The principle of gain for its own sake, of an endlessly increasing profit, is now set up as the one sensible goal of all human life and endeavor. All the aspects of human life are with logical thoroughness rationalized unto this one end. Where the gospel had told Christians not to be too solicitous about the morrow, the new ideal held forth a constant solicitude for the future, not merely in regard to the necessaries of life, for it was not satisfied with such a moderate goal, but in regard to the ever greater accumulation of material goods. It is the standard of production for profit accepted so uncompromisingly that production is even curtailed below the minimum standard of human needs if greater profit at less expense can be procured in that way. It is the spirit according to which all factors concerned in production, except the receivers of the profit, are treated as merely so many material instruments for the accumulation of this profit, even human labor being nothing but a market commodity to be sold or rejected at will.
Wealth alone counts.
The highest criterion of rank or position among one's fellowmen has in our day been decided almost entirely the amount of money a person was able to accumulate. That is his own affair and no one else's. Thus was glorified the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and not an as instrument for the good life of the Christian idea. There is no reason to wonder that while our evident material advances have been so great our civilization has shown only retrogression when judged by the standards of Christian civiliation and tradition or even by the Hellenistic ideals on which Christianity was built, and that the material progress has been accompanied by the loss of effective religion, art, literature, true social intercourse, ethical norms, etc. The bourgeois spirit knows nothing of denying oneself the comforts and goods of this world for the sake of growth in spiritual things or for the sake of another world.