puritanism with the Old Testament Hebrew spirit is evident.
55. Thus the Savoy Declaration says of the members of the ecclesia pura that they are "saints by effectual calling, visibly manifested by their profession and walking”.
56. "A Principle of Goodness", Charnock in the Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 175.
57. Conversion is, as Sedgwick puts it, an "exact copy of the decree of predestination". And whoever is chosen is also called to obedience and made capable of it, teaches Bailey. Only those whom God calls to His faith (which is expressed in their conduct) are true believers, not merely temporary believers, according to the (Baptist) Confession of Hanserd Knolly.
58. Compare, for instance, the conclusion to Baxter's Christian Directory. ​59. Thus, for instance, Charnock, Self-Examination, p. 183, in refutation of the Catholic doctrine of dubitatio.
60. This argument recurs again and again in Hoornbeek, Theologia practica. For instance, I, p. 160; II, pp. 70, 72, 182.
61. For instance, the Conf. Helvet, 16, says "et improprie his [the works] salus adtribuitur".
62. With all the above compare Schneckenburger, pp. 80 ff.
63. Augustine is supposed to have said "si non es prædestinatus, fac ut prædestineris".
64. One is reminded of a saying of Goethe with essentially the same meaning: "How can a man know himself? Never by observation, but through action. Try to do your duty and you will know what is in you. And what is your duty? Your daily task."
65. For though Calvin himself held that saintliness must appear on the surface (Instit. Christ, IV, pp. 1, 2, 7, 9), the dividing-line between saints and sinners must ever remain hidden from human knowledge. We must believe that where God's pure word is alive in a Church, organized and administered according to His law, some of the elect, even though we do not know them, are present.
66. The Calvinistic faith is one of the many examples in the history of religions of the relation between the logical and the psychological consequences for the practical religious attitude to be derived from certain religious ideas. Fatalism is, of course, the only logical consequence of predestination. But on account of the idea of proof the psychological result was precisely the opposite. For essentially similar reasons the followers of Nietzsche claim a positive ethical significance for the idea of eternal recurrence. This case, however, is concerned with responsibility for a future life which is connected with the active individual by no conscious thread of continuity, while for the Puritan it was tua res agitur. Even Hoornbeek (Theologia practica, I, p. 159) analyses the relation between predestination and action well in the language of the times. The electi are, on account of their election, proof against fatalism because in their rejection of it they prove themselves "quos ipsa electio sollicitos reddit et diligentes officiorum". The practical interests cut off the fatalistic consequences of logic (which, however, in spite of everything occasionally did break through).
But, on the other hand, the content of ideas of a religion is, as Calvinism shows, far more important than William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, p. 444 f.) is inclined to admit. The significance of the rational element in religious metaphysics is shown in classical form by the tremendous influence which especially the logical structure of the Calvinistic concept of God exercised on life. If the God of the Puritans has influenced history as hardly another before or since, it is principally due to the attributes which the power of thought had given him. James's pragmatic valuation of the significance of religious ideas according to their influence on life is inci​dentally a true child of the world of ideas of the Puritan home of that eminent scholar. The religious experience as such is of course irrational, like every experience. In its highest, mystical form it is even the experience κατ' ἐξοχὴν, and, as James has well shown, is distinguished by its absolute incommunicability. It has a specific character and appears as knowledge, but cannot be adequately reproduced by means of our lingual and conceptual apparatus. It is further true that every religious experience loses some of its content in the attempt of rational formulation, the further the conceptual formulation goes, the more so. That is the reason for many of the tragic conflicts of all rational theology, as the Baptist sects of the seventeenth century already knew. But that irrational element, which is by no means peculiar to religious experience, but applies (in different senses and to different degrees) to every experience, does not prevent its being of the greatest practical importance, of what particular type the system of ideas is, that captures and moulds the immediate experience of religion in its own way. For from this source develop, in times of great influence of the Church on life and of strong interest in dogmatic considerations within it, most of those differences between the various religions in their ethical consequences which are of such great practical importance. How unbelievably intense, measured by present standards, the dogmatic interests even of the layman were, everyone knows who is familiar with the historical sources. We can find a parallel to-day only in the at bottom equally superstitious belief of the modern proletariat in what can be accomplished and proved by science.
67. Baxter, The Saints' Everlasting Rest, I, p. 6, answers to the question: "Whether to make salvation our end be not mercenary or legal? It is properly mercenary when we expect it as wages for work done. . . . Otherwise it is only such a mercenarism as Christ commandeth and if seeking Christ be mercenary, I desire to be so mercenary." Nevertheless, many Calvinists who are considered orthodox do not escape falling into a very crass sort of mercenariness. According to Bailey, Praxis pietatis, p. 262, alms are a means of escaping temporal punishment. Other theologians urged the damned to perform good works, since their damnation might thereby become somewhat more bearable, but the elect because God will then not only love them without cause but ob causam, which shall certainly sometime have its reward. The apologists have also made certain small concessions concerning the significance of good works for the degree of salvation (Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 101).
68. Here also it is absolutely necessary, in order to bring out the characteristic differences, to speak in terms of ideal types, thus in a certain sense doing violence to historical reality. But without this a clear formulation would be quite impossible considering the complexity of the material. In how far the differences which we here draw as sharply as possible were merely relative, would have to be discussed separately. It is, of course, true that the official Catholic ​doctrine, even in the Middle Ages, itself set up the ideal of a systematic sanctification of life as a whole. But it is just as certain (1) that the normal practice of the Church, directly on account of its most effective means of discipline, the confession, promoted the unsystematic way of life discussed in the text, and further (2) that the fundamentally rigorous and cold atmosphere in which he lived and the absolute isolation of the Calvinst were utterly foreign to mediæval lay-Catholicism.
69. The absolutely fundamental importance of this factor will, as has already once been pointed out, gradually become clear in the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen.
70. And to a certain extent also to the Lutheran. Luther did not wish to eliminate this last vestige of sacramental magic.
71. Compare, for instance, Sedgwick, Buss- und Gnadenlehre (German by Roscher, 1689). The repentant man has a fast rule to which he holds himself exactly, ordering thereby his whole life and conduct (p. 591). He lives according to the law, shrewdly, wakefully, and carefully (p. 596). Only a permanent change in the whole man can, since it is a result of predestination, cause this (p. 852). True repentance is always expressed in conduct (p. 361). The difference between only morally good work and opera spiritualia lies, as Hoornbeek (op. cit., I, IX, chap. ii) explains, in the fact that the latter are the results of a regenerate life (op. cit., I, p. 160). A continuous progress in them is discernible which can only be achieved by the supernatural influence of God's grace (p. 150). Salvation results from the transformation of the whole man through the grace of God (p. 190 f.). These ideas are common to all Protestantism, and are of course found in the highest ideals of Catholicism as well. But their consequences could only appear in the Puritan movements of worldly asceticism, and above all only in those cases did they have adequate psychological sanctions.
72. The latter name is, especially in Holland, derived from those who modelled their lives precisely on the example of the Bible (thus with Voet). Moreover, the name Methodists occurs occasionally among the Puritans in the seventeenth century.
73. For, as the Puritan preachers emphasize (for instance Bunyan in the Pharisee and the Publican, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 126), every single sin would destroy everything which might have been accumulated in the way of merit by good works in a lifetime, if, which is unthinkable, man were alone able to accomplish anything which God should necessarily recognize as meritorious, or even could live in perfection for any length of time. Thus Puritanism did not think as did Catholicism in terms of a sort of account with calculation of the balance, a simile which was common even in antiquity, but of the definite alternative of grace or damnation held for a life as a whole. For suggestions of the bank account idea see note 102 below.
​74. Therein lies the distinction from the mere Legality and Civility which Bunyan has living as associates of Mr. Worldly-Wiseman in the City called Morality.
75. Charnock, Self-Examination (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 172): "Reflection and knowledge of self is a prerogative of a rational nature." Also the footnote: "Cogito, ergo sum, is the first principle of the new philosophy."
76. This is not yet the place to discuss the relationship of the theology of Duns Scotus to certain ideas of ascetic Protestantism. It never gained official recognition, but was at best tolerated and at times proscribed. The later specific repugnance of the Pietists to Aristotelean philosophy was shared by Luther, in a somewhat different sense, and also by Calvin in conscious antagonism to Catholicism (cf. Instit. Christ, II, chap. xii, p. 4; IV, chap. xvii, p. 24). The "primacy of the will", as Kahl has put it, is common to all these movements.
77. Thus, for instance, the article on "Asceticism" in the Catholic Church Lexicon defines its meaning entirely in harmony with its highest historical manifestations. Similarly Seeberg in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. For the purpose of this study we must be allowed to use the concept as we have done. That it can be defined in other ways, more broadly as well as more narrowly, and is generally so defined, I am well aware.
78. In Hudibras (1st Song, 18, 19) the Puritans are compared with the bare-foot Franciscans. A report of the Genoese Ambassador, Fieschi, calls Cromwell's army an assembly of monks.
79. In view of the close relationship between otherworldly monastic asceticism and active worldly asceticism, which I here expressly maintain, I am surprised to find Brentano (op. cit., p. 134 and elsewhere) citing the ascetic labour of the monks and its recommendation against me. His whole "Exkurs" against me culminates in that. But that continuity is, as anyone can see, a fundamental postulate of my whole thesis: the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodical habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of active life in the world. Compare the following discussion, which has not been altered.
80. So in the many reports of the trials of Puritan heretics cited in Neal's History of the Puritans and Crosby's English Baptists.
81. Sanford, op. cit. (and both before and after him many others), has found the origin of the ideal of reserve in Puritanism. Compare on that ideal also the remarks of James Bryce on the American college in Vol. II of his American Commonwealth. The ascetic principle of self-control also made Puritanism one of the fathers of modern military discipline. (On Maurice of Orange as a founder of modern army organization, see Roloff, Preuss. Jahrb., 1903, III, p. 255.) Cromwell's Ironsides, with cocked pistols in their hands, and approaching the enemy at a brisk trot without shooting, were not the superiors of ​the Cavaliers by virtue of their fierce passion, but, on the contrary, through their cool self-control, which enabled their leaders always to keep them well in hand. The knightly storm-attack of the Cavaliers, on the other hand, always resulted in dissolving their troops into atoms. See Firth, Cromwell's Army.
82. See especially Windelband, Ueber Willensfreiheit, pp. 77 ff.
83. Only not so unmixed. Contemplation, sometimes combined with emotionalism, is often combined with these rational elements. But again contemplation itself is methodically regulated.
84. According to Richard Baxter everything is sinful which is contrary to the reason given by God as a norm of action. Not only passions which have a sinful content, but all feelings which are senseless and intemperate as such. They destroy the countenance and, as things of the flesh, prevent us from rationally directing all action and feeling to God, and thus insult Him. Compare what is said of the sinfulness of anger (Christian Directory, second edition, 1698, p. 285. Tauler is cited on p. 287). On the sinfulness of anxiety, Ebenda, I, p. 287. That it is idolatry if our appetite is made the "rule or measure of eating" is maintained very emphatically (op. cit., I, pp. 310, 316, and elsewhere). In such discussions reference is made everywhere to the Proverbs and also to Plutarch's De tranquilitate Animi, and not seldom to ascetic writings of the Middle Ages: St. Bernard, Bonaventura, and others. The contrast to "who does not love wine, women, and song . . ." could hardly be more sharply drawn than by the extension of the idea of idolatry to all sensuous pleasures, so far as they are not justified by hygienic considerations, in which case they (like sport within these limits, but also other recreations) are permissible. See below (Chapter V) for further discussion. Please note that the sources referred to here and elsewhere are neither dogmatic nor edifying works, but grew out of practical ministry, ministry, and thus give a good picture of the direction which its influence took.
85. I should regret it if any evaluation of one or the other form of religion should be read into this discussion. We are not concerned with that here. It is only a question of the influence of certain things which, from a purely religious point of view, are perhaps incidental, but important for practical conduct.
86. On this, see especially the article "Moralisten, englische", by E. Troeltsch, in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, third edition.
87. How much influence quite definite religious ideas and situations, which seem to be historical accidents, have had is shown unusually clearly by the fact that in the circles of Pietism of a Reformed origin the lack of monasteries was occasionally directly regretted, and that the communistic experiments of Labadie and others were simply a substitute for monastic life.
​88. As early even as several confessions of the time of the Reformation. Even Ritschl (Pietismus, I, p. 258 f.) does not deny, although he looks upon the later development as a deterioration of the ideas of the Reformation, that, for instance, in Conf. Gall. 25, 26, Conf. Belg. 29, Conf. Helv. post, 17, the true Reformed Church was defined by definitely empirical attributes, and that to this true Church believers were not accounted without the attribute of moral activity. (See above, note 42.)
89. "Bless God that we are not of the many" (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138).
90. The idea of the birthright, so important in history, thus received an important confirmation in England. "The firstborn which are written in heaven. . . . As the firstborn is not to be defeated in his inheritance, and the enrolled names are never to be obliterated, so certainly they shall inherit eternal life" (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. xiv).
91. The Lutheran emphasis on penitent grief is foreign to the spirit of ascetic Calvinism, not in theory, but definitely in practice. For it is of no ethical value to the Calvinist; it does not help the damned, while for those certain of their election, their own sin, so far as they admit it to themselves, is a symptom of backwardness in development. Instead of repenting of it they hate it and attempt to overcome it by activity for the glory of God. Compare the explanation of Howe (Cromwell's chaplain 1656-58) in Of Men's Enmity against God and of reconciliation between God and Man," Works of the English Puritan Divines, p. 237: "The carnal mind is enmity against God. It is the mind, therefore, not as speculative merely, but as practical and active that must be renewed", and, p. 246: "Recondliation . . . must begin in (1) a deep conviction . . . of your former enmity. . . . I have been alienated from God. . . . (2) (p. 251) a clear and lively apprehension of the monstrous iniquity and wickedne'Ss thereof.” The hatred here is that of sin, not of the sinner. But as early as the famous letter of the Duchess Renata d’Este (Leonore’s mother) to Calvin, in which she speaks of the hatred which she would feel toward her father and husband if she became convinced they belonged to the damned, is shown the transfer to the person. At the same time it is an example of what was said above [pp. 104-6] of how the individual became loosed from the ties resting on his natural feelings, for which the doctrine of predestination was responsible.
92. "None but those who give evidence of being regenerate or holy persons ought to be received or counted fit members of visible Churches. Where this is wanting, the very essence of a Church is lost", as the principle is put by Owen, the Independent-Calvinistic Vice-Chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell (Inv. into the Origin of Ev. Ch.). Further, see the following essay (not translated here.—Translator).
93. See following essay.
​94. Cat. Genev., p. 149. Bailey, Praxis pietatis, p. 125: "In life we should act as though no one but Moses had authority over us."
95. "The law appears to the Calvinist as an ideal norm of action. It oppresses the Lutheran because it is for him unattainable." In the Lutheran catechism it stands at the beginning in order to arouse the necessary humility, in the Reformed catechism it generally stands after the Gospel. The Calvinists accused the Lutherans of having a "virtual reluctance to becoming holy" (Möhler), while the Lutherans accused the Calvinists of an "unfree servitude to the law", and of arrogance.
96. Studies and Reflections of the Great Rebellion, pp. 79 f.
97. Among them the Song of Songs is especially noteworthy. It was for the most part simply ignored by the Puritans. Its Oriental eroticism has influenced the development of certain types of religion, such as that of St. Bernard.
98. On the necessity of this self-observation, see the sermon of Charnock, already referred to, on 2 Cor. xiii. 5, Works of the Puritan Divines, pp. 161 ff.
99. Most of the theological moralists recommended it. Thus Baxter, Christian Directory, II, pp. 77 ff., who, however, does not gloss over its dangers.
100. Moral book-keeping has, of course, been widespread elsewhere. But the emphasis which was placed upon it as the sole means of knowledge of the eternal decree of salvation or damnation was lacking, and with it the most important psychological sanction for care and exactitude in this calculation.
101. This was the significant difference from other attitudes which were superficially similar.
102. Baxter (Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. xii) explains God's invisibility with the remark that just as one can carry on profitable trade with an invisible foreigner through correspondence, so is it possible by means of holy commerce with an invisible God to get possession of the one priceless pearl. These commercial similes rather than the forensic ones customary with the older moralists and the Lutherans are thoroughly characteristic of Puritanism, which in effect makes man buy his own salvation. Compare further the following passage from a sermon: "We reckon the value of a thing by that which a wise man will give for it, who is not ignorant of it nor under necessity. Christ, the Wisdom of God, gave Himself, His own precious blood, to redeem souls, and He knew what they were and had no need of them" (Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 313).
103. In contrast to that, Luther himself said: "Weeping goes before action and suffering excells all accomplishment" (Weinen geht vor Wirken und Leiden übertrifft alles tun).
104. This is also shown most clearly in the development of the ethical theory of Lutheranism. On this see Hoennicke, Studien zur ​altprotestantischen Ethik (Berlin, 1902), and the instructive review of it by E. Troeltsch, Gött. Gel. Anz., 1902, No. 8. The approach of the Lutheran doctrine, especially to the older orthodox Calvinistic, was in form often very close. But the difference of religious background was always apparent. In order to establish a connection between morality and faith, Melanchthon had placed the idea of repentance in the foreground. Repentance through the law must precede faith, but good works must follow it, otherwise it cannot be the truly justifying faith—almost a Puritan formula. Melanchthon admitted a certain degree of perfection to be attainable on earth. He had, in fact, originally taught that justification was given in order to make men capable of good works, and in increasing perfection lay at least the relative degree of blessedness which faith could give in this world. Also later Lutheran theologians held that good works are the necessary fruits of faith, that faith results in a new external life, just as the Reformed preachers did. The question in what good works consist Melanchthon, and especially the later Lutherans, answered more and more by reference to the law. There remained of Luther's original doctrines only the lesser degree of seriousness with which the Bible, especially the particular norms of the Old Testament, was taken. The decalogue remained, as a codification of the most important ideas of the natural moral law, the essential norm of human action. But there was no firm link connecting its legal validity with the more and more strongly emphasized importance of faith for justification, because this faith (see above) had a fundamentally different psychological character from the Calvinistic.
The true Lutheran standpoint of the early period had to be abandoned by a Church which looked upon itself as an institution for salvation. But another had not been found. Especially was it impossible, for fear of losing their dogmatic foundation (sola fide!), to accept the ascetic rationalization of conduct as the moral task of the individual. For there was no motive to give the idea of proof such a significance as it attained in Calvinism through the doctrine of predestination. Moreover, the magical interpretation of the sacraments, combined with the lack of this doctrine, especially the association of the regeneratio, or at least its beginning with baptism, necessarily, assuming as it did the universality of grace, hindered the development of methodical morality. For it weakened the contrast between the state of nature and the state of grace, especially when combined with the strong Lutheran emphasis on original sin. No less important was the entirely forensic interpretation of the act of justification which assumed that God's decrees might be changed through the influence of particular acts of repentance of the converted sinner. And that was just the element to which Melanchthon gave increasing emphasis. The whole development of his doctrine, which gave increasing weight to repentance, was intimately connected with his ​profession of the freedom of the will. That was what primarily determined the unmethodical character of Lutheran conduct.
Particular acts of grace for particular sins, not the development of an aristocracy of saints creating the certainty of their own salvation, was the necessary form salvation took for the average Lutheran, as the retention of the confession proves. Thus it could develop neither a morality free from the law nor a rational asceticism in terms of the law. Rather the law remained in an unorganic proximity to faith as an ideal, and, moreover, since the strict dependence on the Bible was avoided as suggesting salvation by works, it remained uncertain, vague, and, above all, unsystematic in its content. Their conduct remained, as Troeltsch has said of their ethical theory, a "sum of mere beginnings which never quite materialized"; which, "taught in particular, uncertain, and unrelated maxims", did not succeed in "working out an articulate system of conduct", but formed essentially, following the development through which Luther himself (see above) had gone, a resignation to things as they were in matters both small and great. The resignation of the Germans to foreign cultures, their rapid change of nationality, of which there is so much complaint, is clearly to be attributed, along with certain political circumstances in the history of the nation, in part to the results of this influence, which still affects all aspects of our life. The subjective assimilation of culture remained weak because it took place primarily by means of a passive absorption of what was authoritatively presented.
105. On these points, see the gossipy book of Tholuck, Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus.
106. On the quite different results of the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination (or rather predetermination) and the reasons for it, see the theological dissertation (Heidelberg) of F. Ullrich, Die Vorherbestimmungslehre im Islam u. Ch., 1912. On that of the Jansenists, see P. Honigsheim, op. cit.
107. See the following essay in this collection (not translated here).
108. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 152, attempts to distinguish them for the time before Labadie (only on the basis of examples from the Netherlands) (1) in that the Pietists formed conventicles; (2) they held the doctrine of the "worthlessness of existence in the flesh" in a "manner contrary to the Protestant interests in salvation"; (3) "the assurance of grace in the tender relationship with the Lord Jesus" was sought in an un-Calvinistic manner. The last criterion applies for this early period only to one of the cases with which he deals. The idea of worthlessness of the flesh was in itself a true child of the Calvinistic spirit, and only where it led to practical renunciation of the world was it antagonistic to normal Protestantism. The conventicles, finally, had been established to a certain extent (especially for catechistic purposes) by the Synod of Dordrecht itself. Of the criteria of Pietism analysed ​in Ritschl's previous discussion, those worth considering are (1) the greater precision with which the letter of the Bible was followed in all external affairs of life, as Gisbert Voet for a time urged; (2) the treatment of justification and reconciliation with God, not as ends in themselves, but simply as means toward a holy ascetic life as can be seen perhaps in Lodensteyn, but as is also suggested by Melanchthon [see above, note 104]; (3) the high value placed on repentance as a sign of true regeneration, as was first taught by W. Teellinck (4) abstention from communion when unregenerate persons partake of it (of which we shall speak in another connection). Connected with that was the formation of conventicles with a revival of prophecy, i.e. interpretation of the Scriptures by laymen, even women. That went beyond the limits set by the canons of Dordrecht.
Those are all things forming departures, sometimes considerable, from both the doctrine and practice of the Reformers. But compared with the movements which Ritschl does not include in his treatment, especially the English Puritans, they form, except for No. 3, only a continuation of tendencies which lay in the whole line of development of this religion. The objectivity of Ritschl's treatment suffers from the fact that the great scholar allows his personal attitude towards the Church or, perhaps better, religious policy, to enter in, and, in his antipathy to all peculiarly ascetic forms of religion, interprets any development in that direction as a step back into Catholicism. But, like Catholicism, the older Protestantism included all sorts and conditions of men. But that did not prevent the Catholic Church from repudiating rigorous worldly asceticism in the form of Jansenism; just as Pietism repudiated the peculiar Catholic Quietism of the seventeenth century. From our special view-point Pietism differs not in degree, but in kind from Calvinism only when the increasing fear of the world leads to flight from ordinary economic life and the formation of monastic-communistic conventicles (Labadie). Or, which has been attributed to certain extreme Pietists by their contemporaries, they were led deliberately to neglect worldly duties in favour of contemplation. This naturally happened with particular frequency when contemplation began to assume the character which Ritschl calls Bernardism, because it suggests St. Bernard's interpretation of the Song of Songs: a mystical, emotional form of religion seeking the unio mystica with an esoteric sexual tinge. Even from the view-point of religious psychology alone this is undoubtedly something quite different from Calvinism, including its ascetic form exemplified by men like Voet. Ritschl, however, everywhere attempts to connect this quietism with the Pietist asceticism and thus to bring the latter under the same indictment; in doing so he puts his finger on every quotation from Catholic mysticism or asceticism which he can find in Pietist literature. But English and Dutch moralists and theologians who are quite beyond suspicion cite Bernard, Bona​ventura, and Thomas à Kempis. The relationship of all the Reformation Churches to the Catholic past was very complex and, according to the point of view which is emphasized, one or another appears most closely related to Catholicism or certain sides of it.
109. The illuminating article on "Pietism" by Mirbt in the third edition of the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, treats the origin of Pietism, leaving its Protestant antecedents entirely on one side, as a purely personal religious experience of Spener, which is somewhat improbable. As an introduction to Pietism, Gustav Freytag's description in Bilder der deutschen Vergangenheit is still worth reading. For the beginnings of English Pietism in the contemporary literature, compare W. Whitaker, Prima Institutio disciplinaque pietatis (1570).
110. It is well known that this attitude made it possible for Pietism to be one of the main forces behind the idea of toleration. At this point we may insert a few remarks on that subject. In the West its historical origin, if we omit the humanistic indifference of the Enlightenment, which in itself has never had great practical influence, is to be found in the following principal sources: (1) Purely political expediency (type: William of Orange). (2) Mercantilism (especially clear for the City of Amsterdam, but also typical of numerous cities, landlords, and rulers who received the members of sects as valuable for economic progress). (3) The radical wing of Calvinism. Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy. For clerical positions were often granted as benefices to men from the universities only because of their theological training, though they might be personally unregenerate. In general, any interference in the affairs of the religious community by those in political power, whose conduct might often be unsatisfactory, was resented. Reformed Pietism strengthened this tendency by weakening the emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy and by gradually undermining the principle of extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
Calvin had regarded the subjection of the damned to the divine supervision of the Church as alone consistent with the glory of God; in New England the attempt was made to constitute the Church as an aristocracy of proved saints. Even the radical Independents, however, repudiated every interference of temporal or any sort of hierarchical powers with the proof of salvation which was only possible within the individual community. The idea that the glory of God requires the subjection of the damned to the discipline of ​the Church was gradually superseded by the other idca, which was present from the beginning and became gradually more prominent, that it was an insult to His glory to partake of the Communion with one rejected by God. That necessarily led to voluntarism, for it led to the believers' Church the religious community which included only the twice-born. Calvinistic Baptism, to which, for instance, the leader of the Parliament of Saints Praisegod Barebones belonged, drew the consequences of this line of thought with great emphasis. Cromwell's army upheld the liberty of conscience and the parliament of saints even advocated the separation of Church and State, because its members were good Pietists, thus on positive religious grounds. (4) The Baptist sects, which we shall discuss later, have from the beginning of their history most strongly and consistently maintained the principle that only those personally regenerated could be admitted to the Church. Hence they repudiated every conception of the Church as an institution (Anstalt) and every interference of the temporal power. Here also it was for positive religious reasons that unconditional toleration was advocated.
The first man who stood out for absolute toleration and the separation of Church and State, almost a generation before the Baptists and two before Roger Williams, was probably John Browne. The first declaration of a Church group in this sense appears to be the resolution of the English Baptists in Amsterdam of 1612 or 1613: "The magistrate is not to middle with religion or matters of conscience . . . because Christ is the King and Law-giver of the Church and conscience." The first official document of a Church which claimed the positive protection of liberty of conscience by the State as a right was probably Article 44 of the Confession of the Particular Baptists of 1644.
Let it be emphatically stated again that the idea sometimes brought forward, that toleration as such was favourable to capitalism, is naturally quite wrong. Religious toleration is neither peculiar to modern times nor to the West. It has ruled in China, in India, in the great empires of the Near East in Hellenistic times, in the Roman Empire and the Mohammedan Empires for long periods to a degree only limited by reasons of political expediency (which form its limits to-day also!) which was attained nowhere in the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, it was least strong in those areas which were dominated by Puritanism, as, for instance, Holland and Zeeland in their period of political and economic expansion or in Puritan old or New England. Both before and after the Reformation, religious intolerance was peculiarly characteristic of the Occident as of the Sassanian Empire. Similarly, it has prevailed in China, Japan, and India at certain particular times, though mostly for political reasons. Thus toleration as such certainly has nothing whatever to do with capitalism. The real question is, Who benefited by it? Of the ​consequences of the believers' Church we shall speak further in the following article.
111. This idea is illustrated in its practical application by Cromwell's tryers, the examiners of candidates for the position of preacher. They attempted to ascertain not only the knowledge of theology, but also the subjective state of grace of the candidate. See also the following article.
112. The characteristic Pietistic distrust of Aristotle and classical philosophy in general is suggested in Calvin himself (compare Instit. Christ, II, chap. ii, p. 4; III, chap. xxiii, p. 5; IV, chap. xvii, p. 24). Luther in his early days distrusted it no less, but that was later changed by the humanistic influence (especially of Melanchthon) and the urgent need of ammunition for apologetic purposes. That everything necessary for salvation was contained in the Scriptures plainly enough for even the untutored was, of course, taught by the Westminster Confession (chap.i, No. 7.), in conformity with the whole Protestant tradition.
113. The official Churches protested against this, as, for example, in the shorter catechism of the Scotch Presbyterian Church of 1648, sec. vii. Participation of those not members of the same family in family devotions was forbidden as interference with the prerogatives of the office. Pietism, like every ascetic community-forming movement, tended to loosen the ties of the individual with domestic patriarchalism, with its interest in the prestige of office.
114. We are here for good reasons intentionally neglecting discussion of the psychological, in the technical sense of the word, aspect of these religious phenomena, and even its terminology has been as far as possible avoided. The firmly established results of psychology, including psychiatry, do not as present go far enough to make them of use for the purposes of the historical investigation of our problems without prejudicing historical judgments. The use of its terminology would only form a temptation to hide phenomena which were immediately understandable, or even sometimes trivial, behind a veil of foreign words, and thus give a false impression of scientific exactitude, such as is unfortunately typical of Lamprecht. For a more serious attempt to make use of psychological concepts in the interpretation of certain historical mass phenomena, see W. Hellpach, Grundlinien zu einer Psychologie der Hysterie, chap. xii, as well as his Nervosität und Kultur. I cannot here attempt to explain that in my opinion even this many-sided writer has been harmfully influenced by certain of Lamprecht's theories. How completely worthless, as compared with the older literature, Lamprecht's schematic treatment of Pietism is (in Vol. VII of the Deutsche Geschichte) everyone knows who has the slightest acquaintance with the literature.
115. Thus with the adherents of Schortinghuis's Innige Christendom. In the history of religion it goes back to the verse about the servant of God in Isaiah and the 22nd Psalm.
​116. This appeared occasionally in Dutch Pietism and then under the influence of Spinoza.
117. Labadie, Teersteegen, etc.
118. Perhaps this appears most clearly when he (Spener!) disputes the authority of the Government to control the conventicles except in cases of disorder and abuses, because it concerns a fundamental right of Christians guaranteed by apostolic authority (Theologische Bedenken, II, pp. 81 f.). That is, in principle, exactly the Puritan standpoint regarding the relations of the individual to authority and the extent to which individual rights, which follow ex jure divino and are therefore inalienable, are valid. Neither this heresy, nor the one mentioned farther on in the text, has escaped Ritschl (Pietismus, II, pp. 115, 157). However unhistorical the positivistic (not to say philistine) criticism to which he has subjected the idea of natural rights to which we are nevertheless indebted for not much less than everything which even the most extreme reactionary prizes as his sphere of individual freedom, we naturally agree entirely with him that in both cases an organic relationship to Spener's Lutheran standpoint is lacking.
The conventicles (collegia pietitatis) themselves, to which Spener's famous pia desideria gave the theoretical basis, and which he founded in practice, corresponded closely in essentials to the English prophesyings which were first practised in John of Lasco's London Bible Classes (1547), and after that were a regular feature of all forms of Puritanism which revolted against the authority of the Church. Finally, he bases his well-known repudiation of the Church discipline of Geneva on the fact that its natural executors, the third estate (status æconomicus: the Christian laity), were not even a part of the organization of the Lutheran Church. On the other hand, in the discussion of excommunication the lay members' recognition of the Consistorium appointed by the prince as representatives of the third estate is weakly Lutheran.
119. The name Pietism in itself, which first occurs in Lutheran territory, indicates that in the opinion of contemporaries it was characteristic of it that a methodical business was made out of pietas.
120. It is, of course, granted that though this type of motivation was primarily Calvinistic it is not exclusively such. It is also found with special frequency in some of the oldest Lutheran Church constitutions.
121. In the sense of Heb. v. 13, 14. Compare Spener, Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 306.
122. Besides Bailey and Baxter (see Consilia theologica, III, 6, 1; 1, 47; 3, 6), Spener was especially fond of Thomas à Kempis, and even more of Tauler-whom he did not entirely understand (op. cit., III, 61, 1, No. 1). For detailed discussion of the latter, see op. cit., I, 1, 1 No. 7. For him Luther is derived directly from Tauler.
​123. See in Ritschl, op. cit., II, p 113. He did not accept the repentance of the later Pietists (and of Luther) as the sole trustworthy indication of true conversion (Theologische Bedenken, III, p. 476). On sanctification as the fruit of thankfulness in the belief of forgiveness, a typically Lutheran idea, see passages cited by Ritschl, op. cit., p. 115, note 2. On the certitudo salutis see, on the one hand, Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 324: "true belief is not so much felt emotionally as known by its fruits" (love and obedience to God); on the other. Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 335 f.: "As far as anxiety that they should be assured of salvation and grace is concerned, it is better to trust to our books, the Lutheran, than to the English writings." But on the nature of sanctification he was at one with the English view-point.
124. Of this the religious account books which A. H. Francke recommended were external symptoms. The methodical practice and habit of virtue was supposed to cause its growth and the separation of good from evil. This is the principal theme of Francke's book. Von des Christen Vollkommenheit.
125. The difference between this rational Pietist belief in Providence and its orthodox interpretation is shown characteristically in the famous controversy between the Pietists of Halle and the orthodox Lutheran Löscher. Löscher in his Timotheus Verinus goes so far as to contrast everything that is attained by human action with the decrees of Providence. On the other hand, Francke 's consistent view was that the sudden flash of clarity over what is to happen, which comes as a result of quiet waiting for decision, is to be considered as "God's hint", quite analogous to the Quaker psychology, and corresponding to the general ascetic idea that rational methods are the way to approach nearer to God. It is true that Zinzendorf, who in one most vital decision entrusted the fate of his community to lot, was far from Francke's form of the belief in Providence. Spener, Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 314, referred to Tauler for a description of the Christian resignation in which one should bow to the divine will, and not cross it by hasty action on one's own responsibility, essentially the position of Francke. Its effectiveness as compared to Puritanism is essentially weakened by the tendency of Pietism to seek peace in this world, as can everywhere be clearly seen. "First righteousness, then peace", as was said in opposition to it in 1904 by a leading Baptist (G. White in an address to be referred to later) in formulating the ethical programme of his denomination (Baptist Handbook, 1904, p. 107).
126. Lect. paraenet., IV, p. 271.
127. Ritschl's criticism is directed especially against this continually recurrent idea. See the work of Francke containing the doctrine which has already been referred to. (See note 124 above.)
128. It occurs also among English Pietists who were not adherents of predestination, for instance Goodwin. On him and others compare ​Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche (Leiden, 1879), a book which even with Ritschl's standard work cannot yet be dispensed with for England, and here and there also for the Netherlands. Even in the nineteenth century in the Netherlands Köhler, Die Niederl. ref. Kirche, was asked about the exact time of his rebirth.
129. They attempted thus to counteract the lax results of the Lutheran doctrine of the recoverability of grace (especially the very frequent conversion in extremis).
130. Against the corresponding necessity of knowing the day and hour of conversion as an indispensable sign of its genuineness. See Spener, Theologische Bedenken, II, 6, 1, p. 197. Repentance was as little known to him as Luther's terrores conscientiæ to Melanchthon.
131. At the same time, of course, the anti-authoritarian interpretation of the universal priesthood, typical of all asceticism, played a part. Occasionally the minister was advised to delay absolution until proof was given of genuine repentance which, as Ritschl rightly says, was in principle Calvinistic.
132. The essential points for our purposes are most easily found in Plitt, Zinzendorf's Theologie (3 vols., Gotha, 1869), I, pp. 325, 345, 381, 412, 429, 433 f., 444, 448; II, pp. 372, 381, 385, 409 f.; III, pp. 131, 167, 176. Compare also Bernh. Becker, Zinzendorf und sein Christentum (Leipzig, 1900), Book III, chap. iii.
133. "In no religion do we recognize as brothers those who have not been washed in the blood of Christ and continue thoroughly changed in the sanctity of the Spirit. We recognize no evident (= visible) Church of Christ except where the Word of God is taught in purity and where the members live in holiness as children of God following its precepts." The last sentence, it is true, is taken from Luther's smaller catechism but, as Ritschl points out, there it serves to answer the question how the Name of God shall be made holy, while here it serves to delimit the Church of the saints.
134. It is true that he only considered the Augsburg Confession to be a suitable document of the Lutheran Christian faith if, as he expressed it in his disgusting terminology, a Wundbrühe had been poured upon it. To read him is an act of penitence because his language, in its insipid melting quality, is even worse than the frightful Christo-turpentine of F. T. Vischer (in his polemics with the Munich christoterpe).
135. See Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 346. Even more decisive is the answer, quoted in Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 381, to the question whether good works are necessary to salvation. "Unnecessary and harmful to the attainment of salvation, but after salvation is attained so necessary that he who does not perform them is not really saved." Thus here also they are not the cause of salvation, but the sole means of recognizing it.
136. For instance, through those caricatures of Christian freedom which Ritschl, op. cit., III, p. 381, so severely criticizes.
​137. Above all in the greater emphasis on the idea of retributive punishment in the doctrine of salvation, which, after the repudiation of his missionary attempts by the American sects, he made the basis of his method of sanctification. After that he places the retention of childlikeness and the virtues of humble resignation in the foreground as the end of Herrnhut asceticism, in sharp contrast to the inclination of his own community to an asceticism closely analogous to the Puritan.
138. Which, however, had its limits. For this reason alone it is wrong to attempt to place Zinzendorf's religion in a scheme of social psychological evolutionary stages, as Lamprecht does. Furthermore, however, his whole religious attitude is influenced by nothing more strongly than the fact that he was a Count with an outlook fundamentally feudal. Further, the emotional side of it would, from the point of view of social psychology, fit just as well into the period of the sentimental decadence of chivalry as in that of sensitiveness. If social psychology gives any clue to its difference from West European rationalism, it is most likely to be found in the patriarchal traditionalism of Eastern Germany.
139. This is evident from Zinzendorf's controversy with Dippel just as, after his death, the doctrines of the Synod of 1764 bring out the character of the Herrnhut community as an institution for salvation. See Ritschl's criticism, op. cit., III, p. 443 f.
140. Compare, for instance, §§151, 153, 160. That sanctification may not take place in spite of true penitence and the forgiveness of sins is evident, especially from the remarks on p. 311, and agrees with the Lutheran doctrine of salvation just as it is in disagreement with that of Calvinism (and Methodism).
141. Compare Zinzendorf's opinion, cited in Plitt, op. cit., II, p. 345. Similarly Spangenberg, Idea Fidei, p. 325.
142. Compare, for instance, Zinzendorf's remark on Matt. xx. 28, cited by Plitt, op. cit., III, p. 131: "When I see a man to whom God has given a great gift, I rejoice and gladly avail myself of the gift. But when I note that he is not content with his own, but wishes to increase it further, I consider it the beginning of that person's ruin." In other words, Zinzendorf denied, especially in his conversation with John Wesley in 1743, that there could be progress in holiness, because he identified it with justification and found it only in the emotional relationship to Christ (Plitt, I, p. 413). In place of the sense of being the instrument of God comes the possession of the divine; mysticism, not asceticism (in the sense to be discussed in the introduction to the following essays) (not here translated.—Translator's Note). As is pointed out there, a present, worldly state of mind is naturally what the Puritan really seeks for also. But for him the state which he interprets as the certitudo salutis is the feeling of being an active instrument,
​143. But which, precisely on account of this mystical tendency, did not receive a consistent ethical justification. Zinzendorf rejects Luther's idea of divine worship in the calling as the decisive reason for performing one's duty in it. It is rather a return for the "Saviour's loyal services" (Plitt, II, p. 411).
144. His saying that "a reasonable man should not be without faith and a believer should not be unreasonable" is well known. See his Sokrates, d. i. Aufrichtige Anzeige verschiedener nicht sowohl unbekannter als vielmehr in Abfall geratener Hauptwahrheiten (1725). Further, his fondness for such authors as Bayle.
145. The decided propensity of Protestant asceticism for empiricism, rationalized on a mathematical basis, is well known, but cannot be further analysed here. On the development of the sciences in the direction of mathematically rationalized exact investigation, the philosophical motives of it and their contrast to Bacon's viewpoint, see Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, pp. 305-7, especially the remark on p. 305, which rightly denies that modern natural science can be understood as the product of material and technical interests. Highly important relationships exist, of course, but they are much more complex. See further Windelband, Neuere Phil., I, pp. 40 ff. For the attitude of Protestant asceticism the decisive point was, as may perhaps be most clearly seen in Spener's Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 232; III, p. 260, that just as the Christian is known by the fruits of his belief, the knowledge of God and His designs can only be attained through a knowledge of His works. The favourite science of all Puritan, Baptist, or Pietist Christianity was thus physics, and next to it all those other natural sciences which used a similar method, especially mathematics. It was hoped from the empirical knowledge of the divine laws of nature to ascend to a grasp of the essence of the world, which on account of the fragmentary nature of the divine revelation, a Calvinistic idea, could never be attained by the method of metaphysical speculation. The empiricism of the seventeenth century was the means for asceticism to seek God in nature. It seemed to lead to God, philosophical speculation away from Him. In particular Spener considers the Aristotelean philosophy to have been the most harmful element in Christian tradition. Every other is better, especially the Platonic: Cons. Theol., III, 6, 1, Dist. 2, No. 13. Compare further the following characteristic passage: "Unde pro Cartesio quid dicam non habeo [he had not read him], semper tamen optavi et opto, ut Deus viros excitet, qui veram philosophiam vel tandem oculis sisterent in qua nullius hominis attenderetur auctoritas, sed sana tantum magistri nescia ratio", Spener, Cons. Theol., II, 5, No. 2. The significance of this attitude of ascetic Protestantism for the development of education, especially technical education, is well known. Combined with the attitude to fides implicita they furnished a pedagogical programme.
​146. "That is a type of men who seek their happiness in four main ways: (1) to be insignificant, despised, and abased; (2) to neglect all things they do not need for the service of their Lord; (3) either to possess nothing or to give away again what they receive; (4) to work as wage labourers, not for the sake of the wage, but of the calling in the service of the Lord and their neighbour” (Rel. Reden, II, p. 180; Plitt, op. cit., I, p.445). Not everyone can or may become a disciple, but only those who receive the call of the Lord. But according to Zinzendorf's own confession (Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 449) there still remain difficulties, for the Sermon on the Mount applies formally to all. The resemblance of this free universality of love to the old Baptist ideals is evident.
147. An emotional intensification of religion was by no means entirely unknown to Lutheranism even in its later period. Rather the ascetic element, the way of life which the Lutheran suspected of being salvation by works, was the fundamental difference in this case.
148. A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken, I, p. 324. In the Puritan writers we, of course, also find emphatic warnings against false certainty; but at least the doctrine of predestination, so far as its influence determined religious practice, always worked in the opposite direction.
149. The psychological effect of the confessional was everywhere to relieve the individual of responsibility for his own conduct, that is why it was sought, and that weakened the rigorous consistency of the demands of asceticism.
150. How important at the same time, even for the form of the Pietist faith, was the part played by purely political factors, has been indicated by Ritschl in his study of Württemberg Pietism.
151. See Zinzendorf's statement [quoted above, note 146].
152. Of course Calvinism, in so far as it is genuine, is also patriarchal. The connection, for instance, of the success of Baxter's activities with the domestic character of industry in Kidderminster is evident from his autobiography. See the passage quoted in the Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 38: "The town liveth upon the weaving of Kidderminster stuffs, and as they stand in their loom, they can set a book before them, or edify each other. . . ." Nevertheless, there is a difference between patriarchalism based on Pietism and on the Calvinistic and especially the Baptist ethics. This problem can only be discussed in another connection.
153. Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, third edition, I, p. 598. That Frederick William I called Pietism a religion for the leisure class is more indicative of his own Pietism than that of Spener and Francke. Even this king knew very well why he had opened his realm to the Pietists by his declaration of toleration.
154. As an introduction to Methodism the excellent article Methodismus by Loofs in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theo​logie und Kirche is particularly good. Also the works of Jacoby (especially the Handbuch des Methodismus), Kolde, Jüngst, and Southey are useful. On Wesley: Tyerman, Life and Times of John Wesley is popular. One of the best libraries on the history of Methodism is that of Northwestern University, Evanston, III. A sort of link between classical Puritanism and Methodism was formed by the religious poet Isaac Watts, a friend of the chaplain of Oliver Cromwell (Howe) and then of Richard Cromwell. Whitefield is said to have sought his advice (cf. Skeats, op. cit., pp. 254 f.).
155. Apart from the personal influence of the Wesleys the similarity is historically determined, on the one hand, by the decline of the dogma of predestination, on the other by the powerful revival of the sola fide in the founders of Methodism, especially motivated by its specific missionary character. This brought forth a modified rejuvenation of certain mediæval methods of revival preaching and combined them with Pietistic forms. It certainly does not belong in a general line of development toward subjectivism, since in this respect it stood behind not only Pietism, but also the Bernardine religion of the Middle Ages.
156. In this manner Wesley himself occasionally characterized the effect of the Methodist faith. The relationship to Zinzendorf's Glückseligkeit is evident.
157. Given in Watson's Life of Wesley, p. 331 (German edition).
158. J. Schneckenburger, Vorlesungen über die Lehrbegriffe der kleinen protestantischen Kirchenparteien, edited by Hundeshagen (Frankfurt, 1863), p. 147.
159. Whitefield, the leader of the predestinationist group which after his death dissolved for lack of organization, rejected Wesley's doctrine of perfection in its essentials. In fact, it is only a makeshift for the real Calvinistic idea of proof.
160. Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 145. Somewhat different in Loofs, op. cit. Both results are typical of all similar religious phenomena.
161. Thus in the conference of 1770. The first conference of 1744 had already recognized that the Biblical words came "within a hair" of Calvinism on the one hand and Antinomianism on the other. But since they were so obscure it was not well to be separated by doctrinal differences so long as the validity of the Bible as a practical norm was upheld.
162. The Methodists were separated from the Herrnhuters by their doctrine of the possibility of sinless perfection, which Zinzendorf, in particular, rejected. On the other hand, Wesley felt the emotional element in the Herrnhut religion to be mysticism and branded Luther's interpretation of the law as blasphemous. This shows the barrier which existed between Lutheranism and every kind of rational religious conduct.
163. John Wesley emphasizes the fact that everywhere, among Quakers, Presbyterians, and High Churchmen, one must believe in ​dogmas, except in Methodism. With the above, compare the rather summary discussion in Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England, 1688-1851.
164. Compare Dexter, Congregationalism, pp. 455 ff.
165. Though naturally it might interfere with it, as is to-day the case among the American negroes. Furthermore, the often definitely pathological character of Methodist emotionalism as compared to the relatively mild type of Pietism may possibly, along with purely historical reasons and the publicity of the process, be connected with the greater ascetic penetration of life in the areas where Methodism is widespread. Only a neurologist could decide that.
166. Loofs, op. cit., p. 750, strongly emphasizes the fact that Methodism is distinguished from other ascetic movements in that it came after the English Enlightenment, and compares it with the (surely much less pronounced) German Renaissance of Pietism in the first third of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is permissible, following Ritschl, Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, I, pp. 568 f., to retain the parallel with the Zinzendorf form of Pietism, which, unlike that of Spener and Francke, was already itself a reaction against the Enlightenment. However, this reaction takes a very different course in Methodism from that of the Herrnhuters, at least so far as they were influenced by Zinzendorf.
167. But which, as is shown by the passage from John Wesley (below, p. 175), it developed in the same way and with the same effect as the other ascetic denominations.
168. And, as we have seen, milder forms of the consistent ascetic ethics of Puritanism; while if, in the popular manner, one wished to interpret these religious conceptions as only exponents or reflections of capitalistic institutions, just the opposite would have to be the case.
169. Of the Baptists only the so-called General Baptists go back to the older movement. The Particular Baptists were, as we have pointed out already, Calvinists, who in principle limited Church membership to the regenerate, or at least personal believers, and hence remained in principle voluntarists and opponents of any State Church. Under Cromwell, no doubt, they were not always consistent in practice. Neither they nor the General Baptists, however important they are as the bearers of the Baptist tradition, give us any occasion for an especial dogmatic analysis here. That the Quakers, though formally a new foundation of George Fox and his associates, were fundamentally a continuation of the Baptist tradition, is beyond question. The best introduction to their history, including their relations to Baptists and Mennonites, is Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, 1876. On the history of the Baptists, compare, among others, H. M. Dexter, The True Story of John Smyth, the Se-Baptist, as told by himself and his contemporaries, Boston, 1881 (also J. C. Lang in The Baptist Quarterly ​Review, 1883, p. 1); J. Murch, A History of the Presb. and Gen. Bapt. Church in the West of England, London, 1835; A. H. Newman, History of the Baptist Church in the U.S., New York, 1894 (Am. Church Hist. Series, vol. 2); Vedder, A Short History of the Baptists, London, 1897; E. B. Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, New York, 1902; G. Lorimer, The Baptists in History, 1902; J. A. Seiss, The Baptist System Examined, Lutheran Publication Society, 1902; further material in the Baptist Handbook, London, 1896 ff.; Baptist Manuals, Paris, 1891-93; The Baptist Quarterly Review; and the Bibliotheca Sacra, Oberlin, 1900.
The best Baptist library seems to be that of Colgate College in the State of New York. For the history of the Quakers the collection in Devonshire House in London is considered the best (not available to me). The official modern organ of orthodoxy is the American Friend, edited by Professor Jones; the best Quaker history that of Rowntree. In addition: Rufus B. Jones, George Fox, an Autobiography, Phila., 1903; Alton C. Thomas, A History of the Society of Friends in America, Phila., 1895; Edward Grubbe, Social Aspects of the Quaker Faith, London, 1899. Also the copious and excellent biographical literature.
170. It is one of the many merits of Karl Müller's Kirchengeschichte to have given the Baptist movement, great in its way, even though outwardly unassuming, the place it deserved in his work. It has suffered more than any other from the pitiless persecution of all the Churches, because it wished to be a sect in the specific sense of that word. Even after five generations it was discredited before the eyes of all the world by the debacle of the related eschatological experiment in Münster. And, continually oppressed and driven underground, it was long after its origin before it attained a consistent formulation of its religious doctrines. Thus it produced even less theology than would have been consistent with its principles, which were themselves hostile to a specialized development of its faith in God as a science. That was not very pleasing to the older professional theologians, even in its own time, and it made little impression on them. But many more recent ones have taken the same attitude. In Ritschl, Pietismus, I, pp. 22 f., the rebaptizers are not very adequately, in fact, rather contemptuously, treated. One is tempted to speak of a theological bourgeois standpoint. That, in spite of the fact that Cornelius's fine work (Geschichte des Münsterschen Aufruhrs) had been available for decades.
Here also Ritschl everywhere sees a retrogression from his standpoint toward Catholicism, and suspects direct influences of the radical wing of the Franciscan tradition. Even if such could be proved in a few cases, these threads would be very thin. Above all, the historical fact was probably that the official Catholic Church, wherever the worldly asceticism of the laity went as far as the ​formation of conventicles, regarded it with the utmost suspicion and attempted to encourage the formation of orders, thus outside the world, or to attach it as asceticism of the second grade to the existing orders and bring it under control. Where this did not succeed, it felt the danger that the practice of subjectivist ascetic morality might lead to the denial of authority and to heresy, just as, and with the same justification, the Elizabethan Church felt toward the half-Pietistic prophesying Bible conventicles, even when their conformism was undoubted; a feeling which was expressed by the Stuarts in their Book of Sports, of which later. The history of numerous heretical movements, including,. for instance, the Humiliati and the Beguins, as well as the fate of St. Francis, are the proofs of it. The preaching of the mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans, probably did much to prepare the way for the ascetic lay morality of Calvinist-Baptist Protestantism. But the numerous close relationships between the asceticism of Western monasticism and the ascetic conduct of Protestantism, the importance of which must continually be stressed for our particular problems, are based in the last analysis on the fact that important factors are necessarily common to every asceticism on the basis of Biblical Christianity. Furthermore, every asceticism, no matter what its faith, has need of certain tried methods of subduing the flesh.
Of the following sketch it may further be remarked that its brevity is due to the fact that the Baptist ethic is of only very limited importance for the problem considered primarily in this study, the development of the religious background of the bourgeois idea of the calling. It contributed nothing new whatever to it. The much more important social aspect of the movement must for the present remain untouched. Of the history of the older Baptist movement, we can, from the view-point of our problem, present here only what was later important for the development of the sects in which we are interested: Baptists, Quakers, and, more incidentally, Mennonites.
171. See above [note 92].
172. On their origin and changes, see A. Ritschl in his Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 69 f.
173. Naturally the Baptists have always repudiated the designation of a sect. They form the Church in the sense of the Epistle to the Ephesians v. 27. But in our terminology they form a sect not only because they lack all relation to the State. The relation between Church and State of early Christianity was even for the Quakers (Barclay) their ideal; for to them, as to many Pietists, only a Church under the Cross was beyond suspicion of its purity. But the Calvinists as well, faute de mieux, similarly even the Catholic Church in the same circumstances, were forced to favour the separation of Church and State under an unbelieving State or under the Cross. Neither were they a sect, because induction to membership in the Church took ​place de facto through a contract between the congregation and the candidates. For that was formally the case in the Dutch Reformed communities (as a result of the original political situation) in accordance with the old Church constitution (see v. Hoffmann, Kirchen-verfassungsrecht der niederl. Reformierten, Leipzig, 1902).
On the contrary, it was because such a religious community could only be voluntarily organized as a sect, not compulsorily as a Church, if it did not wish to include the unregenerate and thus depart from the Early Christian ideal. For the Baptist communities it was an essential of the very idea of their Church, while for the Calvinists it was an historical accident. To be sure, that the latter were also urged by very definite religious motives in the direction of the believers' Church has already been indicated. On the distinction between Church and sect, see the following essay. The concept of sect which I have adopted here has been used at about the same time and, I assume, independently from me, by Kattenbusch in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Article Sekte). Troeltsch in his Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen accepts it and discusses it more in detail. See also below, the introduction to the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen.
174. How important this symbol was, historically, for the conservation of the Church communty, since it was an unambiguous and unmistakable sign, has been very clearly shown by Cornelius, op. cit.
175. Certain approaches to it in the Mennonites' doctrine of justification need not concern us here.
176. This idea is perhaps the basis of the religious interest in the discussion of questions like the incarnation of Christ and his relationship to the Virgin Mary, which, often as the sole purely dogmatic part, stands out so strangely in the oldest documents of Baptism (for instance the confessions printed in Cornelius, op. cit., Appendix to Vol. II. On this question, see K. Müller, Kirchengeschichte, II, 1, p. 330). The difference between the christology of the Reformed Church and the Lutheran (in the doctrine of the so-called communicatio idiomatum) seems to have been based on similar religious interests.
177. It was expressed especially in the original strict avoidance even of everyday intercourse with the excommunicated, a point at which even the Calvinists, who in principle held the opinion that worldly affairs were not affected by spiritual censure, made large concessions. See the following essay.
178. How this principle was applied by the Quakers to seemingly trivial externals (refusal to remove the hat, to kneel, bow, or use formal address) is well known. The basic idea is to a certain extent characteristic of all asceticism. Hence the fact that true asceticism is always hostile to authority. In Calvinism it appeared in the principle that only Christ should rule in the Church. In the case of Pietism one may think of Spener's attempts to find a Biblical justification of ​titles. Catholic asceticism, so far as ecclesiastical authority was concerned, broke through this tendency in its oath of obedience, by interpreting obedience itself in ascetic terms. The overturning of this principle in Protestant asceticism is the historical basis of the peculiarities of even the contemporary democracy of the peoples influenced by Puritanism as distinct from that of the Latin spirit. It is also part of the historical background of that lack of respect of the American which is, as the case may be, so irritating or so refreshing.
179. No doubt this was true from the beginning for the Baptists essentially only of the New Testament, not to the same extent of the Old. Especially the Sermon on the Mount enjoyed a peculiar prestige as a programme of social ethic in all denominations.
180. Even Schwenkfeld had considered the outward performance of the sacraments an adiaphoron, while the General Baptists and the Mennonites held strictly to Baptism and the Communion, the Mennonites to the washing of feet in addition. On the other hand, for the predestinationists the depreciation, in fact for all except the communion-one may even say the suspicion—in which the sacraments were held, went very far. See the following essay.
181. On this point the Baptist denominations, especially the Quakers (Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, fourth edition, London, 1701, kindly placed at my disposal by Eduard Bernstein), referred to Calvin's statements in the Instit. Christ, III, p. 2, where in fact quite unmistakable suggestions of Baptist doctrine are to be found. Also the older distinction between the Word of God as that which God had revealed to the patriarchs, the prophets, and the apostles, and the Holy Scriptures as that part of it which they had written down, was, even though there was no historical connection, intimately related to the Baptist conception of revelation. The mechanical idea of inspiration, and with it the strict bibliocracy of the Calvinists, was just as much the product of their development in one direction in the course of the sixteenth century as the doctrine of the inner light of the Quakers, derived from Baptist sources, was the result of a directly opposite development. The sharp differentiation was also in this case partly a result of continual disputes.
182. That was emphasized strongly against certain tendencies of the Socinians. The natural reason knows nothing whatever of God (Barclay, op. cit., p. 102). That meant that the part played by the lex naturæ elsewhere in Protestantism was altered. In principle there could be no general rules, no moral code, for the calling which everyone had, and which is different for every individual, is revealed to him by God through his conscience. We should do, not the good in the general sense of natural reason, but God's will as it is written in our hearts and known through the conscience (Barclay, pp. 73, 76). This irrationality of morality, derived from the exaggerated ​contrast between the divine and the flesh, is expressed in these fundamental tenets of Quaker ethics: "What a man does contrary to his faith, though his faith may be wrong, is in no way acceptable to God—though the thing might have been lawful to another" (Barclay, p. 487). Of course that could not be upheld in practice. The "moral and perpetual statutes acknowledged by all Christians" are, for instance, for Barclay the limit of toleration. In practice the contemporaries felt their ethic, with certain peculiarities of its own, to be similar to that of the Reformed Pietists. "Everything good in the Church is suspected of being Quakerism", as Spener repeatedly points out. It thus seems that Spener envied the Quakers this reputation. Cons. Theol., III, 6, 1, Dist. 2, No. 64. The repudiation of oaths on the basis of a passage in the Bible shows that the real emancipation from the Scriptures had not gone far. The significance for social ethics of the principle, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you", which many Quakers regarded as the essence of the whole Christian ethics, need not concern us here.
183. The necessity of assuming this possibility Barclay justifies because without it "there should never be a place known by the Saints wherein they might be free of doubting and despair, which—is most absurd". It is evident that the certitudo salutis depends upon it. Thus Barclay, op. cit., p. 20.
184. There thus remains a difference in type between the Calvinistic and the Quaker rationalization of life. But when Baxter formulates it by saying that the spirit is supposed by the Quakers to act upon the soul as on a corpse, while the characteristically formulated Calvinistic principle is "reason and spirit are conjunct principles" (Christian Directory, II, p. 76), the distinction was no longer valid for his time in this form.
185. Thus in the very careful articles "Menno" and "Mennoniten" by Cramer in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, especially p. 604. However excellent these articles are, the article "Baptisten" in the same encyclopedia is not very penetrating and in part simply incorrect. Its author does not know, for instance, the Publications of the Hanserd Knolly's Society, which are indispensable for the history of Baptism.
186. Thus Barclay, op. cit., p. 404, explains that eating, drinking, and acquisition are natural, not spiritual acts, which may be performed without the special sanction of God. The explanation is in reply to the characteristic objection that if, as the Quakers teach, one cannot pray without a special motion of the Spirit, the same should apply to ploughing. It is, of course, significant that even in the modern resolutions of Quaker Synods the advice is sometimes given to retire from business after acquiring a sufficient fortune, in order, withdrawn from the bustle of the world, to be able to live in devotion to the Kingdom of God alone. But the same idea certainly occurs ​occasionally in other denominations, including Calvinism. That betrays the fact that the acceptance of the bourgeois practical ethics by these movements was the worldly application of an asceticism which had originally fled from the world.
187. Veblen in his suggestive book The Theory of Business Enterprise is of the opinion that this motto belongs only to early capitalism. But economic supermen, who, like the present captains of industry, have stood beyond good and evil, have always existed, and the statement is still true of the broad underlying strata of business men.
188. We may here again expressly call attention to the excellent remarks of Eduard Bernstein, op. cit. To Kautsky's highly schematic treatment of the Baptist movement and his theory of heretical communism in general (in the first volume of the same work) we shall return on another occasion.
189. "In civil actions it is good to be as the many, in religious to be as the best", says, for example, Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138). That sounds somewhat more drastic than it is meant to be. It means that the Puritan honesty is formalistic legality, just as the uprightness which the sometime Puritan people like to claim as a national virtue is something specifically different from the German Ehrlichkeit. Some good remarks on the subject from the educational standpoint may be found in the Preuss. Jahrb., CXII (1903), p. 226. The formalism of the Puritan ethic is in turn the natural consequence of its relation to the law.
190. Something is said on this in the following essay.
191. This is the reason for the economic importance of the ascetic Protestant, but not Catholic, minorities.
192. That the difference of dogmatic basis was not inconsistent with the adoption of the most important interest in proof is to be explained in the last analysis by the historical peculiarities of Christianity in general which cannot be discussed here.
193. "Since God hath gathered us to be a people", says Barclay, op. cit., p. 357. I myself heard a Quaker sermon at Haverford College which laid great emphasis on the interpretation of saints as meaning separate.
CHAPTER V
1. See the excellent sketch of his character in Dowden, op. cit. A passable introduction to Baxter's theology, after he had abandoned a strict belief in the double decree, is given in the introduction to the various extracts from his works printed in the Works of the Puritan Divines (by Jenkyn). His attempt to combine universal redemption and personal election satisfied no one. For us it is important only that he even then held to personal election, i.e. to ​the most important point for ethics in the doctrine of predestination. On the other hand, his weakening of the forensic view of redemption is important as being suggestive of baptism.
2. Tracts and sermons by Thomas Adams, John Howe, Matthew Henry, J. Janeway, Stuart Charnock, Baxter, Bunyan, have been collected in the ten volumes of the Works of the Puritan Divines (London, 1845-8), though the choice is often somewhat arbitrary. Editions of the works of Bailey, Sedgwick, and Hoornbeek have already been referred to.
3. We could just as well have included Voet and other continental representatives of worldly asceticism. Brentano's view that the whole development was purely Anglo-Saxon is quite wrong. My choice is motivated mainly (though not exclusively) by the wish to present the ascetic movement as much as possible in the second half of the seventeenth century, immediately before the change to utilitarianism. It has unfortunately been impossible, within the limits of this sketch, to enter upon the fascinating task of presenting the characteristics of ascetic Protestantism through the medium of the biographical literature; the Quakers would in this connection be particularly important, since they are relatively little known in Germany.
4. For one might just as well take the writings of Gisbert Voet, the proceedings of the Huguenot Synods, or the Dutch Baptist literature. Sombart and Brentano have unfortunately taken just the ebionitic parts of Baxter, which I myself have strongly emphasized, to confront me with the undoubted capitalistic backwardness of his doctrines. But (1) one must know this whole literature thoroughly in order to use it correctly, and (2) not overlook the fact that I have attempted to show how, in spite of its anti-mammonistic doctrines, the spirit of this ascetic religion nevertheless, just as in the monastic communities, gave birth to economic rationalism because it placed a premium on what was most important for it: the fundamentally ascetic rational motives. That fact alone is under discussion and is the point of this whole essay.
5. Similarly in Calvin, who was certainly no champion of bourgeois wealth (see the sharp attacks on Venice and Antwerp in Jes. Opp., III, 140a, 308a).
6. Saints' Everlasting Rest, chaps. x, xii. Compare Bailey (Praxis Pietatis, p. 182) or Matthew Henry (The Worth of the Soul, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 319). "Those that are eager in pursuit of worldly wealth despise their Soul, not only because the Soul is neglected and the body preferred before it, but because it is employed in these pursuits" (Psa. cxxvii. 2). On the same page, however, is the remark to be cited below about the sinfulness of all waste of time, especially in recreations. Similarly in almost the whole religious literature of English-Dutch Puritanism. See, for instance, Hoornbeek's (op. cit., L, X, ch. 18, 18) Phillipics against avaritia. This writer is also ​affected by sentimental pietistic influences. See the praise of tranquillitas animi which is much more pleasing to God than the sollicitudo of this world. Also Bailey, referring to the well-known passage in Scripture, is of the opinion that "A rich man is not easily saved" (op. cit., p. 182). The Methodist catechisms also warn against "gathering treasure on this earth". For Pietism this is quite obvious, as also for the Quakers. Compare Barclay (op. cit., p. 517), " . . . and therefore beware of such temptations as to use their callings as an engine to be richer".
7. For not wealth alone, but also the impulsive pursuit of it (or what passed as such) was condemned with similar severity. In the Netherlands the South Holland Synod of 1574 declared, in reply to a question, that money-lenders should not be admitted to communion even though the business was permitted by law; and the Deventer Provincial Synod of 1598 (Art. 24) extended this to the employees of money-lenders. The Synod of Gorichem in 1606 prescribed severe and humiliating conditions under which the wives of usurers might be admitted, and the question was discussed as late as 1644 and 1657 whether Lombards should be admitted to communion (this against Brentano, who cites his own Catholic ancestors, although foreign traders and bankers have existed in the whole European and Asiatic world for thousands of years). Gisbert Voet (Disp. Theol., IV, 1667, de usuris, p. 665) still wanted to exclude the Trapezites (Lombards, Piedmontese). The same was true of the Huguenot Synods. This type of capitalistic classes were not the typical representatives of the philosophy or the type of conduct with which we are concerned. They were also not new as compared with antiquity or the Middle Ages.
8. Developed in detail in the tenth chapter of the Saints' Everlasting Rest. He who should seek to rest in the shelter of possessions which God gives, God strikes even in this life. A self-satisfied enjoyment of wealth already gained is almost always a symptom of moral degradation. If we had everything which we could have in this world, would that be all we hoped for? Complete satisfaction of desires is not attainable on earth because God's will has decreed it should not be so.
9. Christian Directory, 1, pp. 375-6. "It is for action that God maintaineth us and our activities; work is the moral as well as the natural end of power. . . . It is action that God is most served and honoured by. . . . The public welfare or the good of the many is to be valued above our own." Here is the connecting-point for the transition from the will of God to the purely utilitarian view-point of the later liberal theory. On the religious sources of Utilitarianism, see below in the text and above, chap. iv, note 145.
10. The commandment of silence has been, starting from the Biblical threat of punishment for every useless word, especially since ​the Cluny monks, a favourite ascetic means of education in self-control. Baxter also speaks in detail of the sinfulness of unnecessary words. Its place in his character has been pointed out by Sanford, op. cit., pp. 90 ff.
What contemporaries felt as the deep melancholy and moroseness of the Puritans was the result of breaking down the spontaneity of the status naturalis, and the condemnation of thoughtless speech was in the service of this end. When Washington Irving (Bracebridge Hall, chap. xxx) seeks the reason for it partly in the calculating spirit of capitalism and partly in the effect of political freedom, which promotes a sense of responsibility, it may be remarked that it does not apply to the Latin peoples. For England the situation was probably that: (1) Puritanism enabled its adherents to create free institutions and still become a world power; and (2) it transformed that calculating spirit (what Sombart calls Rechenhaftigkeit), which is in truth essential to capitalism, from a mere means to economy into a principle of general conduct.
11. Op. cit., I, p. 111.
12. Op. cit., I, p. 383 f.
13. Similarly on the preciousness of time, see Barclay, op. cit., p. 14.
14. Baxter, op. cit., I, p. 79. "Keep up a high esteem of time and be every day more careful that you lose none of your time, than you are that you lose none of your gold and silver. And if vain recreation, dressings, feastings, idle talk, unprofitable company, or sleep be any of them temptations to rob you of any of your time accordingly heighten your watchfulness." "Those that are prodigal of their time despise their own souls", says Matthew Henry (Worth of the Soul, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 315). Here also Protestant asceticism follows a well-beaten track. We are accustomed to think it characteristic of the modern man that he has no time, and for instance, like Goethe in the Wanderjahren, to measure the degree of capitalistic development by the fact that the clocks strike every quarter-hour. So also Sombart in his Kapitalismus. We ought not, however, to forget that the first people to live (in the Middle Ages) with careful measurement of time were the monks, and that the church bells were meant above all to meet their needs.
15. Compare Baxter's discussion of the calling, op. cit., I, pp. 108 H. Especially the following passage: "Question: But may I not cast off the world that I may only think of my salvation? Answer: You may cast off all such excess of worldly cares or business as unnecessarily hinder you in spiritual things. But you may not cast off all bodily employment and mental labour in which you may serve the common good. Everyone as a member of Church or Commonwealth must employ their parts to the utmost for the good of the Church and the Commonwealth. To neglect this and say: I will pray and meditate, is as if your servant should refuse his greatest work and tie himself ​to some lesser, easier part. And God hath commanded you some way or other to labour for your daily bread and not to live as drones of the sweat of others only." God's commandment to Adam, "In the sweat of thy brow", and Paul's declaration, "He who will not work shall not eat", are also quoted. It has always been known of the Quakers that even the most well-to-do of them have had their sons learn a calling, for ethical and not, as Alberti recommends, for utilitarian reasons.
16. Here are points where Pietism, on account of its emotional character, takes a different view. Spener, although he emphasizes in characteristic Lutheran fashion that labour in a calling is worship of God (Theologische Bedenken, III, p. 445), nevertheless holds that the restlessness of business affairs distracts one from God, a most characteristic difference from Puritanism.
17. I, op. cit., p. 242. "It's they that are lazy in their callings that can find no time for holy duties." Hence the idea that the cities, the seat of the middle class with its rational business activities, are the seats of ascetic virtue. Thus Baxter says of his hand-loom weavers in Kidderminster: "And their constant converse and traffic with London doth much to promote civility and piety among tradesmen . . ." in his autobiography (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 38). That the proximity of the capital should promote virtue would astonish modern clergymen, at least in Germany. But Pietism also inclined to similar views. Thus Spener, speaking of a young colleague, writes: "At least it appears that among the great multitudes in the cities, though the majority is quite depraved, there are nevertheless a number of good people who can accomplish much, while in villages often hardly anything good can be found in a whole community" (Theologische Bedenken, I, 66, p. 303). In other words, the peasant is little suited to rational ascetic conduct. Its ethical glorification is very modern. We cannot here enter into the significance of this and similar statements for the question of the relation of asceticism to social classes.
18. Take, for instance, the following passages (op. cit., p. 336 f.): "Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful callings when you are not exercised in the more immediate service of God." "Labour hard in your callings." "See that you have a calling which will find you employment for all the time which God's immediate service spareth."
19. That the peculiar ethical valuation of labour and its dignity was not originally a Christian idea nor even peculiar to Christianity has recently again been strongly emphasized by Harnack (Mitt. des Ev.-Soz. Kongr., 14. Folge, 1905, Nos. 3, 4, P. 48).
20. Similarly in Pietism (Spener, op. cit., III, pp. 429-30). The characteristic Pietist version is that loyalty to a calling which is imposed upon us by the fall serves to annihilate one's own selfish ​will. Labour in the calling is, as a service of love to one's neighbour, a duty of gratitude for God's grace (a Lutheran idea), and hence it is not pleasing to God that it should be performed reluctantly (op. cit., III, p. 272). The Christian should thus "prove himself as industrious in his labour as a worldly man" (III, p. 278). That is obviously less drastic than the Puritan version.
21. The significance of this important difference, which has been evident ever since the Benedictine rules, can only be shown by a much wider investigation.
22. "A sober procreation of children" is its purpose according to Baxter. Similarly Spener, at the same time with concessions to the coarse Lutheran attitude, which makes the avoidance of immorality, which is otherwise unavoidable, an accessory aim. Concupiscence as an accompaniment of sexual intercourse is sinful even in marriage. For instance, in Spener's view it is a result of the fall which transformed such a natural, divinely ordained process into something inevitably accompanied by sinful sensations, which is hence shameful. Also in the opinion of various Pietistic groups the highest form of Christian marriage is that with the preservation of virginity, the next highest that in which sexual intercourse is only indulged in for the procreation of children, and so on down to those which are contracted for purely erotic or external reasons and which are, from an ethical standpoint, concubinage. On these lower levels a marriage entered into for purely economic reasons is preferred (because after all it is inspired by rational motives) to one with erotic foundations. We may here neglect the Herrnhut theory and practice of marriage. Rationalistic philosophy (Christian Wolff) adopted the ascetic theory in the form that what was designed as a means to an end, concupiscence and its satisfaction, should not be made an end in itself.
The transition to a pure, hygienically oriented utilitarianism had already taken place in Franklin, who took approximately the ethical standpoint of modern physicians, who understand by chastity the restriction of sexual intercourse to the amount desirable for health, and who have, as is well known, even given theoretical advice as to how that should be accomplished. As soon as these matters have become the object of purely rational consideration the same development has everywhere taken place. The Puritan and the hygienic sex-rationalist generally tread very different paths, but here they understand each other perfectly. In a lecture, a zealous adherent of hygienic prostitution—it was a question of the regulation of brothels and prostitutes—defended the moral legitimacy of extra-marital intercourse (which was looked upon as hygienically useful) by referring to its poetic justification in the case of Faust and Margaret. To treat Margaret as a prostitute and to fail to distinguish the powerful sway of human passions from sexual intercourse for hygienic reasons, ​both are thoroughly congenial to the Puritan standpoint. Similar, for instance, is the typical specialist's view, occasionally put forward by very distinguished physicians, that a question which extends so far into the subtlest problems of personality and of culture as that of sexual abstinence should be dealt with exclusively in the forum of the physician (as an expert). For the Puritan the expert was the moral theorist, now he is the medical man; but the claim of competence to dispose of the questions which seem to us somewhat narrow-minded is, with opposite signs of course, the same in both cases.
But with all its prudery, the powerful idealism of the Puritan attitude can show positive accomplishments, even from the point of view of race conservation in a purely hygienic sense, while modern sex hygiene, on account of the appeal to unprejudicedness which it is forced to make, is in danger of destroying the basis of all its success. How, with the rationalistic interpretation of sexual relations among peoples influenced by Puritanism, a certain refinement and spiritual and ethical penetration of marital relationships, with a blossoming of matrimonial chivalry, has grown up, in contrast to the patriarchal sentimentality (Brodem), which is typical of Germany even in the circles of the intellectual aristocracy, must necessarily remain outside this discussion. Baptist influences have played a part in the emancipation of woman; the protection of her freedom of conscience, and the extension of the idea of the universal priesthood to her were here also the first breaches in patriarchal ideas.
23. This recurs again and again in Baxter. The Biblical basis is regularly either the passages in Proverbs, which we already know from Franklin (xxii. 29), or those in praise of labour (xxxi. 16). Cf. op. cit., I, pp. 377, 382, etc.
24. Even Zinzendorf says at one point: "One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one's work, and if there is no more work to do one suffers or goes to sleep" (Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 428).
25. Also a symbol of the Mormons closes (after quotations) with the words: "But a lazy or indolent man cannot be a Christian and be saved. He is destined to be struck down and cast from the hive." But in this case it was primarily the grandiose discipline, half-way between monastery and factory, which placed the individual before the dilemma of labour or annihilation and, of course in connection with religious enthusiasm and only possible through it, brought forth the astonishing economic achievements of this sect.
26. Hence (op. cit., I, p. 380) its symptoms are carefully analysed. Sloth and idleness are such deadly sins because they have a cumulative character. They are even regarded by Baxter as "destroyers of grace" (op. cit., I, pp. 279-80). That is, they are the antitheses of the methodical life.
​27. See above, chap. iii, note 5.
28. Baxter, op. cit., I, pp. 108 ff. Especially striking are the following passages: "Question: But will not wealth excuse us? Answer: It may excuse you from some sordid sort of work by making you more serviceable to another, but you are no more excused from service of work . . . than the poorest man." Also, p. 376: "Though they [the rich] have no outward want to urge them, they have as great a necessity to obey God . . . God hath strictly commanded it [labour] to all." Chap, iv, note 47.
29. Similarly Spener (op. cit., III, pp. 338, 425), who for this reason opposes the tendency to early retirement as morally objectionable, and, in refuting an objection to the taking of interest, that the enjoyment of interest leads to laziness, emphasizes that anyone who was in a position to live upon interest would still be obligated to work by God's commandment.
30. Including Pietism. Whenever a question of change of calling arises, Spener takes the attitude that after a certain calling has once been entered upon, it is a duty of obedience to Providence to remain and acquiesce in it.
31. The tremendous force, dominating the whole of conduct, with which the Indian religious teaching sanctions economic traditionalism in terms of chances of favourable rebirth, I have shown in the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. It is an excellent example by which to show the difference between mere ethical theories and the creation of psychological sanctions with a religious background for certain types of conduct. The pious Hindu could advance in the scale of transmigration only by the strictly traditional fulfilment of the duties of the caste of his birth. It was the strongest conceivable religious basis for traditionalism. In fact, the Indian ethic is in this respect the most completely consistent antithesis of the Puritan, as in another respect (traditionalism of the caste structure) it is opposed to the Hebrew.
32. Baxter, op. cit., I, p. 377.
33. But this does not mean that the Puritan view-point was historically derived from the latter. On the contrary, it is an expression of the genuinely Calvinistic idea that the cosmos of the world serves the glory of God. The utilitarian turn, that the economic cosmos should serve the good of the many, the common good, etc., was a consequence of the idea that any other interpretation of it would lead to aristocratic idolatry of the flesh, or at least did not serve the glory of God, but only fleshly cultural ends. But God's will, as it is expressed (chap iv, note 34) in the purposeful arrangements of the economic cosmos, can, so far as secular ends are in question at all, only be embodied in the good of the community, in impersonal usefulness. Utilitarianism is thus, as has already been pointed out, the result of the impersonal character of brotherly love and the ​repudiation of all glorification of this world by the exclusiveness of the Puritan in majorem Dei gloriam.
How completely this idea, that all idolatry of the flesh is inconsistent with the glory of God and hence unconditionally bad, dominated ascetic Protestantism is clearly shown by the doubts and hesitation which it cost even Spener, who certainly was not infected with democracy, to maintain the use of titles as ἀδιάφορον against numerous objections. He finally comforted himself with the reflection that even in the Bible the Prætor Festus was given the title of κράτιστος by the Apostles. The political side of the question does not arise in this connection.
34. "The inconstant man is a stranger in his own house", says Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 77).
35. On this, see especially George Fox's remarks in the Friends' Library (ed. W. & T. Evans, Philadelphia, 1837), I, p. 130.
36. Above all, this sort of religious ethic cannot be regarded as a reflex of economic conditions. The specialization of occupations had, if anything, gone further in mediæval Italy than in the England of that period.
37. For, as is often pointed out in the Puritan literature, God never commanded "love thy neighbour more than thyself", but only as thyself. Hence self-regard is also a duty. For instance, a man who can make better use of his possessions, to the greater glory of God, than his neighbour, is not obliged by the duty of brotherly love to part with them.
38. Spener is also close to this view-point. But even in the case of transfer from commercial occupations (regarded as especially dangerous to virtue) to theology, he remains hesitalit and on the whole opposed to it (op. cit., III, pp. 435, 443; I, p. 524). The frequent occurrence of the reply to just this question (of the permissibility of changing a calling) in Spener's naturally biassed opinion shows, incidentally, how eminently practical the different ways of interpreting 1 Corinthians vii were.
39. Such ideas are not to be found, at least in the writings, of the leading Continental Pietists. Spener's attitude vacillates between the Lutheran (that of satisfaction of needs) and Mercantilist arguments for the usefulness of the prosperity of commerce, etc. (op. cit., III, pp. 330, 332; I, p. 418: "the cultivation of tobacco brings money into the country and is thus useful, hence not sinful". Compare also III, pp. 426–7, 429, 434). But he does not neglect to point out that, as the example of the Quakers and the Mennonites shows, one can make profit and yet remain pious; in fact, that even especially high profits, as we shall point out later, may be the direct result of pious uprightness (op. cit., p. 435).
40. These views of Baxter are not a reflection of the economic environment in which he lived. On the contrary, his autobiography ​shows that the success of his home missionary work was partly due to the fact that the Kidderminster tradesmen were not rich, but only earned food and raiment, and that the master craftsmen had to live from hand to mouth just as their employees did. "It is the poor who receive the glad tidings of the Gospel." Thomas Adams remarks on the pursuit of gain: "He [the knowing man] knows . . . that money may make a man richer, not better, and thereupon chooseth rather to sleep with a good conscience than a full purse therefore desires no more wealth than an honest man may bear away" (Works of the Puritan Divines, LI). But he does want that much, and that means that every formally honest gain is legitimate.
41. Thus Baxter, op. cit., I, chap. x, 1, 9 (par. 24); I, p. 378, 2. In Prov. xxiii. 4: "Weary thyself not to be rich" means only "riches for our fleshly ends must not ultimately be intended". Possession in the feudal-seigneurial form of its use is what is odious (cf. the remark, op. cit., I, p. 380, on the "debauched part of the gentry"), not possession in itself. Milton, in the first Defensio pro populo Anglicano, held the well-known theory that only the middle class can maintain virtue. That middle class here means bourgeoisie as against the aristocracy is shown by the statement that both luxury and necessity are unfavourable to virtue.
42. This is most important. We may again add the general remark: we are here naturally not so much concerned with what concepts the theological moralists developed in their ethical theories, but, rather, what was the effective morality in the life of believers-that is, how the religious background of economic ethics affected practice. In the casuistic literature of Catholicism, especially the Jesuit, one can occasionally read discussions which—for instance on the question of the justification of interest, into which we do not enter here—sound like those of many Protestant casuists, or even seem to go farther in permitting or tolerating things. The Puritans have since often enough been reproached that their ethic is at bottom the same as that of the Jesuits. Just as the Calvinists often cite Catholic moralists, not only Thomas Aquinas, Bernhard of Clairvaux, Bonaventura, etc., but also contemporaries, the Catholic casuists also took notice of heretical ethics. We cannot discuss all that here.
But quite apart from the decisive fact of the religious sanction of the ascetic life for the layman, there is the fundamental difference, even in theory, that these latitudinarian ideas within Catholicism were the products of peculiarly lax ethical theories, not sanctioned by the authority of the Church, but opposed by the most serious and strictest disciples of it. On the other hand, the Protestant idea of the calling in effect placed the most serious enthusiasts for asceticism in the service of capitalistic acquisition. What in the one case might under certain conditions be allowed, appeared in the other as a positive moral good. The fundamental differences of the ​two ethics, very important in practice, have been finally crystallized, even for modern times, by the Jansenist controversy and the Bull Unigenitus.
43. "You may labour in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain. You are bound to improve all your talents." There follows the passage cited above in the text. A direct parallel between the pursuit of wealth in the Kingdom of Heaven and the pursuit of success in an earthly calling is found in Janeway, Heaven upon Earth (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 275).
44. Even in the Lutheran Confession of Duke Christopher of Württemberg, which was submitted to the Council of Trent, objection It is made to the oath of poverty. He who is poor in his station should bear it, but if he swore to remain so it would be the same as if he swore to remain sick or to maintain a bad reputation.
45. Thus in Baxter and also in Duke Christopher's confession. Compare further pasages like: " . . . the vagrant rogues whose lives are nothing but an exorbitant course; the main begging", etc. (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines; p. 259). Even Calvin had strictly forbidden begging, and the Dutch Synods campaigned against licences to beg. During the epoch of the Stuarts, especially Laud's regime under Charles I, which had systematically developed the principle of public poor relief and provision of work for the unemployed, the Puritan battle-cry was: "Giving alms is no charity" (title of Defoe's later well-known work). Towards the end of the seventeenth century they began the deterrent system of workhouses for the unemployed (compare Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, Cambridge, 1900, and H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, Jena, 1912, pp. 69 ff.).
46. The President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, G. White, said emphatically in his inaugural address before the assembly in London in 1903 (Baptist Handbook, 1904, p. 104): "The best men on the roll of our Puritan Churches were men of affairs, who believed that religion should permeate the whole of life."
47. Here also lies the characteristic difference from all feudal view-points. For the latter only the descendants of the parvenu (political or social) can reap the benefit of his success in a recognized station (characteristically expressed in the Spanish Hidalgo = hijo d'algo = filius de aliquo where the aliquid means an inherited property) However rapidly these differences are to-day fading out in the rapid change and Europeanization of the American national character, nevertheless the precisely opposite bourgeois attitude which glorifies business success and earnings as a symptom of mental achievement, but has no respect for mere inherited wealth, is still sometimes represented there. On the other hand, in Europe (as James Bryce once remarked) in effect almost every social honour is now purchasable ​for money, so long as the buyer has not himself stood behind the counter, and carries out the necessary metamorphosis of his property (formation of trusts, etc.). Against the aristocracy of blood, see for instance Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 216.
48. That was, for instance, already true of the founder of the Familist sect, Hendrik Nicklaes, who was a merchant (Barclay, Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, p. 34).
49. This is, for instance, definitely true for Hoornbeek, since Matt. v. 5 and 1 Tim. iv. 8 also made purely worldly promises to the saints (op. cit., I, p. 193). Everything is the work of God's Providence, but in particular He takes care of His own. Op. cit., p. 192: "Super alios autem summa cura et modis singularissimis versatur Dei providentia circa fideles." There follows a discussion of how one can know that a stroke of luck comes not from the communis providentia, but from that special care. Bailey also (op. cit., p. 191) explains success in worldly labours by reference to Providence. That prosperity is often the reward of a godly life is a common expression in Quaker writings (for example see such an expression as late as 1848 in Selection from the Christian Advices, issued by the General Meeting of the Society of Friends, London, sixth edition, 1851, p. 209). We shall return to the connection with the Quaker ethics.
50. Thomas Adams's analysis of the quarrel of Jacob and Esau may serve as an example of this attention to the patriarchs, which is equally characteristic of the Puritan view of life (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 235): "His [Esau's] folly may be argued from the base estimation of the birthright" [the passage is also important for the development of the idea of the birthright, of which more later] "that he would so lightly pass from it and on so easy condition as a pottage." But then it was perfidious that he would not recognize the sale, charging he had been cheated. He is, in other words, "a cunning hunter, a man of the fields"; a man of irrational, barbarous life; while Jacob, "a plain man, dwelling in tents", represents the "man of grace".
The sense of an inner relationship to Judaism, which is expressed even in the well-known work of Roosevelt, Köhler (op. cit.) found widespread among the peasants in Holland. But, on the other hand, Puritanism was fully conscious of its differences from Hebrew ethics in practical affairs, as Prynne's attack on the Jews (apropos of Cromwell's proposals for toleration) plainly shows. See below, note 58.
51. Zur bäuerlichen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre. Von einem thüringischen Landpfarrer, second edition, Gotha, 1890, p. 16. The peasants who are here described are characteristic products of the Lutheran Church. Again and again I wrote Lutheran in the margin when the excellent author spoke of peasant religion in general.
52. Compare for instance the passage cited in Ritschl, Pietismus II. p. 158. Spener also bases his objections to change of calling and ​pursuit of gain partly on passages in Jesus Sirach. Theologische Bedenken, III, p. 426.
53. It is true that Bailey, nevertheless, recommends reading them, and references to the Apocrypha occur now and then, though naturally not often. I can remember none to Jesus Sirach just now (though perhaps by chance).
54. Where outward success comes to persons evidently damned, the Calvinist (as for instance Hoornbeek) comforts himself with the reflection, following the theory of stubbornness, that God allows it to them in order to harden them and make their doom the more certain.
55. We cannot go farther into this point in this connection. We are here interested only in the formalistic character of Puritan righteousness. On the significance of Old Testament ethics for the lex naturæ there is much in Troeltsch's Soziallehren.
56. The binding character of the ethical norms of the Scriptures goes for Baxter (Christian Directory, III, p. 173 f.) so far that they are (1) only a transcript of the law of nature, or (2) bear the "express character of universality and perpetuity".
57. For instance Dowden (with reference to Bunyan), op. cit., P. 39.
58. More on this point in the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. The enormous influence which, for instance, the second commandment ("thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image") has had on the development of the Jewish character, its rationality and abhorrence of sensuous culture, cannot be analysed here. However, it may perhaps be noted as characteristic that one of the leaders of the Educational Alliance in the United States, an organization which carries on the Americanization of Jewish immigrants on a grand scale and with astonishing success, told me that one of the first purposes aimed at in all forms of artistic and social educational work was emancipation from the second commandment. To the Israelite's prohibition of any anthropomorphic representation of God corresponds in Puritanism the somewhat different but in effect similar prohibition of idolatry of the flesh.
As far as Talmudic Judaism is concerned, some fundamental traits of Puritan morality are certainly related to it. For instance, it is stated in the Talmud (in Wünsche, Babyl. Talmud, II, p. 34) that it is better and will be more richly rewarded by God if one does a good deed for duty's sake than one which is not commanded by the law. In other words, loveless fulfillment of duty stands higher ethically than sentimental philanthropy. The Puritan ethics would accept that in essentials. Kant in effect also comes close to it, being partly of Scotch ancestry and strongly influenced by Pietism in his bringing up. Though we cannot discuss the subject here, many of his formulations are closely related to ideas of ascetic Protestantism. ​But nevertheless the Talmudic ethic is deeply saturated with Oriental traditionalism. "R. Tanchum said to Ben Chanilai, 'Never alter a custom'" (Gemara to Mischna. VII, i, 86b, No. 93, in Wünsche. It is a question of the standard of living of day labourers). The only exception to this conformity is relation to strangers.
Moreover, the Puritan conception of lawfulness as proof evidently provided a much stronger motive to positive action than the Jewish unquestioned fulfillment of all commandments. The idea that success reveals the blessing of God is of course not unknown to Judaism. But the fundamental difference in religious and ethical significance which it took on for Judaism on account of the double ethic prevented the appearance of similar results at just the most important point. Acts toward a stranger were allowed which were forbidden toward a brother. For that reason alone it was impossible for success in this field of what was not commanded but only allowed to be a sign of religious worth and a motive to methodical conduct in the way in which it was for the Puritan. On this whole problem, which Sombart, in his book Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, has often dealt with incorrectly, see the essays referred to above. The details have no place here.
The Jewish ethics, however strange that may at first sound, remained very strongly traditionalistic. We can likewise not enter into the tremendous change which the inner attitude toward the world underwent with the Christian form of the ideas of grace and salvation which contained in a peculiar way the seeds of new possibilities of development. On Old Testament lawfulness compare for example Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, II, p. 265.
To the English Puritans, the Jews of their time were representatives of that type of capitalism which was involved in war, Government contracts, State monopolies, speculative promotions, and the construction and financial projects of princes, which they themselves condemned. In fact the difference may, in general, with the necessary qualifications, be formulated: that Jewish capitalism was speculative pariah-capitalism, while the Puritan was bourgeois organization of labour.
59. The truth of the Holy Scriptures follows for Baxter in the last analysis from the "wonderful difference of the godly and ungodly", the absolute difference of the renewed man from others, and God's evident quite special care for His chosen people (which may of course be expressed in temptations), Christian Directory, I, p. 165.
60. As a characterization of this, it is only necessary to read how tortuously even Bunyan, who still occasionally approaches the atmosphere of Luther's Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (for example in Of the Law and a Christian, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 254), reconciles himself with the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican ​(see the sermon The Pharisee and the Publican, op. cit., p. 100). Why is the Pharisee condemned? He does not truly keep God's commandments, for he is evidently a sectarian who is only concerned with external details and ceremonies (p. 107), but above all because he ascribes merit to himself, and at the same time, like the Quakers, thanks God for virtue by misuse of His name. In a sinful manner he exalts this virtue (p. 126), and thus implicitly contests God's predestination (p. 139). His prayer is thus idolatry of the flesh, and that is the reason it is sinful. On the other hand, the publican is, as the honesty of his confession shows, spiritually reborn, for, as it is put with a characteristic Puritan mitigation of the Lutheran sense of sin, "to a right and sincere conviction of sin there must be a conviction of the probability of mercy" (p. 209).
61. Printed in Gardiner's Constitutional Documents. One may compare this struggle against anti-authoritarian asceticism with Louis XIV's persecution of Port Royal and the Jansenists.
62. Calvin's own standpoint was in this respect distinctly less drastic, at least in so far as the finer aristocratic forms of the enjoyment of life were concerned. The only limitation is the Bible. Whoever adheres to it and has a good conscience, need not observe his every impulse to enjoy life with anxiety. The discussion in Chapter X of the Instit. Christ (for instance, "nec fugere ea quoque possumus quæ videntur oblectatione magis quam necessitate inservire") might in itself have opened the way to a very lax practice. Along with increasing anxiety over the certitudo salutis the most important circumstance for the later disciples was, however, as we shall point out in another place, that in the era of the ecclesia militans it was the small bourgeoisie who were the principal representatives of Calvinistic ethics.
63. Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 3) begins a sermon on the "three divine sisters" ("but love is the greatest of these") with the remark that even Paris gave the golden apple to Aphrodite!
64. Novels and the like should not be read; they are "wastetimes" (Baxter, Christian Directory, I, p. 51). The decline of lyric poetry and folk-music, as well as the drama, after the Elizabethan age in England is well known. In the pictorial arts Puritanism perhaps did not find very much to suppress. But very striking is the decline from what seemed to be a promising musical beginning (England's part in the history of music was by no means unimportant) to that absolute musical vacuum which we find typical of the Anglo-Saxon peoples later, and even to-day. Except for the negro churches, and the professional singers whom the Churches now engage as attractions (Trinity Church in Boston in 1904 for $8,000 annually), in America one also hears as community singing in general only a noise which is intolerable to German ears (partly analogous things in Holland also).
​65. Just the same in Holland, as the reports of the Synods show. (See the resolutions on the Maypole in the Reitmaas Collection, VI, 78, 139.)
66. That the "Renaissance of the Old Testament" and the Pietistic orientation to certain Christian attitudes hostile to beauty in art, which in the last analysis go back to Isaiah and the 22nd Psalm, must have contributed to making ugliness more of a possible object for art, and that the Puritan repudiation of idolatry of the flesh played a part, seems likely. But in detail everything seems uncertain. In the Roman Church quite different demagogic motives led to outwardly similar effects, but, however, with quite different artistic results. Standing before Rembrandt's Saul and David (in the Mauritshuis), one seems directly to feel the powerful influence of Puritan emotions. The excellent analysis of Dutch cultural influences in Carl Neumann's Rembrandt probably gives everything that for the time being we can know about how far ascetic Protestantism may be credited with a positive fructifying influence on art.
67. The most complex causes, into which we cannot go here, were responsible for the relatively smaller extent to which the Calvinistic ethic penetrated practical life there. The ascetic spirit began to weaken in Holland as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century (the English Congregationalists who fled to Holland in 1608 were disturbed by the lack of respect for the Sabbath there), but especially under the Stadtholder Frederick Henry. Moreover, Dutch Puritanism had in general much less expansive power than English. The reasons for it lay in part in the political constitution (particularistic confederation of towns and provinces) and in the far smaller degree of military force (the War of Independence was soon fought principally with the money of Amsterdam and mercenary armies. English preachers illustrated the Babylonian confusion of tongues by reference to the Dutch Army). Thus the burden of the war of religion was to a large extent passed on to others, but at the same time a part of their political power was lost. On the other hand, Cromwell's army, even though it was partly conscripted, felt that it was an army of citizens. It was, to be sure, all the more characteristic that just this army adopted the abolition of conscription in its programme, because one could fight justly only for the glory of God in a cause hallowed by conscience, but not at the whim of a sovereign. The constitution of the British Army, so immoral to traditional German ideas, had its historical origin in very moral motives, and was an attainment of soldiers who had never been beaten. Only after the Restoration was it placed in the service of the interests of the Crown.
The Dutch schutterijen, the champions of Calvinism in the period of the Great War, only half a generation after the Synod of Dordrecht, do not look in the least ascetic in the pictures of Hals. Protests of ​the Synods against their conduct occur frequently. The Dutch concept of Deftigkeit is a mixture of bourgeois-rational honesty and patrician consciousness of status. The division of church pews according to classes in the Dutch churches shows the aristocratic character of this religion even to-day. The continuance of the town economy hampered industry. It prospered almost alone through refugees, and hence only sporadically. Nevertheless, the worldly asceticism of Calvinism and Pietism was an important influence in Holland in the same direction as elsewhere. Also in the sense to be referred to presently of ascetic compulsion to save, as Groen van Prinsterer shows in the passage cited below, note 87.
Moreover, the almost complete lack of belles lettres in Calvinistic Holland is of course no accident (see for instance Busken-Huet, Het Land van Rembrandt). The significance of Dutch religion as ascetic compulsion to save appears clearly even in the eighteenth century in the writings of Albertus Haller. For the characteristic peculiarities of the Dutch attitude toward art and its motives, compare for example the autobiographical remarks of Constantine Huyghens (written in 1629-31) in Oud Holland, 1891. The work of Groen van Prinsterer, La Hollande et l'influence de Calvin, 1864, already referred to, offers nothing important for our problems. The New Netherlands colony in America was socially a half-feudal settlement of patroons, merchants who advanced capital, and, unlike New England, it was difficult to persuade small people to settle there.
68. We may recall that the Puritan town government closed the theatre at Stratford-on-Avon while Shakespeare was still alive and residing there in his last years. Shakespeare's hatred and contempt of the Puritans appear on every occasion. As late as 1777 the City of Birmingham refused to license a theatre because it was conducive to slothfulness, and hence unfavourable to trade (Ashley, Birmingham Trade and Commerce, 1913).
69. Here also it was of decisive importance that for the Puritan there was only the alternative of divine will or earthly vanity. Hence for him there could be no adiaphora. As we have already pointed out, Calvin's own view was different in this respect. What one eats, wears, etc., as long as there is no enslavement of the soul to earthly desire as a result, is indifferent. Freedom from the world should be expressed, as for the Jesuits, in indifference, which for Calvin meant an indifferent, uncovetous use of whatever goods the earth offered (pp. 409 ff. of the original edition of the Instit. Christ).
70. The Quaker attitude in this respect is well known. But as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century the heaviest storms shook the pious congregation of exiles in Amsterdam for a decade over the fashionable hats and dresses of a preacher's wife (charmingly described in Dexter's Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years). Sanford (op. cit.) has pointed out that the present-day male ​hair-cut is that of the ridiculous Roundheads, and the equally ridiculous (for the time) male clothing of the Puritans is at least in principle fundamentally the same as that of to-day.
71. On this point again see Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise.
72. Again and again we come back to this attitude. It explains statements like the following: "Every penny which is paid upon yourselves and children and friends must be done as by God's own appointment and to serve and please Him. Watch narrowly, or else that thievish, carnal self will leave God nothing" (Baxter, op. cit., I, p. 108). This is decisive; what is expended for personal ends is withdrawn from the service of God's glory.
73. Quite rightly it is customary to recall (Dowden, op. cit.) that Cromwell saved Raphael's drawings and Mantegna's Triumph of Cæsar from destruction, while Charles II tried to sell them. Moreover, the society of the Restoration was distinctly cool or even hostile to English national literature. In fact the influence of Versailles was all-powerful at courts everywhere. A detailed analysis of the influence of the unfavourable atmosphere for the spontaneous enjoyment of everyday life on the spirit of the higher types of Puritan, and the men who went through the schooling of Puritanism, is a task which cannot be undertaken within the limits of this sketch. Washington Irving (Bracebridge Hall) formulates it in the usual English terms thus: "It [he says political freedom, we should say Puritanism] evinces less play of the fancy, but more power of the imagination." It is only necessary to think of the place of the Scotch in science, literature, and technical invention, as well as in the business life of Great Britain, to be convinced that this remark approaches the truth, even though put somewhat too narrowly. We cannot speak here of its significance for the development of technique and the empirical sciences. The relation itself is always appearing in everyday life. For the Quakers, for instance, the recreations which are permissible (according to Barclay) are: visiting of friends, reading of historical works, mathematical and physical experiments, gardening, discussion of business and other occurrences in the world, etc. The reason is that pointed out above.
74. Already very finely analysed in Carl Neumann's Rembrandt, which should be compared with the above remarks in general.
75. Thus Baxter in the passage cited above, I, p. 108, and below.
76. Compare the well-known description of Colonel Hutchinson (often quoted, for instance, in Sanford, op. cit., p. 57) in the biography written by his widow. After describing all his chivalrous virtues and his cheerful, joyous nature, it goes on: "He was wonderfully neat, cleanly, and genteel in his habit, and had a very good fancy in it; but he left off very early the wearing of anything that was costly." Quite similar is the ideal of the educated and highly civilized Puritan ​woman who, however, is penurious of two things: (i) time, and (2) expenditure for pomp and pleasure, as drawn in Baxter's funeral oration for Mary Hammer (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 533).
77. I think, among many other examples, especially of a manufacturer unusually successful in his business ventures, and in his later years very wealthy, who, when for the treatment of a trouble- some digestive disorder the doctor prescribed a few oysters a day, could only be brought to comply with difficulty. Very considerable gifts for philanthropic purposes which he made during his lifetime and a certain openhandedness showed, on the other hand, that it was simply a survival of that ascetic feeling which looks upon enjoyment of wealth for oneself as morally reprehensible, but has nothing whatever to do with avarice.
78. The separation of workshop, office, of business in general and the private dwelling, of firm and name, of business capital and private wealth, the tendency to make of the business a corpus mysticum (at least in the case of corporate property) all lay in this direction. On this, see my Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pp. 312 ff.).
79. Sombart in his Kapitalismus (first edition) has already well pointed out this characteristic phenomenon. It must, however, be noted that the accumulation of wealth springs from two quite distinct psychological sources. One reaches into the dimmest antiquity and is expressed in foundations, family fortunes, and trusts, as well as much more purely and clearly in the desire to die weighted down with a great burden of material goods; above all to insure the continuation of a business even at the cost of the personal interests of the majority of one's children. In such cases it is, besides the desire to give one's own creation an ideal life beyond one's death, and thus to maintain the splendor familiæ and extend the personality of the founder, a question of, so to speak, fundamentally egocentric motives. That is not the case with that bourgeois motive with which we are here dealing. There the motto of asceticism is "Entsagen sollst du, sollst entsagen" in the positive capitalistic sense of "Erwerben sollst du, sollst erwerben". In its pure and simple non -rationality it is a sort of categorical imperative. Only the glory of God and one's own duty, not human vanity, is the motive for the Puritans; and to-day only the duty to one's calling. If.it pleases anyone to illustrate an idea by its extreme consequences, we may recall the theory of certain American millionaires, that their millions should not be left to their children, so that they will not be deprived of the good moral effects of the necessity of working and earning for themselves. To-day that idea is certainly no more than a theoretical soap-bubble.
80. This is, as must continually be emphasized, the final decisive religious motive (along with the purely ascetic desire to mortify the flesh). It is especially clear in the Quakers.
​81. Baxter (Saints' Everlasting Rest, p. 12) repudiates this with precisely the same reasoning as the Jesuits: the body must have what it needs, otherwise one becomes a slave to it.
82. This ideal is clearly present, especially for Quakerism, in the first period of its development, as has already been shown in important points by Weingarten in his Englische Revolutionskirchen. Also Barclay's thorough discussion (op. cit., pp. 519 ff., 533) shows it very clearly. To be avoided are: (i) Worldly vanity ; thus all ostentation, frivolity, and use of things having no practical purpose, or which are valuable only for their scarcity (i.e. for vanity's sake). (2) Any unconscientious use of wealth, such as excessive expenditure for not very urgent needs above necessary provision for the real needs of life and for the future. The Quaker was, so to speak, a living law of marginal utility. "Moderate use of the creature" is definitely permissible, but in particular one might pay attention to the quality and durability of materials so long as it did not lead to vanity. On all this compare Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser, 1846, pp. 216 ff. Especially on comfort and solidity among the Quakers, compare Schneckenburger, Vorlesungen, pp. 96 f.
83. Adapted by Weber from Faust, Act I. Goethe there depicts Mephistopheles as "Die Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft".—Translator's Note.
84. It has already been remarked that we cannot here enter into the question of the class relations of these religious movements (see the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen). In order to see, however, that for example Baxter, of whom we make so much use in this study, did not see things solely as a bourgeois of his time, it will suflSce to recall that even for him in the order of the religious value of callings, after the learned professions comes the husband-man, and only then mariners, clothiers, booksellers, tailors, etc. Also, under mariners (characteristically, enough) he probably thinks at least as often of fishermen as of shipowners. In this regard several things in the Talmud are in a different class. Compare, for instance, in Wünsche, Babyl. Talmud, II, pp. 20, 21, the sayings of Rabbi Eleasar, which though not unchallenged, all contend in effect that business is better than agriculture. In between see II, 2, p. 68, on the wise investment of capital: one-third in land, one-third in merchandise, and one-third in cash.
For those to whom no causal explanation is adequate without an economic (or materialistic as it is unfortunately still called) interpretation, it may be remarked that I consider the influence of economic development on the fate of religious ideas to be very important and shall later attempt to show how in our case the process of mutual adaptation of the "two took place. On the other haiid, those religious ideas themselves simply cannot be deduced from economic circumstances. They are in themselves, that is beyond doubt, the ​most powerful plastic elements of national character, and contain a law of development and a compelling force entirely their own. Moreover, the most important differences, so far as non-religious factors play a part, are, as with Lutheranism and Calvinism, the result of political circumstances, not economic.
85. That is what Eduard Bernstein means to express when he says, in the essay referred to above (pp. 625, 681), "Asceticism is a bourgeois virtue." His discussion is the first which has suggested these important relationships. But the connection is a much wider one than he suspected. For not only the accumulation of capital, but the ascetic rationalization of the whole of economic life was involved.
For the American Colonies, the difference between the Puritan North, where, on account of the ascetic compulsion to save, capital in search of investment was always available, from the conditions in the South has already been clearly brought out by Doyle.
86. Doyle, The English in America, II, chap. i. The existence of iron-works (1643), weaving for the market (1659), and also the high development of the handicrafts in New England in the first generation after the foundation of the colonies are, from a purely economic view-point, astounding. They are in striking contrast to the conditions in the South, as well as the non-Cälvinistic Rhode Island with its complete freedom of conscience. There, in spite of the excellent harbour, the report of the Governor and Council of 1686 said: "The great obstruction concerning trade is the want of merchants and men of considerable estates amongst us" (Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island, p. 490). It can in fact hardly be doubted that the compulsion continually to reinvest savings, which the Puritan curtailment of consumption exercised, played a part. In addition there was the part of Church discipline which cannot be discussed here.
87. That, however, these circles rapidly diminished in the Netherlands is shown by Busken-Huet's discussion (op. cit., II, chaps, iii and iv). Nevertheless, Groen van Prinsterer says (Handb. der Gesch. van het Vaderland, third edition, par. 303, note, p. 254), "De Nederlanders verkoopen veel en verbruiken wenig", even of the time after the Peace of Westphalia.
88. For England, for instance, a petition of an aristocratic Royalist (quoted in Ranke, Engl. Geschichte, IV, p. 197) presented after the entry of Charles II into London, advocated a legal prohibition of the acquisition of landed estates by bourgeois capital, which should thereby be forced to find employment in trade. The class of Dutch regents was distinguished as an estate from the bourgeois patricians of the cities by the purchase of landed estates. See the complaints, cited by Fruin, Tien jaren uit den tachtigjarigen oorlog, of the year 1652, that the regents have become landlords and are no longer merchants. To be sure these circles had never been at bottom strictly ​Calvinistic. And the notorious scramble for membership in the nobility and titles in large parts of the Dutch middle class in the second half of the seventeenth century in itself shows that at least for this period the contrast between English and Dutch conditions must be accepted with caution. In this case the power of hereditary moneyed property broke through the ascetic spirit.
89. Upon the strong movement for bourgeois capital to buy English landed estates followed the great period of prosperity of English agriculture.
90. Even down into this century Anglican landlords have often refused to accept Nonconformists as tenants. At the present time the two parties of the Church are of approximately equal numbers, while in earlier times the Nonconformists were always in the minority.
91. H. Levy (article in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XLVI, p. 605) rightly notes that according to the native character of the English people, as seen from numerous of its traits, they were, if anything, less disposed to welcome an ascetic ethic and the middle-class virtues than other peoples. A hearty and unrestrained enjoyment of life was, and is, one of their fundamental traits. The power of Puritan asceticism at the time of its predominance is shown most strikingly in the astonishing degree to which this trait of character was brought under discipline among its adherents.
92. This contrast recurs continually in Doyle's presentation. In the attitude of the Puritan to everything the religious motive always played an important part (not always, of course, the sole important one). The colony (under Winthrop's leadership) was inclined to permit the settlement of gentlemen in Massachusetts, even an upper house with a hereditary nobility, if only the gentlemen would adhere to the Church. The colony remained closed for the sake of Church discipline. The colonization of New Hampshire and Maine was carried out by large Anglican merchants, who laid out large stock-raising plantations. Between them and the Puritans there was very little social connection. There were complaints over the strong greed for profits of the New Englanders as early as 1632 (see Weeden's Economic and Social History of New England, I, p. 125).
93. This is noted by Petty (Pol. Arith.), and all the contemporary sources without exception speak in particular of the Puritan sectarians, Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites, etc., as belonging partly to a propertyless class, partly to one of small capitalists, and contrast them both with the great merchant aristocracy and the financial adventurers. But it was from just this small capitalist class, and not from the great financial magnates, monopolists, Government contractors, lenders to the King, colonial entrepreneurs, promoters, etc., that there originated what was characteristic of Occidental capitalism: the middle-class organization of industrial labour on the basis of private ​property (see Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, London, 1914, pp. 196 ff.). To see that this difference was fully known even to contemporaries, compare Parker's Discourse Concerning Puritans of 1641, where the contrast to promoters and courtiers is also emphasized.
94. On the way in which this was expressed in the politics of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, especially during the War of Independence, see Sharpless, A Quaker Experiment in Government, Philadelphia, 1902.
95. Quoted in Southey, Life of Wesley, chap, xxix (second American edition, II, p. 308). For the reference, which I did not know, I am indebted to a letter from Professor Ashley (1913). Ernst Troeltsch, to whom I communicated it for the purpose, has already made use of it.
96. The reading of this passage may be recommended to all those who consider themselves to-day better informed on these matters than the leaders and contemporaries of the movements themselves. As we see, they knew very well what they were doing and what dangers they faced. It is really inexcusable to contest so lightly, as some of my critics have done, facts which are quite beyond dispute, and have hitherto never been disputed by anyone. All I have done is to investigate their underlying motives somewhat 'more carefully. No one in the seventeenth century doubted the existence of these relationships (compare Manley, Usury of 6 per Cent. Examined, 1669, p. 137). Besides the modern writers already noted, poets like Heine and Keats, as well as historians like Macaulay, Cunningham, Rogers, or an essayist such as Matthew Arnold, have assumed them as obvious. From the most recent literature see Ashley, Birmingham Industry and Commerce (1913). He has also expressed his complete agreement with me in correspondence. On the whole problem now compare the study by H. Levy referred to above, note 91.
97. Weber's italics.
98. That exactly the same things were obvious to the Puritans of the classical era cannot perhaps be more clearly shown than by the fact that in Bunyan Mr. Money-Love argues that one may become religious in order to' get rich, for instance to attract customers. For why one has become religious makes no difference (see p. 114, Tauchnitz edition).
99. Defoe was a zealous Nonconformist.
100. Spener also (Theologische Bedenken, pp. 426, 429, 432 ff.), although he holds that the merchant's calling is full of temptations and pitfalls, nevertheless declares in answer to a question: "I am glad to see, so far as trade is concerned, that my dear friend knows no scruples, but takes it as an art of life, which it is, in which much good may be done for the human race, and God's will may be carried out through love." This is more fully justified in other passages by mercantilist arguments. Spener, at times in a purely Lutheran strain, ​designates the desire to become rich as the main pitfall, following 1 Tim. vi, viii, and ix, and referring to Jesus Sirach (see above), and hence rigidly to be condemned. But, on the other hand, he takes some of it back by referring to the prosperous sectarians who yet live righteously (see above, note 39). As the result of industrious work wealth is not objectionable to him either. But on account of the Lutheran influence his standpoint is less consistent than that of Baxter.
101. Baxter, op. cit., II, p. 16, warns against the employment of "heavy, flegmatic, sluggish, fleshly, slothful persons" as servants, and recommends preference for godly servants, not only because ungodly servants would be mere eye-servants, but above all because "a truly godly servant will do all your service in obedience to God, as if God Himself had bid him do it". Others, on the other hand, are inclined "to make no great matter of conscience of it". However, the criterion of saintliness of the workman is not for him the external confession of faith, but the "conscience to do their duty". It appears here that the interests of God and of the employers are curiously harmonious. Spener also (Theologische Bedenken, III, p. 272), who otherwise strongly urges taking time to think of God, assumes it to be obvious that workers must be satisfied with the extreme minimum of leisure time (even on Sundays). English writers have rightly called the Protestant immigrants the pioneers of skilled labour. See also proofs in H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, p. 53.
102. The analogy between the unjust (according to human standards) predestination of only a few and the equally unjust, but equally divinely ordained, distribution of wealth, was too obvious to be escaped. See for example Hoornbeek, op. cit., I, p. 153. Furthermore, as for Baxter, op. cit., I, p. 380, poverty is very often a symptom of sinful slothfulness.
103. Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 158) thinks that God probably allows so many people to remain poor because He knows that they would not be able to withstand the temptations that go with wealth. For wealth all too often draws men away from religion.
104. See above, note 45, and the study of H. Levy referred to there. The same is noted in all the discussions (thus by Manley for the Huguenots).
105. Charisma is a sociological term coined by Weber himself. It refers to the quality of leadership which appeals to non-rational motives. See Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pp. 140 ff.—Translator's Note.
106. Similar things were not lacking in England. There was, for example, that Pietism which, starting from Law's Serious Call (1728), preached poverty, chastity, and, originally, isolation from the world.
​107. Baxter's activity in Kidderminster, a community absolutely debauched when he arrived, which was almost unique in the history of the ministry for its success, is at the same time a typical example of how asceticism educated the masses to labour, or, in Marxian terms, to the production of surplus value, and thereby for the first time made their employment in the capitalistic labour relation (putting-out industry, weaving, etc.) possible at all. That is very generally the causal relationship. From Baxter's own view-point he accepted the employment of his charges in capitalistic production for the sake of his religious and ethical interests. From the standpoint of the development of capitalism these latter were brought into the service of the development of the spirit of capitalism.
108. Furthermore, one may well doubt to what extent the joy of the mediaeval craftsman in his creation, which is so commonly appealed to, was effective as a psychological motive force. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly something in that thesis. But in any case asceticism certainly deprived all labour of this worldly attractiveness, to-day for ever destroyed by capitalism, and oriented it to the beyond. Labour in a calling as such is willed by God. The impersonality of present-day labour, what, from the standpoint of the individual, is its joyless lack of meaning, still has a religious justification here. Capitalism at the time of its development needed labourers who were available for economic exploitation for conscience' sake. To-day it is in the saddle, and hence able to force people to labour without transcendental sanctions.
109. Petty, Political Arithmetick, Works, edited by Hull, I, p. 262.
110. On these conflicts and developments see H. Levy in the book cited above. The very powerful hostility of public opinion to monopolies, which is characteristic of England, originated historically in a combination of the political struggle for power against the Crown—the Long Parliament excluded monopolists from its membership —with the ethical motives of Puritanism; and the economic interests of the small bourgeois and moderate-scale capitalists against the financial magnates in the seventeenth century. The Declaration of the Army of August 2, 1652, as well as the Petition of the Levellers of January 28, 1653, demand, besides the abolition of excises, tariffs, and indirect taxes, and the introduction of a single tax on estates, above all free trade, i.e. the abolition of the monopolistic barriers to trade at home and abroad, as a violation of the natural rights of man.
111. Compare H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, pp. 51 f.
112. That those other elements, which have here not yet been traced to their religious roots, especially the idea that honesty is the best policy (Franklin's discussion of credit), are also of Puritan origin, must be proved in a somewhat different connection (see the following essay [not translated here]). Here I shall limit myself to ​repeating the following remark of J. A. Rowntree (Quakerism, Past and Present, pp. 95-6), to which E. Bernstein has called my attention: "Is it merely a coincidence, or is it a consequence, that the lofty profession of spirituality made by the Friends has gone hand in hand with shrewdness and tact in the transaction of mundane affairs? Real piety favours the success of a trader by insuring his integrity and fostering habits of prudence and forethought, important items in obtaining that standing and credit in the commercial world, which are requisites for the steady accumulation of wealth" (see the following essay). "Honest as a Huguenot" was as proverbial in the seventeenth century as the respect for law of the Dutch which Sir W. Temple admired, and, a century later, that of the English as compared with those Continental peoples that had not been through this ethical schooling.
113. Well analysed in Bielschowsky's Goethe, II, chap. xviii. For the development of the scientific cosmos Windelband, at the end of his Blütezeit der deutschen Philosophie (Vol. II of the Gesch. d. Neueren Philosophie), has expressed a similar idea.
114. Saints' Everlasting Rest, chap. xii.
115. "Couldn't the old man be satisfied with his $75,000 a year and rest? No! The frontage of the store must be widened to 400 feet. Why? That beats everything, he says. In the evening when his wife and daughter read together, he wants to go to bed. Sundays he looks at the clock every five minutes to see when the day will be over—what a futile life!" In these terms the son-in-law (who had emigrated from Germany) of the leading dry-goods man of an Ohio city expressed his judgment of the latter, a judgment which would undoubtedly have seemed simply incomprehensible to the old man. A symptom of German lack of energy.
116. This remark alone (unchanged since his criticism) might have shown Brentano (op. cit.) that I have never doubted its independent significance. That humanism was also not pure rationalism has lately again been strongly emphasized by Borinski in the Abhandl. der Münchener Akad. der Wiss., 1919.
117. The academic oration of v. Below, Die Ursachen der Reformation (Freiburg, 1916), is not concerned with this problem, but with that of the Reformation in general, especially Luther. For the question dealt with here, especially the controversies which have grown out of this study, I may refer finally to the work of Hermelink, Reformation und Gegenreformation, which, however, is also primarily concerned with other problems.
118. For the above sketch has deliberately taken up only the relations in which an influence of religious ideas on the material culture is really beyond doubt. It would have been easy to proceed beyond that to a regular construction which logically deduced everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant rational​ism. But that sort of thing may be left to the type of dilettante who believes in the unity of the group mind and its reducibility to a single formula. Let it be remarked only that the period of capitalistic development lying before that which we have studied was everywhere in part determined by religious influences, both hindering and helping. Of what sort these were belongs in another chapter. Furthermore, whether, of the broader problems sketched above, one or another can be dealt with in the limits of this Journal [the essay first appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik—Translator's Note] is not certain in view of the problems to which it is devoted. On the other hand, to write heavy tomes, as thick as they would have to be in this case, and dependent on the work of others (theologians and historians), I have no great inclination (I have left these sentences unchanged).
For the tension between ideals and reality in early capitalistic times before the Reformation, see now Strieder, Studien zur Geschichte der kapit. Organizationsformen, 1914, Book II. (Also as against the work of Keller, cited above, which was utilized by Sombart.)
119. I should have thought that this sentence and the remarks and notes immediately preceding it would have sufficed to prevent any misunderstanding of what this study was meant to accomplish, and I find no occasion for adding anything. Instead of following up with an immediate continuation in terms of the above programme, I have, partly for fortuitous reasons, especially the appearance of Troeltsch's Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, which disposed of many things I should have had to investigate in a way in which I, not being a theologian, could not have done it; but partly also in order to correct the isolation of this study and to place it in relation to the whole of cultural development, determined, first, to write down some comparative studies of the general historical relationship of religion and society. These follow. Before them is placed only a short essay in order to clear up the concept of sect used above, and at the same time to show the significance of the Puritan conception of the Church for the capitalistic spirit of modern times.