Max Weber ...............................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 1. RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION ................................1

CHAPTER II. THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM....................................................................................5

CHAPTER III. LUTHER'S CONCEPTION OF THE CALLING .......................................................15

CHAPTER IV. THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF WORLDLY ASCETICISM ......................20

CHAPTER V. ASCETICISM AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM ...............................................40

A glance at the occupational statistics of any country of mixed religious composition brings to light with

remarkable frequency a situation which has several times provoked discussion in the Catholic press and

literature, and in Catholic congresses in Germany, nam ely, the fact that business leaders and owners of

capital, as well as the higher grades of skilled labor, and even more the higher technically and commercially

trained personnel of modern enterprises, are overwhelmingly Protestant. This is true not only in cases where

the difference in religion coincides with one of nationality, and thus of cultural development, as in Eastern

Germany between Germans and Poles. The same thing is shown in the figures of religious affiliation almost

wherever capitalism, at t he time of its great expansion, has had a free hand to alter the social distribution of

the population in accordance with its needs, and to determine its occupational structure. The more freedom it

has had, the more clearly is the effect shown. It is true that the greater relative participation of Protestants in

the ownership of capital, in management, and the upper ranks of labor in great modern industrial and

commercial enterprises, may in part be explained in terms of historical circumstances, which extend far back

into the past, and in which religious affiliation is not a cause of the economic conditions, but to a certain

extent appears to be a result of them. Participation in the above economic functions usually involves some

previous ownership of ca pital, and generally an expensive education; often both. These are today largely

dependent on the possession of inherited wealth, or at least on a certain degree of material well being. A

number of those sections of the old Empire which were most highly developed economically and most

favored by natural resources and situation, in particular a majority of the wealthy towns went over to

Protestantism in the sixteenth century The results of that circumstance favor the Protestants even today in

their strug gle for economic existence. There arises thus the historical question: why were the districts of

highest economic development at the same time particularly favorable to a revolution in the Church? The

The emancipation from economic traditionalism appears, no doubt, to be a factor which would greatly

strengthen the tendency to doubt the sanctity of the religious tradition, as of all traditional authorities. But it is

necessary to note, what has often been forgotten, that the Reformation meant not the elimination the Church's

control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous, one. It meant

the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more

than formal, in favor of a regulation, of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private

and public life, was infinitely., burdensome and earnestly enforced. The rule of the Catholic Church,

"punishing the heretic, but indulgent. to the sinner", as it was in the past even more than today, is now

tolerated by peoples of thoroughly modern economic character, and was borne by the richest and

economically most advanced peoples on earth at about the turn of the fifteenth century. The rule of

Calvinism, on the other hand, as it was enforced in the sixteenth century in Geneva and in Scotland, at the

turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in large parts of the Netherlands, in the seventeenth in New

England, and for a time in England itself, would be for us the most absolutely unbearable form of

ecclesiastical control of the individual which could possibly exist. That was exactly what larg e numbers of

the old commercial aristocracy of those times, in Geneva as well as in Holland and England, felt about it.

And what the reformers complained of in those areas of high economic development was not too much

supervision of life on the part of the Church, but too little. Now how does it happen that at that time those

countries which were most advanced economically, and within them the rising bourgeois middle classes, not

only failed to resist this unexampled tyranny of Puritanism, but even develo ped a heroism in its defense? For

bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our

But further, and especially important: it may be, as has been claimed, that the greater participation of

Protestants in the positions of ownership and management in modern economic life may today be

understood, in part at least, simply as a result of the greater mat erial wealth they have inherited. But there are

certain other phenomena which cannot be explained in the same way. Thus, to mention only a few facts: there

is a great difference discoverable in Baden, in Bavaria, in Hungary, in the type of higher educatio n which

Catholic parents, as opposed to Protestant, give their children. That the percentage of Catholics among the

students and graduates of higher educational institutions in general lags behind their proportion of the total

population," may, to be sure, be largely explicable in terms of inherited differences of wealth. But among the

Catholic graduates themselves the percentage of those graduating from the institutions preparing, in

particular, for technical studies and industrial and commercial occupations, but in general from those

preparing for middleclass business life, lags still farther behind the percentage of Protestants. On the other

hand, Catholics prefer the sort of training which the humanistic Gymnasium affords. That is a circumstance

to w hich the above explanation does not apply, but which, on the contrary, is one reason why so few

Even more striking is a fact which partly explains the smaller proportion of Catholics among the skilled

laborers of modern industry. It is well known that the factory has taken its skilled labor to a large extent from

young men in the handicrafts; but this is much more true of Protestant than of Catholic journ eymen. Among

journeymen, in other words, the Catholics show a stronger propensity to remain in their crafts, that is they

more often become master craftsmen, whereas the Protestants are attracted to a larger extent into the factories

in order to fill the upper ranks skilled labor and administrative positions. The explanation of these cases is

undoubtedly that the mental and spiritual peculiarities acquired from the environment, here the type of

education favored by the religious atmosphere of the home com munity and the parental home, have

The smaller participation of Catholics in the modern business life of Germany is all the mo re striking

because it runs counter to a tendency which has been observed at all times including the present. National or

religious minorities which are in a position of subordination to a group of rulers are likely, through their

voluntary or invol untary exclusion from positions of political influence, to be driven with peculiar force into

economic activity. Their ablest members seek to satisfy the desire for recognition of their abilities in this

field, since there is no opportunity in the service of the State. This has undoubtedly been true of the Poles in

Russia and Eastern Prussia, who have without question been undergoing a more rapid economic advance than

in Galicia, where they have been in the ascendant. It has in earlier times been true of the Huguenots in France

under Louis XIV, the Nonconformists and Quakers in England, and, last but not least, the Jew for two

thousand years. But the Catholics in Germany have shown no striking evidence of such a result of their

position. In the past they have, unlike the Protestants, undergone no particularly prominent economic

development in the times when they, were persecuted or only tolerated, either in Holland or in England. On

the other hand, it is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain br anches of the movement to be fully

discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special

tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics

either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in

the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external

historicopolitical situations. It will be our ta sk to investigate these religions with a view to finding out what

peculiarities they have or have had which might have resulted in the behavior we have described. On

superficial analysis, and on the basis of certain current impressions, one might be tempt ed to express the

difference by saying that the greater otherworldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest

ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such

an explanation f its the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as

a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the 'Catholic way of life, while the Catholics

answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through

Protestantism. One recent writer has attempted to formulate the difference of their attitudes toward economic

life in the following manner: "The Catholic is quieter, having less of the acquisitive impu lse; he prefers a life

of the greatest possible security, even with a smaller income, to a life of risk and excitement, even though it

may bring the chance of gaining honor and riches. The proverb says jokingly, 'either eat well or sleep well'. In

the pre sent case the Protestant prefers to eat well, the Catholic to sleep undisturbed."

In fact, this desire to eat well may be a correct though incomplete characterization of the motives of many

nominal Prote stants in Germany at the present time. But things were very different in the past: the English,

Dutch, and American Puritans were characterized by the exact opposite of the joy of living, a fact which is

indeed, as we shall see, most important for our pre sent study. Moreover, the French Protestants, among

others, long retained, and retain to a certain extent up to the present, the characteristics which were impressed

upon the Calvinistic Churches everywhere, especially under the cross in the time of the r eligious struggles.

Nevertheless (or was it, perhaps, as we shall ask later, precisely on that account?) it is well known that these

characteristics were one of the most important factors in the industrial and capitalistic development of France,

and on th e small scale permitted them by their persecution remained so. If we may call this seriousness and

the strong predominance of religious interests in the whole conduct of life otherworldliness, then the French

Calvinists were and still are at least as othe rworldly as, for instance, the North German Catholics, to whom

their Catholicism is undoubtedly as vital a matter as religion is to any other people in the world. Both differ

from the predominant religious trends in their respective countries in much the same way. The Catholics of

France are, in their lower ranks, greatly interested in the enjoyment of life, in the upper directly hostile to

religion. Similarly, the Protestants of Germany are today absorbed in worldly economic life, and their upper

ranks are most indifferent to religion. Hardly anything shows so clearly as this parallel that, with such vague

ideas as that of the alleged otherworldliness of Catholicism, and the alleged materialistic joy of living of

Protestantism, and others like them, not hing can be accomplished for our purpose. In such general terms the

distinction does not even adequately fit the facts of today, and certainly not of the past. If, however, one

wishes to make use of it at all, several other observations present themselve s at once which, combined with

the above remarks, suggest that the supposed conflict between otherworldliness, asceticism, and

ecclesiastical piety on the one side, and participation in capitalistic acquisition on the other, might actually

turn out to be an intimate relationship. As a matter of fact it is surely remarkable, to begin with quite a

superficial observation, how large is the number of representatives of the most spiritual forms of Christian

piety who have sprung from commercial circles. In pa rticular, very many of the most zealous adherents of

Pietism are of this origin. It might e explained as a sort of reaction against mammonism on the part of

sensitive natures not adapted to commercial life, and, as in the case of Francis of Assisi, man Pietists have

themselves interpreted the process of their conversion in these terms. Similarly, the remarkable circumstance

that so many of the greatest capitalistic entrepreneursdown to Cecil Rhodeshave come from clergymen's

families might be explained r eaction against their ascetic upbringing. But this form of explanation fails

where an extraordinary capitalistic business sense is combined in the same persons and groups with the most

intensive forms of a piety which penetrates and dominates their whole lives. Such cases are not isolated, but

these traits are characteristic of many of the most important Churches and sects in the history of

Protestantism. Especially Calvinism, wherever it has appeared, has shown this combination. However little,

in the ti me of the expansion of the Reformation, it (or any other Protestant belief) was bound up with any

particular social class, it is characteristic and in a certain sense typical that in French Huguenot Churches

monks and businessmen (merchants, craftsmen) we re particularly numerous among the proselytes, especially

at the time of the persecution. Even the Spaniards knew that heresy (i.e. the Calvinism of the Dutch)

promoted trade, and this coincides with the opinions which Sir William Petty expressed in his d iscussion of

the reasons for the capitalistic development of the Netherlands. Gothein rightly calls the Calvinistic diaspora

the seedbed of capitalistic economy. Even in this case one might consider the decisive factor to be the

superiority of the French and Dutch economic cultures from which these communities sprang, or perhaps the

immense influence of exile in the breakdown of traditional relationships. But in France the situation was, as

we know from Colbert's struggles, the same even in t he seventeenth century. Even Austria, not to speak of

But not all the Protestant denominations seem to have had an equally strong influence in thi s direction. That

of Calvinism, even in Germany, was among the strongest, it seems, and the reformed faith more than the

others seems to have promoted the development of the spirit of capitalism, in the Wupperthal as well as

elsewhere. Much more so than Lutheranism, as comparison both in general and in particular instances,

especially in the Wupperthal, seems to prove. For Scotland, Buckle, and among English poets, Keats have

emphasized these same relationships. Even more striking, as it is only nec essary to mention, is the

connection of a religious way of life with the most intensive development of business acumen among those

sects whose otherworldliness is proverbial as their wealth, especially the Quakers and the Mennonites. The

part which the fo rmer have played in England and North America fell to the latter in Germany and the

Netherlands. That in East Prussia Frederick William I tolerated the Mennonites as indispensable to industry,

in spite of their absolute refusal to refusal perform military service, is only one of the numerous wellknown

cases which illustrates the fact, though, considering the character of that monarch, it is one it is one of the

most striking. Finally, that this combination of intense piety with just as strong a developme nt of business

It is only necessary to think of the Rhine country and of Calw. In this purely introductory discussion it is

unnecessary to pile up more examples. For these few already all show one thing: that the spirit of hard work,

of progress, or whatever else it might may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to ascribe to

Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense as

connected with the Enlightenment. The old Protestantism of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Voet, had precious little to

do with what today is called progress. To whole aspects of modern life which the m ost extreme religionist

would not wish to suppress today, it was directly hostile. If any inner relationship between certain

expressions of the old Protestant spirit and modern capitalistic culture is to be found, we must attempt to find

it, for better o r worse, not in its alleged more or less materialistic or at least antiascetic joy of living, but in

its purely religious characteristics. Montesquieu says (Esprit des Lois, Book XX, chap. 7) of the English that

they "had progressed the farthest of all p eoples of the world in three important things: in piety, in commerce,

and in freedom". Is it not possible that their commercial superiority and their adaptation to free political

institutions are connected in someway with that record of piety which Montes quieu ascribes to them? A large

number of possible relationships, vaguely perceived, occur to us when we put the question in this way. It will

now be our task to formulate what occurs to us confusedly as clearly as is possible, considering the

inexhaustib le diversity to be found in all historical material. But in order to do this it is necessary to leave

behind the vague and general concepts with which we have dealt up to this point, and attempt to Penetrate

into the peculiar characteristics of and the differences between those great worlds of religious thought which

Before we can proceed to that, however, a few remarks are necessary, first on the peculiarities of the

phenomenon of which we are seeking an historical explanation, then concerning the sense in which such an

In the title of this study is used the somewhat pretentious phrase, the spirit of capitalism. What is to be

understood by it? The attempt to give anything like a definition of it brings out certain difficulties which are

If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any understandable meaning, it can only be

an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a

Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a phenomenon significant for its unique

individuality, cannot be defined according to the formula genus proximunt, differentia specifica, but it must

be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up.

Thus the final and definitive concept cannot stand at the beginning of the investigation, but must come at the

end. We must, in other words, work out in the course of the discussion, as its most important result, the best

conceptual formulation of what we here understand by the spirit of capitalism, that is the best from the point

of view which interests us here. This point of view (the one of which we shall speak later) is, further, by no

means the only possible one from which the historical phenomena we are investigating can be analyzed.

Other standpoints would, for this as for every historical phenomenon, yield other characteristics as the

essential ones. The result is that it is by no means necessary to understand by the spirit of capitalism only

what it will come to mean to us for the purposes of our analysis. This is a necessary result of the nature of

historical concepts which attempt for their methodological purposes not to grasp historical reality in abstract

general formulae, but in concrete genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique and

Thus, if we try to determine the object, the analysis and historical explanation of which we are attempting, it

cannot be in the form of a conceptual definition, but at least in the beginning only a provisional description of

what is here meant by the spirit of capitalism. Such a description is, however, indispensable in order clearly

to understand the object of the investigation. For this purpose we turn to a document of that spirit which

contains what we are looking for in almost classical purity, and at the game time has the advantage of being

free from all direct relationship to religion, being thus for our purposes, free of preconceptions.

"Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, o sits idle,

one half of that day, though he spends but, sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not t reckon that

the only expense; he has really spent, rather thrown away, five shilling, besides. "Remember, that credit is

money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make

of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes

"Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can

beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on, till it

becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise

quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He

that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds."

"Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man's purse. He that is known to pay

punctually and exactly to the time he, promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money

his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to

the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep

borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend's purse for

"The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in

the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a

billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when You should be at work, he sends for his money the next

day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. 'It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe;

it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.

"Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people

who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and

your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will

discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have

been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience."

" For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known

prudence and honesty. "He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the

price for the use of one hundred pounds. "He that wastes idly a groat's worth of his time per day, one day

with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day. "He that idly loses five shillings'

worth of time, loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea. "He that loses five

shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by

the time that a young man become: old, will amount to a considerable sum of money."

It is Benjamin Ferdinand who preaches to us in these sentences, the same which Ferdinand Kurnberger

satirizes in his clever and malicious Picture of American Culture as the supposed confession of faith of the

Yankee. That it is the spirit of capitalism which here speaks in characteristic fashion, no one will doubt,

however little we may wish to claim that everything which could be understood as pertaining to that spirit is

Contained in it. Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy of which Kurnberger sums up

in the words, "They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men". The peculiarity of this philosophy of

avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the

individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached

is not simply a means of making one's way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is

treated not as foolishness but as forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere

business astuteness, that sort of thing is common enough, it is an ethos. This is the quality which interests us.

When Jacob Fugger, in speaking to a business associate who had retired and who wanted to persuade him to

do the same, since he had made enough money and should let others have a chance, rejected that as

Pusillanimity and answered that "he (Fugger) thought otherwise, he wanted to make money as long as he

could", the spirit of his statement is evidently quite different from that of Franklin. What in the former case

was an expression of commercial daring and a Personal inclination morally neutral, in the latter takes on the

character of ethically colored maxim for the conduct of life. The concept spirit of capitalism is here used in

this specific sense, it is the spirit of modern capitalism. For that we are here dealing only with Western

European and American capitalism is obvious from the way in which the problem was stated. Capitalism

existed in China, India, Babylon, in the classic world, and in the Middle Ages. But in all these cases, as we

Now, all Franklin's moral attitudes are colored with utilitarianism. Honesty is useful, because it assures

credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues. A logical deduction from

this would be that where, for instance, the appearance of honesty serves the same purpose, that would suffice,

and an unnecessary surplus of this virtue would evidently appear to Franklin's eyes a unproductive waste.

And as a matter of fact, the story in his autobiography of his conversion to those virtues, or the discussion of

the value of a strict maintenance of the appearance of modesty, the assiduous belittlement of one's own

deserts in order to gal general recognition later, confirms this impression. According to Franklin, those

virtues, like all others, are only in so far virtues as they are actually useful to t individual, and the surrogate of

mere appearance always sufficient when it accomplishes the end view. It is a conclusion which is inevitable

for strict utilitarianism. The impression of many Germans t the virtues professed by Americanism are pure

hypocrisy seems to have been confirmed by this striking case. But in fact the matter is not by any means so

Benjamin Franklin's own character, as it appears in the really unusual candidness of his autobiography, belies

that suspicion. The circumstance that he ascribes his recognition of the utility of virtue to a divine revelation

which was intended to lead him in the path of righteousness, shows that something more than mere

In fact, the summumbonumof his ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict

avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to

say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the

happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic

acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This

reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently

as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At

the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus

ask, whyshould "money be made out of men", Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colorless deist,

answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed

into him again and again in his youth: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings"

(Prov. xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the

result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now

not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin's ethic, as expressed in the passages we have

And in truth this peculiar idea, so familiar to us today, but in reality so little a matter of course, of one's duty

in a calling, is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the

fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the

content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on

the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital).

Of course, this conception has not appeared only under capitalistic conditions. On the contrary, we shall, later

trace its origins back to a time previous to the advent of capitalism. Still less, naturally, do we maintain:' that

a conscious acceptance of these ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or laborers in

modem capitalistic enterprises, is a condition o the further existence of present day capitalism. The

capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which

presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It

forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to

capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as

inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them

Thus the capitalism of today, which has come t dominate economic life, educates and selects the economic

subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest. But here one can easily see the

limits of the concept of selection as a means of historical explanation. In order that a manner of life so well

adapted to the peculiarities of capitalism could be selected at all, i.e. should come to dominate others, it had

to originate somewhere, and not in isolated individuals alone, but as a way of life common to whole groups

of men. This origin is what really needs explanation. Concerning the doctrine of the more naive historical

materialism, that such ideas originate as a reflection or superstructure of economic situations, we shall speak

more in detail below. At this point it will suffice for our purpose to call attention to the fact that without

doubt, in the country of Benjamin Franklin's birth (Massachusetts), the spirit of capitalism (in the sense we

have attached to it) was present before the capitalistic order. There were complaints of a peculiarly

Calculating sort of profitseeking in New England, as distinguished from other parts of America, as early as

1632. It is further undoubted that capitalism remained far less developed in some of the neighboring colonies,

the later Southern States of the United States of America, in spite of the fact that these latter were founded by

large capitalists for business motives, while the New England colonies were founded by preachers and

seminary graduates with the help of small bourgeois, craftsmen and yoemen, for religious reasons. In this

case the causal relation is certainly the reverse of that suggested by the materialistic standpoint.

But the origin and history of such ideas is much more complex than the theorists of the superstructure

suppose. The spirit of capitalism, in the sense in which we are using the term, had to fight its way to

supremacy against a whole world of hostile forces. A state of mind such as that expressed in the passages we

have quoted from Franklin, and which called forth the applause of a whole people, would both in ancient

times and in the Middle Ages have been proscribed as the lowest sort of avarice and as an attitude entirely

lacking in self respect. It is, in ' fact, still regularly thus looked upon by all those social groups which are least

involved in or adapted to modern capitalistic conditions. This is not wholly because the instinct of acquisition

was in those times unknown or undeveloped, as has often been said. Nor because the auri sacra fames, the

greed for gold, was then, or now, less powerful outside of bourgeois capitalism than within its peculiar

sphere, as the illusions of modern romanticists are wont to believe. The difference between the capitalistic

and precapitalistic spirits is not to be found at this point. The greed of the Chinese Mandarin, the old Roman

aristocrat, or the modern peasant, can stand up to any comparison. And the auri . sacra fames of a

Neapolitan cabdriver or barcaiuolo, and certainly of Asiatic representatives of similar trades, as well as of

the craftsmen of southern European or Asiatic countries is, as anyone can find out for himself, very much

more intense, and especially more unscrupulous than that of, say, an Englishman in similar circumstances.

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money

has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeoiscapitalistic development,

measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward. As every employer knows, the lack of

coscienziosita of the labourers of such countries, for instance Italy as compared with Germany, has been, and

to a certain extent still is, one of the principal obstacles to their capitalistic development. Capitalism cannot

make use of the labor of those who practice the doctrine of undisciplined liberumarbitrium, any more than it

can make use of the business man who seems absolutely unscrupulous in his dealings with others, as we can

learn from Franklin. Hence the difference does not lie in the degree of development of any impulse to make

money. The auri sacra fames is as old as the history of man. But we shall see that those who submitted to it

without reserve as an uncontrolled impulse, such as the Dutch sea captain who "would go through hell for

gain, even though he scorched his sails", were by no means the representatives of that attitude of mind from

which the specifically modern capitalistic spirit as a mass phenomenon is derived, and that is what matters.

At all periods of history, wherever it was possible, there has been ruthless acquisition, bound to, no ethical

norms whatever. Like war and piracy, trade has often been unrestrained in its relations with foreigners and

those outside the group. The double ethic has permitted here what was forbidden in dealings among

brothers. Capitalistic acquisition as an adventure has been at home in all types of economic society which

have known trade with the use of money and which have offered it opportunities, through commenda,

farming of taxes, State loans, financing of wars, ducal courts and officeholders. Likewise the inner attitude

of the adventurer, which laughs at all ethical limitations, has been universal. Absolute and conscious

ruthlessness in acquisition has often stood in the closest connection with the strictest conformity to tradition.

Moreover, with the breakdown of tradition and the more or less complete extension of free economic

enterprise, even to within the social group, the new thing has not generally been ethically justified and

encouraged, but only tolerated as a fact. And this fact has been treated either as ethically indifferent or as

reprehensible, but unfortunately unavoidable. This has not only been the normal attitude of all ethical

teachings, but, what is more important, also that expressed in the practical action of the average man of

precapitalistic times, precapitalistic in the sense that the rational utilization of capital in a permanent

enterprise and the rational capitalistic organization of labor had not yet become dominant forces in the

determination of economic activity. Now just this attitude was one of the strongest inner obstacles which the

adaptation of men to the conditions of an ordered bourgeois capitalistic economy has encountered

The most important opponent with which the spirit of capitalism, in the sense of a definite standard of life

claiming ethical sanction, has had to struggle, was that type of attitude and reaction to new situations which

we may designate as traditionalism. In this case also every attempt at a final definition must be held in

abeyance. On the other hand, lye must try to make the provisional meaning clear by citing a few cases. We

One of the technical means which the modern employer uses in order to secure the greatest possible amount

of work from his men is the device of piece rates. In agriculture, for instance, the gathering of the harvest is a

case where the greatest possible intensity of labor is called for, since, the weather being uncertain, the

difference between high profit and heavy loss may depend on the speed with which the harvesting can be

done. Hence a system of piece rates is almost universal in this case. And since the interest of the employer in

a speeding. up of harvesting increases with the increase of the results and the intensity of the work, the

attempt has again and again been made, by increasing the piece rates of the workmen, thereby giving them

an opportunity to earn what is for them a very high wage, to interest them in increasing their own efficiency.

But a Peculiar difficulty has been met with surprising frequency: raising the Piece rates has often had the

result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the

increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of his work. A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1

mark per acre mowed 2 1/2 acres per day and earned 2 1/2 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per

acre mowed, not 3 acres, as be might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he

could still earn the 2 1/2 marks to which he was accustomed. The opportunity of earning more was less

attractive than that of working less. He did not ask: how much can I earn in a day if 1 do as much work as

possible? but: how much must 1 work in order to cam the wage, 2 1/2 marks, which I earned before and

which takes care of my traditional needs? This is an example of what is here meant by traditionalism. A

man does not "by nature" wish to cam more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live

and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of

increasing the productivity of human labor by increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely

stubborn resistance of this leading trait of precapitalistic labor. And today it encounters it the more, the

more backward (from a capitalistic point of view) the laboring forces are with which it has to deal.

Another obvious possibility, to return to our example, since the appeal to the acquisitive instinct through

higher wage rates failed, would have been to try the opposite policy, to force the worker by reduction of his

wage rates to work harder to cam the same amount than he did before. Low wages and high profits seem even

today to a superficial observer to stand in correlation; everything which is paid out in wages seems to

involve a corresponding reduction of profits. That road capitalism has taken again and again since its

beginning ' For centuries it was an article of faith, that low wages were productive, i.e. that they increased the

material results of labor so that, as Pieter de la Cour, on this point, as we shall see, quite in the spirit of the

old Calvinism, said long ago, the people only work because and so long as they are poor.

But the effectiveness of this apparently so efficient method has its limits. Of course the presence of a surplus

population which it can hire cheaply in the labour market is a necessity for the development of Capitalism.

But though too large a reserve army may in certain cases favor its quantitative expansion, it checks its

qualitative development, especially the transition to types of enterprise which make more intensive use of

labor. Low wages are by no means identical with cheap labor. From a purely quantitative point of view the

efficiency of labor decreases with a wage which is physiologically insufficient, which may in the long run

even mean a survival of the unfit. The presentday average Silesian mows, when he exerts himself to the full,

little more than two thirds as much land as the better paid and nourished Pomeranian or Mecklenburger, and

the Pole, the further East he comes from, accomplishes progressively less than the German. Low wages fail

even from a purely business point of view wherever it is a question of producing goods which require any

sort of skilled labor, or the use of expensive machinery which is easily damaged, or in general wherever any

great amount of sharp attention or of initiative is required. Here low wages do not pay, and their effect is the

opposite of what was intended. For not only is a developed sense of responsibility absolutely indispensable,

but in general also an attitude which, at least during working hours, is freed from continual calculations of

how the customary wage May be earned with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of exertion. Labor

must, on the contrary, be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by

no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the

product of a long and arduous process of education. Today, capitalism, once in the saddle, can recruit its

laboring force in all industrial countries with comparative ease. In the past this was in every case an

extremely difficult problem. And even today it could probably not get along without the support of a

powerful ally along the way, which, as we shall see below, was at hand at the time of its development.

What is meant can again best be explained by means of an example. The type of backward traditional form of

labor is today very often exemplified by women workers, especially unmarried ones. An almost universal

complaint of employers of girls, for instance German girls, is that they are almost entirely unable and

unwilling to give up methods of work inherited or once learned in favor of more efficient ones, to adapt

themselves to new methods, to learn and to concentrate their intelligence, or even to use it at all. Explanations

of the possibility of making work easier, above all more profitable to themselves, generally encounter a

complete lack of understanding. Increases of piece rates are without avail against the stone wall of habit. In

general it is otherwise, and that is a point of no little importance from our viewpoint, only with girls having

a specifically religious, especially a Pietistic, background. One often bears, and statistical investigation

confirms it, that by far the best chances of economic education are found among this group. The ability of

mental concentration, as well as the absolutely essential feeling of obligation to one's job, are here most often

combined with a strict economy which calculates the possibility of high earnings, and a cool selfcontrol and

frugality which enormously increase performance. This provides the most favorable foundation for the

conception of labor as an end in itself, as a calling which is necessary to capitalism: the chances of

overcoming traditionalism are greatest on account of the religious upbringing. This observation of

presentday capitalism in itself suggests that it is worth while to ask how this connection of adaptability to

capitalism with religious factors may have come about in the days of the early development of capitalism. For

that they were even then present in much the same form can be inferred from numerous facts. For instance,

the dislike and the persecution which Methodist workmen in the eighteenth century met at the hands of their

comrades were not solely nor even principally the result of their religious eccentricities, England had seen

many of those and more striking ones. It rested rather, as the destruction of their tools, repeatedly mentioned

in the reports, suggests, upon their specific willingness to work as we should say today.

However, let us again return to the present, and this time to the entrepreneur, in order to clarify the meaning

of traditionalism in his case. Sombart, in his discussions of the genesis of capitalism, has distinguished

between the satisfaction of needs and acquisition as the two great leading principles in economic history. In

the former case the attainment of the goods necessary to meet personal needs, in the latter a struggle for profit

free from the limits set by needs, have been the ends controlling the form and direction of economic activity.

What he called the economy of needs seems at first glance to be identical with what is here described as

economic traditionalism. That may be the case if the concept of needs is limited to traditional needs. But if

that is not done, a number of economic types which must be considered capitalistic according to the

definition of capital which Sombart gives in another part of his work, would be excluded from the category of

acquisitive economy and put into that of needs economy. Enterprises, namely, which are carried on by private

entrepreneurs by utilizing capital (money or goods with a money value) to make a profit, purchasing the

means of production and selling the product, i.e. undoubted capitalistic enterprises, may at the same time

have a traditionalistic character. This has, in the course even of modem economic history, not been merely an

occasional case, but rather the rule, with continual interruptions from repeated and increasingly powerful

conquests of the capitalistic spirit. To be sure the capitalistic form of an enterprise and the spirit in which it is

run generally stand in some sort of adequate relationship to each other, but not In one of necessary

interdependence. Nevertheless, we provisionally use the expression spirit of (modern) capitalism to describe

that attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically in the manner which we have illustrated, by the

example of Benjamin Franklin. This, however, is justified by the historical fact that that attitude of mind has

on the one hand found its most suitable expression in capitalistic enterprise, while on the other the enterprise

But the two may very well occur separately. Benjamin Franklin was filled with the spirit of capitalism at a

time when his printing business did not differ in form from any handicraft enterprise. And we shall see that at

the beginning of modem times it was by no means the capitalistic entrepreneurs of the commercial

aristocracy, who were either the sole or the predominant bearers of the attitude we have here called the spirit

of capitalism. It was much more the rising strata of the lower industrial middle classes. Even in the

nineteenth century its classical representatives were not the elegant gentlemen of Liverpool and Hamburg,

with their commercial fortunes handed down for generations, but the selfmade parvenus of Manchester

and Westphalia, who often rose from very modest circumstances. As early as the sixteenth century the

situation was similar; the industries which arose at that time were mostly created by parvenus .

The management, for instance, of a bank, a wholesale export business, a large retail establishment, or of a

large puttingout enterprise dealing with goods produced in homes, is certainly only possible in the form of

a capitalistic enterprise. Nevertheless, they may all be carried on in a traditionalistic spirit. In fact, the

business of a large bank of issue cannot be carried on in any other way. The foreign trade of whole epochs

has rested on the basis of monopolies and legal privileges Of strictly traditional character. In retail trade

and we are not here talking of the small men without capital who are continually crying out for Government

aid the revolution which is making an end of the old traditionalism is still in full swing. It is the same

development which broke up the old puttingout system, to which modern domestic labor is related only in

form. How this revolution takes place and what is its significance may, in spite of the fact these things are so

Until about the middle of the past century the life of a putterout was, at least in many of the branches of the

Continental textile industry, what we should today consider very comfortable. We may imagine its routine

somewhat as follows: The peasants came with their cloth, often (in the case of linen) principally or entirely

made from raw material which the peasant himself had produced, to the town in which the putterout lived,

and after a careful, often official, appraisal of the quality, received the customary price for it. The putterout's

customers, for markets any appreciable distance away, were middlemen, who also came to him, generally not

yet following samples, but seeking traditional qualities, and bought from his warehouse, or, long before

delivery, placed orders which were probably in turn passed on to the peasants. Personal canvassing of

customers took place, if at all, only at long intervals. Otherwise correspondence sufficed, though the sending

of samples slowly gained ground. The number of business hours was very moderate, perhaps five to six a

day, sometimes considerably less; in the rush season, where there was one, more. Earnings were moderate;

enough to lead a respectable life and in good times to put away a little. On the whole, relations among

competitors were relatively good, with a large degree of agreement on the fundamentals of business. A long

daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and a congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable

The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the entrepreneur's activity was of a purely business

character; the use of capital, turned over in the business, was indispensable; and finally, the objective aspect

of the economic process, the bookkeeping, was rational. But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers

the spirit which animated the entrepreneur: the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the

traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of regulating the relationships with labor, and the

essentially traditional circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones. All these dominated the

conduct of the business, were at the basis, one may say, of the ethos of this group of business men.

Now at some time this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed, and often entirely without any essential change

in the form of organization, such as the transition to a unified factory, to mechanical weaving, etc. What

happened was, on the contrary, often no more than this: some young man from one of the puttingout

families went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigor of his

supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into laborers. On the other hand, he would

begin to change his marketing methods by so far as possible going directly to the final consumer, would take

the details into his own hands, would personally solicit customers, visiting them every year, and above all

would adapt the quality of the product directly to their needs and wishes. At the same time he began to

introduce the principle of low prices and large turnover. There was repeated what everywhere and always is

the result of such a process of rationalization: those who would not follow suit had to go out of business.

The idyllic state collapsed under the pressure of a bitter competitive struggle, respectable fortunes were made,

and not lent out at interest, but always reinvested in the business. The old leisurely and comfortable attitude

toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they did not

wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with the old ways were forced to curtail

And, what is most important in this connection, it was not generally in such cases a stream of new money

invested in the industry which brought about this revolution in several cases known to me the whole

revolutionary process was set in motion with a few thousands of capital borrowed from relations but the

new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism, had set to work. The question of the motive forces in the

expansion of modern capitalism is not in the first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which

were available for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of capitalism. Where it

appears and is able to work itself out, it produces its own capital and monetary supplies as the means to its

ends, but the reverse is not true. Its entry on the scene was not generally peaceful. A flood of mistrust,

sometimes of hatred, above all of moral indignation, regularly opposed itself to the first innovator. Often I

know of several cases of the sort regular legends of mysterious shady spots in his previous life have been

produced. It is very easy not to recognize that only an unusually strong character could save an entrepreneur

of this new type from the loss of his temperate selfcontrol and from both moral and economic shipwreck.

Furthermore, along with clarity of vision and ability to it is only by virtue of very definite and highly

developed ethical qualities that it has been possible for him to command the absolutely indispensable

confidence of his customers and workmen. Nothing else could have given him the strength to overcome the

innumerable obstacles, above all the infinitely more intensive work which is demanded of the modern

entrepreneur. But these are ethical qualities of quite a different sort from those adapted to the traditionalism

And, as a rule, it has been neither daredevil and unscrupulous speculators, economic adventurers such as we

meet at all periods of economic history, nor simply great financiers who have carried through this change,

outwardly so inconspicuous, but nevertheless so decisive for the penetration of economic life with the new

spirit. On the contrary, they were men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at

he same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd d completely devoted to their business, with strictly

bourgeois opinions and principles. One is tempted to think that these personal moral qualities have not the

slightest relation to any ethical maxims, to say nothing of religious ideas, but that the essential relation

between them is negative. The ability to free oneself from the common tradition, a sort of liberal

enlightenment, seems likely to be the most suitable basis for such a business man's success. And today that

is generally precisely the case. Any relationship between religious beliefs and conduct is generally absent,

and where any exists, at least in Germany, it tends to be of the negative sort. The people filled with the spirit

of capitalism today tend to be indifferent, if not hostile, to the Church. The thought of the pious boredom of

paradise has little attraction for their active natures; religion appears to them as a means of drawing people

away from labor in this world. If you ask them what is the meaning of their restless activity, why they are

never satisfied with what they have, thus appearing so senseless to any purely worldly view of life, they

would perhaps give the answer, if they know any at all: "to provide for my children and grandchildren". But

more often and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was just as effective for the traditionalist, more

correctly, simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives. That is in

fact the only possible motivation, but it at the same time expresses what is, seen from the viewpoint of

personal happiness, so irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead

Of course, the desire for the power and recognition which the mere fact of wealth brings plays its part. When

the imagination of a whole people has once been turned toward purely quantitative bigness, as in the United

States, this romanticism of numbers exercises an irresistible appeal to the poets among business men.

Otherwise it is in general not the real leaders, and especially not the permanently successful entrepreneurs,

who are taken in by it. In particular, the resort to entailed estates and the nobility, with sons whose conduct

at the university and in the officers' corps tries to cover up their social origin, as has been the typical history

of German capitalistic parvenu families, is a product of later decadence. The ideal type of the capitalistic

entrepreneur, as it has been represented even in Germany by occasional outstanding examples, has no relation

to such more or less refined climbers. He avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as well as

conscious enjoyment of his power, and is embarrassed by the outward signs of the social recognition which

he receives. His manner of life is, in other words, often, and we shall have to investigate the historical

significance of just this important fact, distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency, as appears clearly enough

in the sermon of Franklin which we have quoted. It is, namely, by no means exceptional, but rather the rule,

for him to have a sort of modesty which is essentially more honest than the reserve which Franklin so

shrewdly recommends. He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having

But it is just that which seems to the precapitalistic man so incomprehensible and mysterious, so unworthy

and contemptible. That anyone should be able to make it the sole purpose of his lifework, to sink into the

grave weighed down with a great material load of money and goods, seems to him explicable only as the

At present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions, with the forms of

organization and general structure which are peculiar to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might

be understandable, as has been said, purely as a result of adaptation. The capitalistic system so needs this

devotion to the calling of making money, it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to

that system, so intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence,

that there can today no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life

with any single Weltanschauung. In fact, it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the

attempts of religion to influence economic life, in so far as they can still be felt at all, to be as much an

unjustified interference as its regulation by the State. In such circumstances men's commercial and social

interests do tend to determine their opinions and attitudes. Whoever does not adapt his manner of life to the

conditions of capitalistic success must go under, or at least cannot rise. But these are phenomena of a time in

which modem capitalism has become dominant and has become emancipated from its old supports. But as it

could at one time destroy the old forms of medieval regulation of economic life only in alliance with the

growing power of the modern State, the same, we may say provisionally, may have been the case in its

relations with religious forces. Whether and in what sense that was the case, it is our task to investigate. For

that the conception of moneymaking as an end in itself to which people were bound, as a calling, was

contrary to the ethical feelings of whole epochs, it is hardly necessary to prove. The dogma Deo placere vix

potest which was incorporated into the canon law and applied to the activities of the merchant, and which at

that time (like the passage in the gospel about interest) was considered genuine, as well as St. Thomas's

characterization of the desire for gain as turpitudo (which term even included unavoidable and hence ethically

justified profit making), already contained a high degree of concession on the part of the Catholic doctrine

to the financial powers with which the Church had such intimate political relations in the Italian cities, as

compared with the much more radically antichrematistic views of comparatively wide circles. But even

where the doctrine was still better accommodated to the facts, as for instance with Anthony of Florence, the

feeling was never quite overcome, that activity directed to acquisition for its own sake was at bottom a

pudendum which was to be tolerated only because of the unalterable necessities of life in this world.

Some moralists of that time, especially of the nominalistic school, accepted developed capitalistic business

forms as inevitable, and attempted to justify them, especially commerce, as necessary. The

industriadeveloped in it they were able to regard, though not without contradictions, as a legitimate source of

profit, and hence ethically unobjectionable. But the dominant doctrine rejected the spirit of capitalistic

acquisition as turpitudo, or at least could not give it a positive ethical sanction. An ethical attitude like that of

Benjamin Franklin would have been simply unthinkable. This was, above all, the attitude of capitalistic

circles themselves. Their lifework was, so long as they clung to the tradition of the Church, at best

something morally indifferent. It was tolerated, but was still, even if only on account of the continual danger

of collision with the Church's doctrine on usury, somewhat dangerous to salvation. Quite considerable sums,

as the sources show, went at the death of rich people to religious institutions as conscience money, at times

even back to former debtors as usura which had been unjustly taken from them. It was otherwise, along with

heretical and other tendencies looked upon with disapproval, only in those parts of the commercial

aristocracy which were already emancipated from the tradition. But even skeptics and people indifferent to

the Church often reconciled themselves with it by gifts, because it was a sort of insurance against the

uncertainties of what might come after death, or because (at least according to the very widely held latter

view) an external obedience to the commands of the Church was sufficient to insure salvation. Here the either

non moral or immoral character of their action in the opinion of the participants themselves comes clearly to

Now, how could activity, which was at best ethically tolerated, turn into a calling in the sense of Benjamin

Franklin? The fact to be explained historically is that in the most highly capitalistic center of that time, in

Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the money and capital market of all the great political

Powers, this attitude was considered ethically unjustifiable, or at best to be tolerated. But in the backwoods

small bourgeois circumstances of Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, where business threatened for

simple lack of money to fall back into barter, where there was hardly a sign of large enterprise, where only

the earliest beginnings of banking were to be found, the same thing was considered the essence of moral

conduct, even commanded in the name of duty. To speak here of a reflection of material conditions in the

ideal superstructure would be patent nonsense. What was the background of ideas which could account for

the sort of activity apparently directed toward profit alone as a calling toward which the individual feels

himself to have an ethical obligation? For it was this idea which gave the way of life of the new entrepreneur

The attempt has been made, particularly by Sombart, in what are often judicious and effective observations,

to depict economic rationalism as the salient feature of modern economic life as a whole. Undoubtedly with

justification, if by that is meant the extension of the productivity of labor which has, through the

subordination of the process of production to scientific points of view, relieved it from its dependence upon

the natural organic limitations of the human individual. Now this process of rationalization in the field of

technique and economic organization undoubtedly determines an important part of the ideals of life of

modern bourgeois society. Labor in the service of a rational organization for the provision of humanity with

material goods has without doubt always appeared to representatives of the capitalistic spirit as one of the

most important purposes of their lifework. It is only necessary, for instance, to read Franklin's account of his

efforts in the service of civic improvements in Philadelphia clearly to apprehend this obvious truth. And the

joy and pride of having given employment to numerous people, of having had a part in the economic progress

of his home town in the sense referring to figures of population and volume of trade which capitalism

associated with the word, all these things obviously are part of the specific and undoubtedly idealistic

satisfactions in life to modern men of business. Similarly it is one of the fundamental characteristics of an

individualistic capitalistic economy that it is rationalized on the basis of rigorous calculation, directed with

foresight and caution toward the economic success which is sought in sharp contrast to the handtomouth

existence of the peasant, and to the privileged traditionalism of the guild craftsman and of the adventurers'

capitalism, oriented to the exploitation of political opportunities and irrational speculation.

It might thus seem that the development of the spirit of capitalism is best understood as part of the

development of rationalism as a whole, and could be deduced from the fundamental position of rationalism

on the basic problems of life. In the process Protestantism would only have to be considered in so far as it

had formed a stage prior to the development of a purely rationalistic philosophy. But any serious attempt to

carry this thesis through makes it evident that such a simple way of putting the question will not work, simply

because of the fact that the history of rationalism shows a development which by no means follows parallel

lines in the various departments of life. The rationalization of private law, for instance, if it is thought of as a

logical simplification and rearrangement of the content of the law, was achieved in the highest hitherto

known degree in the Roman law of late antiquity. But it remained most backward in some of the countries

with the highest degree of economic rationalization, notably in England, where the Renaissance of Roman

Law was overcome by the power of the great legal corporations, while it has always retained its supremacy in

the Catholic countries of Southern Europe. The worldly rational philosophy of the eighteenth century did not

find favor alone or even principally in the countries of highest capitalistic development. The doctrines of

Voltaire are even to day the common property of broad upper, and what is practically more important,

middle class groups in the Romance Catholic countries. Finally, if under practical rationalism is understood

the type of attitude which sees and judges the world consciously in terms of the worldly interests of the

individual ego, then this view of life was and is the special peculiarity of the peoples of the liberum arbitrium,

such as the Italians and the French are in very flesh and blood. But we have already convinced ourselves that

this is by no means the soil in which that relationship of a man to his calling as a task, which is necessary to

capitalism, has preeminently grown. In fact, one may this simple proposition, which is often forgotten,

should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism rationalize life

from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions, Rationalism is an historical

concept which covers a whole world of different things. It will be our task to find out whose intellectual child

the particular concrete form of rational thought was, from which the idea of a calling and the devotion to

labor in the calling has grown, which is, as we have seen, so irrational from the standpoint of purely

eudaemonistic self interest, but which has been and still is one of the most characteristic elements of our

capitalistic culture. We are here particularly interested in the origin of precisely the irrational element which

Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still more clearly in the English

calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by God, is at least suggested. The more emphasis is put upon

the word in a concrete case, the more evident is the connotation. And if we trace the history of the word

through the civilized languages, it appears that neither the predominantly Catholic peoples nor those of

classical antiquity have possessed any expression of similar connotation for what we know as a calling (in the

sense of a lifetask, a definite field in which to work), while one has existed for all predominantly Protestant

peoples. It may be further shown that this is not due to any ethnical peculiarity of the languages concerned. It

is not, for instance, the product of a Germanic spirit, but in its modern meaning the word comes from the

Bible translations, through the spirit of the translator, not that of the original. In Luther's translation of the

Bible it appears to have first been used at a point in Jesus Sirach (x i. 20 and 21) precisely in our modern

sense. After that it speedily took on its present meaning in the everyday speech of all Protestant peoples,

while earlier not even a suggestion of such a meaning could be found in the secular literature of any of them,

and even, in religious writings, so far as I can ascertain, it is only found in one of the German mystics whose

Like the meaning of the word, the idea is new, a product of the Reformation. This may be assumed as

generally known. It is true that certain suggestions of the positive valuation of routine activity in the world,

which is contained in this conception of the calling, had already existed in the Middle Ages, and even in late

Hellenistic antiquity. We shall speak of that later. But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the

valuation of the fulfillment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the

individual could assume. This it was which inevitably gave everyday worldly activity a religious

significance, and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense. The conception of the calling

thus brings out that central dogma of all Protestant denominations which the Catholic division. of ethical

precepts into preecepta and consilia discards. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass

worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon

Luther developed the conception in the course of the first decade of his activity as a reformer. At first, quite

in harmony with the prevailing tradition of the Middle Ages, as represented, for example, by Thomas

Aquinas he thought of activity in the world as a thing of the flesh, even though willed by God. It is the

indispensable natural condition of a life of faith, but in itself, like eating and drinking, morally neutral. But

with the development of the conception of sola fide in all its consequences, and its logical result, the

increasingly sharp emphasis against the Catholic consilia evangelica of the monks as dictates of the devil, the

calling grew in importance. The monastic life is not only quite devoid of value as a means of justification

before God, but he also looks upon its renunciation of the duties of this world as the product of selfishness,

withdrawing from temporal obligations. In contrast, labor in a calling appears to him as the outward

expression of brotherly love. This he proves by the observation that the division of labor forces every

individual to work for others, but his viewpoint is highly naive, forming an almost grotesque contrast to

Adam Smith's well known statements on the same subject. However, this justification, which is evidently

essentially scholastic, soon disappears again, and there remains, more and more strongly emphasized, the

statement that the fulfillment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to

God. It and it alone is the will of God, and hence every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth in the

That this moral justification of worldly activity was one of the most important results of the Reformation,

especially of Luther's part in it, is beyond doubt, and may even be considered a platitude. This attitude is

worlds removed from the deep hatred of Pascal, in his contemplative moods, for all worldly activity, which

he was deeply convinced could only be understood in terms of vanity or low cunning. And it differs even

more from the liberal utilitarian compromise with the world at which the Jesuits arrived. But just what the

practical significance of this achievement of Protestantism was in detail is dimly felt rather than clearly

In the first place it is hardly necessary to point out that Luther cannot be claimed for the spirit of capitalism

in the sense in which we have used that term above, or for that matter in any sense whatever. The religious

circles which today most enthusiastically celebrate that great achievement of the Reformation are by no

means friendly to capitalism in any sense. And Luther himself would, without doubt, have sharply repudiated

any connection with a point of view like that of Franklin. Of course, one cannot consider his complaints

against the great merchants of his time, such as the Fuggers, as evidence in this case. For the struggle against

the privileged position, legal or actual, of single great trading companies in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries may best be compared with the modem campaign against the trusts, and can no more justly be

considered in itself an expression of a traditionalistic point of view. Against these people, against the

Lombards, the monopolists, speculators, and bankers patronized by the Anglican Church and the kings and

parliaments of England and France, both the Puritans and the Huguenots carried on a bitter struggle.

Cromwell, after the battle of Dunbar (September 1650), wrote to the Long Parliament: "Be pleased to reform

the abuses of all professions: and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not

a Commonwealth." But, nevertheless, we will find Cromwell following a quite specifically capitalistic line of

thought . On the other hand, Luther's numerous statements against usury or interest in any form reveal a

conception of the nature of capitalistic acquisition which, compared with that of late Scholasticism, is, from a

capitalistic viewpoint, definitely backward. Especially, of course , the doctrine of the sterility of money which

But it is unnecessary to go into detail. For, above all the consequences of the conception of the calling in the

religious sense for worldly conduct were susceptible to quite different interpretations. The effect of the

Reformation as such was only that, as compared with the Catholic attitude, the moral emphasis on and the

religious sanction of, organized worldly labor in a calling was mightily increased. The way in which the

concept of the calling, which expressed this change, should develop further depended upon the religious

evolution which now took place in the different Protestant Churches. The authority of the Bible, from which

Luther thought he had derived his idea of the calling, on the whole favored a traditionalistic interpretation.

The old Testament, in particular, though in the genuine prophets it showed no sign of a tendency to excel

worldly morality, and elsewhere only in quite isolated rudiments and suggestions, contained a similar

religious idea entirely in this traditionalistic sense. Everyone should abide by his living and let the godless

run after gain. That is the sense of all the statements which bear directly on worldly activities. Not until the

Talmud is a partially, but not even then fundamentally, different attitude to be found. The personal attitude of

Jesus is characterized in classical purity by the typical antique Oriental plea: "Give us this day our daily

bread." The element of radical repudiation of the world, as expressed in the (Greek term), excluded the

possibility that the modern idea of calling should be based on his personal authority. In the apostolic era as

expressed in the New Testament, especially in St. Paul, the Christian looked upon worldly activity either with

indifference, or at least essentially traditionalistically; for those first generations were filled with

eschatological hopes. Since everyone was simply waiting for the coming of the Lord, there was nothing to do

but remain in the station and in the worldly occupation in which the call of the Lord had found him, and labor

as before. Thus he would not burden his brothers as an object of charity, and it would only be for a little

while. Luther read the Bible through the spectacles of his whole attitude; at the time and in the course of his

development from about 1518 to 1530 this not only remained traditionalistic but became ever more so.

In the first years of his activity as a reformer he was, since he thought of the calling as primarily of the flesh,

dominated by an attitude closely related, in so far as the form of world activity was concerned, to the Pauline

eschatological indifference as expressed in I Cor. vii. One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on the

short pilgrimage of life there is no use in laying weight on the form of occupation. The pursuit of material

gain beyond personal needs must thus appear as a symptom of lack of grace, and since it can apparently only

be attained at the expense of others, directly reprehensible. As he became increasingly involved in the affairs

of the world, he came to value work in the world more highly. But in the concrete calling an individual

pursued he saw more and more a special command of God to fulfill these particular duties which the Divine

Will had imposed upon him. And after the conflict with the Fanatics and the peasant disturbances, the

objective historical order of things in which the individual has been placed by God becomes for Luther more

and more a direct manifestation of divine will. The stronger and stronger emphasis on the providential

element, even in particular events of life, led more and more to a traditionalistic interpretation based on the

idea of Providence. The individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which God had

placed him, and should restrain hi' worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life.

While his economic traditionalism was originally the result of Pauline indifference, it later became that of a

more and more intense belief in divine providence, which identified absolute obedience to God's will, with

absolute acceptance of things as they were. Starting from this background, it was impossible for Luther to

establish a new or in any way fundamental connection between worldly activity and religious principles. His

acceptance of purity of doctrine as the one infallible criterion of the Church, which became more and more

irrevocable after the struggles of the twenties, was in itself sufficient to check the development of new

Thus for Luther the concept of the calling remained traditionalistic. His calling is something which man has

to accept as a divine ordinance, to which he must adapt himself. This aspect outweighed the other idea which

was also present, that work in the calling was a, or rather the, task set by God. And in its further development,

orthodox Lutheranism emphasized this aspect still more. Thus, for the time being, the only ethical result was

negative; worldly duties were no longer subordinated to ascetic' ones; obedience to authority and the

acceptance of things as they were, were preached. In this Lutheran form the idea of a calling had, as will be

shown in our discussion of medieval religious ethics, to a considerable extent been anticipated by the German

mystics. Especially in Tauler's equalization of the values of religious and worldly occupations, and the

decline in valuation of the traditional forms of ascetic practices on account of the decisive significance of the

ecstaticcontemplative absorption of the divine spirit by the soul. To a certain extent Lutheranism means a

step backward from the mystics, in so far as Luther, and still more his Church, had, as compared with the

mystics, partly undermined the psychological foundations for a rational ethics. (The mystic attitude on this

point is reminiscent partly of the Pietest and partly of the Quaker psychology of faith.) That was precisely

because he could not but suspect the tendency to ascetic self discipline of leading to salvation by works, and

Thus the mere idea of the calling in the Lutheran sense is at best of questionable importance for the problems

in which we are interested. This was all that was meant to be determined here. But this is not in the least to

say that even the Lutheran form of the renewal of the religious life may not have had some practical

significance for the objects of our investigation; quite the contrary. Only that significance evidently cannot be

derived directly from the attitude of Luther and his Church to worldly activity, and is perhaps not altogether

so easily grasped as the connection with other branches of Protestantism. It is thus well for us next to look

into those forms in which a relation between practical life and a religious motivation can be more easily

perceived than in Lutheranism. We have already called attention to the conspicuous part played by Calvinism

and the Protestant sects in the history of capitalistic development. As Luther found a different spirit at work

in Zwingli than in himself, so did his spiritual successors in Calvinism. And Catholicism has to the present

Now that may be partly explained on purely political grounds. Although the Reformation is unthinkable

without Luther's own personal religious development, and was spiritually long influenced by his personality,

without Calvinism his work could not have had permanent concrete success. Nevertheless, the reason for

this common repugnance of Catholics and Lutherans lies, at least partly, in the ethical peculiarities of

Calvinism. A purely superficial glance shows that there is here quite a different relationship between the

religious life and earthly activity than in either Catholicism or Lutheranism. Even in literature motivated

purely by religious factors that is evident. Take for instance the end of the Divine Comedy, where the poet in

Paradise stands speechless in his passive contemplation of the secrets of God, and compare it with the poem

which has come to be called the Divine Comedy of Puritanism. Milton closes the last song of Paradise Lost

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of paradise, so late their happy scat, Waved over by that

flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. Some natural tears they dropped, but

wiped them soon: The world was all before them, there to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their

. . . "Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love, By

name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but

One feels at once that this powerful expression of the Puritan's serious attention to this world, his acceptance

of his life in the world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a medieval writer. But it is just

as uncongenial to Lutheranism, as expressed for instance in Luther's and Paul Gerhard's chorales. It is now

our task to replace this vague feeling by a somewhat more precise logical formulation, and to investigate the

fundamental basis of these differences. The appeal to national character is generally a mere confession of

ignorance, and in this case it is entirely untenable. To ascribe a unified national character to the Englishmen

of the seventeenth century would be simply to falsify history. Cavaliers and Roundheads did not appeal to

each other simply as two parties, but a radically distinct species of men, and whoever look into the matter

carefully must agree with them. 0n the other hand, a difference of character between the English merchant

adventurers and the old Hanseatic merchants is not to be found; nor can any other fundamental difference

between the English and German characters at the end of the Middle Ages, which cannot easily be explained

by the differences of their political history. It was the power of religious influence, not alone, but more than

We thus take as our starting point in the investigation of the relationship between the old Protestant ethic and

the spirit of capitalism the works of Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other Puritan sects. But it is not to be

understood that we expect to find any of the founders or representatives of these religious movements

considering the promotion of what we have called the spirit of capitalism as in any sense the end of his

lifework. We cannot well maintain that the pursuit of worldly goods, conceived as a n end in itself, was to

any of them of positive ethical value. Once and for all it must be remembered that programs of ethical reform

never were at the center of interest for any of the religious reformers (among whom, for our purposes, we

must include men like Menno, George Fox, and Wesley). They were not the founders of societies for ethical

culture nor the proponents of humanitarian projects for social reform or cultural ideals. The salvation of the

soul and that alone was the center of their life and work. Their ethical ideals and the practical results of their

doctrines were all based on that alone, and were the consequences of purely religious motives. We shall thus

have to admit that the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent, perhaps in the

particular aspects with which we are dealing predominantly, unforeseen and even unwishedfor results of the

labors of the reformers. They were often far removed from or even in contradiction to all that they themselves

The following study may thus perhaps in a modest way form a contribution to the understanding of the

manner in which ideas become effective forces in history. In order, however, to avoid any misunderstanding

of the sense in which any such effectiveness of purely ideal motives is claimed at all, I may perhaps be

In such a study, it may at once be definitely stated, no attempt is made to evaluate the ideas of the

Reformation in any sense, whether it concern their social or their religious worth. We have continually to deal

with aspects of the Reformation which must appear to the truly religious consciousness as incidental and even

superficial. For we are merely attempting to clarify the part which religious forces have played in forming the

developing web of our specifically worldly modern culture, in the complex interaction of innumerable

different historical factors. We are thus inquiring only to what extent certain characteristic features of this

culture can be imputed to the influence of the Reformation. At the same time we must free ourselves from the

idea that it is possible to deduce the Reformation, as a historically necessary result, from certain economic

changes. Countless historical circumstances, which cannot be reduced to any economic law, and are not

susceptible of economic explanation of any sort, especially purely political processes, had to concur in order

On the other hand, however, we have no intention whatever of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire

thesis as that the spirit of capitalism (in the provisional sense of the term explained above) could only have

arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a

creation of the Reformation. In itself, the fact that certain important forms of capitalistic business

organization are known to be considerably older than the Reformation is a sufficient refutation of such a

claim On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part

in qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world. Furthermore, what

concrete aspects of our capitalistic culture can be traced to them, In view of the tremendous confusion of

interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the

ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points

certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out. At the same

time we shall as far as possible clarify the manner and the general direction in which, by virtue of those

relationships, the religious movements have influenced the development of material culture. Only when this

has been determined with reasonable accuracy can the attempt be made to estimate to what extent the

historical development of modern culture can be attributed to those religious forces and to what extent to

In history there have been four principal forms of ascetic Protestantism (in the sense of word here used): (1)

Calvinism in the form which it assumed in the main area of its influence in Western Europe, especially in the

seventeenth century; (2) Pietism; (3) Methodism; (4) the sects growing out of the Baptist movement. None of

these movements was completely separated from the others, and even the distinction from the nonascetic

Churches of the Reformation is never perfectly clear. Methodism, which first arose in the middle of the

eighteenth century within the Established Church of England, was not, in the , minds of its founders, intended

to form a new Church, but only a new awakening of the ascetic spirit within the old. Only in the course of its

development, especially in its extension to America, did it become separate from the Anglican Church.

Pietism first split off from the Calvinistic movement in England, and especially in Holland. It remained

loosely connected with orthodoxy, shading off from it by imperceptible gradations, until at the end of the

seventeenth century it was absorbed into Lutheranism under Spener's leadership. Though the dogmatic

adjustment was not entirely satisfactory, it remained a movement within the Lutheran Church. Only the

faction dominated by Zinzendorf, and affected by lingering Hussite and Calvinistic influences within the

Moravian brotherhood, was forced, like Methodism against its will, to form a peculiar sort of sect. Calvinism

and Baptism were at the beginning of their development sharply opposed to each other. But in the Baptism

of the latter part of the seventeenth century they were in close contact. And, even in the Independent sects of

England and Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century the transition was not abrupt. As Pietism

shows, the transition to Lutheranism is also gradual, and the same is true of Calvinism and the Anglican

Church, though both in external character and in the spirit of its most logical adherents the latter is more

closely related to Catholicism. It is true that both the mass of the adherents and especially the staunchest

champions of that ascetic movement which, in the broadest sense of a highly ambiguous word, has been

called Puritanism, did attack the foundations of Anglicanism; but even here the differences were only

gradually worked out in the course of the struggle. Even if for the present we quite ignore the questions, of

government and organization which do not interest us here, the facts are just the same. The dogmatic

differences, even the most important, such as those over the doctrines of predestination and justification, were

combined in the most complex ways, and even at the beginning of the seventeenth century regularly, though

not without exception, prevented the maintenance o unity in the Church. Above all, the types of moral

conduct in which we are interested may be found in similar manner among the adherents of the most various

denominations, derived from any one of the four sources mentioned above, or a combination of several of

them. We shall see that similar ethical maxims may be correlated with very different dogmatic foundations.

Also the important literary tools for the saving of souls, above all the casuistic compendia of the various

denominations, influenced each other in the course of time; one finds great similarities in them, in spite of

It would almost seem as though we had best completely ignore both the dogmatic foundations and the

ethical theory and confine our attention to the moral practice so far as it can be determined. That, however, is

not true. The various different dogmatic roots of ascetic morality did no doubt die out after terrible struggles.

But the original connection with those dogmas has left behind important traces in the later undogmatic ethics;

moreover, only the knowledge of the original body of ideas can help us to understand the connection of that

morality with the idea of the afterlife which absolutely dominated the most spiritual men of that time.

Without its power, overshadowing everything else, no moral awakening which seriously influenced practical

We are naturally not concerned with the question of what was theoretically and officially taught in the ethical

compendia of the time, however much practical significance this may have had through the influence of

Church discipline, pastoral work, and preaching. We are interested rather in something entirely different: the

influence of those psychological sanctions which, originating in religious belief and the practice of religion,

gave a direction to practical conduct and held the individual to it. Now these sanctions were to a large extent

derived from the peculiarities of the religious ideas behind them. The men of that day were occupied with

abstract dogmas to an extent which itself can only be understood when we perceive the connection of these

dogmas with practical religious interests. A few observations on dogma, which will seem to the

nontheological reader as dull as they will hasty and superficial to the theologian, are indispensable. We can

of course only proceed by presenting these religious ideas in the artificial simplicity of ideal types, as they

could at best but seldom be found in history. For just because of the impossibility of drawing sharp

boundaries in historical reality we can only hope to understand their specific importance from an

Now Calvinism was the faith over which the great political and cultural struggles of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries were fought in the most highly developed countries, the Netherlands, England, and

France. To it we shall hence turn first. At that time, and in general even today, the doctrine of predestination

was considered its most characteristic dogma. It is true that there has been controversy as to whether it is the

most essential dogma of the Reformed Church or only an appendage. Judgments of the importance of a

historical phenomenon may be judgments of value or faith, namely, when they refer to what is. alone

interesting, or alone in the long run valuable in it. Or, on the other hand, they may refer to its influence on

other historical processes as a causal factor. Then we are concerned with judgments o historical imputation. If

now we start, as we must do here, from the latter standpoint and inquire into the significance which is to be

attributed to that dogma by virtue Of its cultural and historical con sequences, it must certainly be rated very

highly. The movement which Oldenbameveld led was shattered by it. The schism in the English Church

became irrevocable under James I after the Crown and the Puritans came to differ dogmatically over just this

doctrine. Again and again it was looked upon as the real element of political danger in Calvinism and

attacked as such by those in authority. The great synods of the seventeenth century, above all those of

Dordrecht and Westminster, besides numerous smaller ones, made its elevation to canonical authority the

central purpose of their work. It served as a rallying point to countless heroes of the Church militant, and in

both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries it caused schisms in the Church and formed the battle cry of

great new awakenings. We cannot pass it by, and since today it can no longer be assumed as known to all

educated men, we can best learn its content from the authoritative words of the Westminster Confession of

1647, which in this regard is simply repeated by both Independent and Baptist creeds.

"Chapter IX (of Free Will), No. 3 Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to

any spiritual good accompanying salvation. So that a natural man, being altogether averse from that Good,

and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.

"Chapter III (of God's Eternal Decree), No. 3. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some

men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death.

"No. 5. Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God before the foundation of the world was laid,

according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath

chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or

good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature as conditions, or causes

"No. 7. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will,

whereby He extendeth, or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His

creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious

"Chapter X (of Effectual Calling), No. 1. All those whom God hath predestinated unto life, and those only,

He is pleased in His appointed and accepted time effectually to call, by His word and spirit (out of that state

of sin and death, in which they are by nature) . . . taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them an

heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty power determining them to that which is good...

"Chapter V (of Providence), No. 6. As for those wicked and ungodly men, whom God as a righteous judge,

for former sins doth blind and harden, from them He not only withholdeth His grace, whereby they might

have been enlightened in their understandings and wrought upon in their hearts, but sometimes also

withdraweth the gifts which they had and exposeth them to such objects as their corruption makes occasion of

sin: and withal, gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power of Satan:

whereby it comes to pass that they harden themselves, even under those means, which God useth for the

"Though I may be sent to Hell for it, such a God will never command my respect", was Milton's well known

opinion of the doctrine. But we are here concerned not with the evaluation, but the historical significance of

the dogma. We can only briefly sketch the question of how the doctrine originated and how it fitted into the

Two paths leading to it were possible. The phenomenon of the religious sense of grace is combined, in the

most active and passionate of those great worshippers which Christianity has produced again and again since

Augustine, with the feeling of certainty that that grace is the sole product of an objective power, and not in

the least to be attributed to personal worth. The powerful feeling of lighthearted assurance, in which the

tremendous pressure of their sense of sin is released, apparently breaks over them with elemental force and

destroys every possibility of the belief that this overpowering gift of grace could owe anything to their own

cooperation or could be connected with achievements or qualities of their own faith and will. At the time of

Luther's greatest religious creativeness, when he was capable of writing his Freiheit eines Christenmenschen,

God's secret decree was also to him most definitely the sole and ultimate source of his state of religious grace.

Even later he did not formally abandon it. But not only did the idea not assume a central position for him, but

it receded more and more into the background, the more his position as responsible head of his Church

forced him into practical politics. Melancthon quite deliberately avoided adopting the dark and dangerous

teaching in the Augsburg Confession, and for the Church fathers of Lutheranism it was an article of faith that

grace was revocable (amissibilis), and could be won again by penitent humility and faithful trust in the word

With Calvin the process was just the opposite; the significance of the doctrine for him increased, perceptibly

in the course of his polemical controversies with theological opponents. It is not fully developed until the

third edition of his Institutes, and only gained its position of central prominence after his death in the great

struggles which the Synods of Dordrecht and Westminster sought to put an end to. With Calvin the decretum

horribile is derived not, as with Luther, from religious experience, but from the logical necessity of his

thought; therefore its importance increases with every increase in the logical consistency of that religious

thought. The interest of it is solely in God, not in man; God does not exist for men, but men for the sake of

God. All creation, including of course the fact, as it undoubtedly was for Calvin, that only a small

proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace, can have any meaning only as means to the glory and

majesty of God. To apply earthly standards of justice to His sovereign decrees is meaningless and an insult to

His Majesty, since He and He alone is free, i.e. is subject to no law. His decrees can only be understood by or

even known to us in so far as it has been His pleasure to reveal them. We can only hold to these fragments of

eternal truth. Everything else, including the meaning of our individual destiny, is hidden in dark mystery

For the damned to complain of their lot would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact they were

not born as men. For everything of the flesh is separated from God by an unbridgeable gulf and deserves of

Him only eternal death, in so far as He has not decreed otherwise for the glorification of His Majesty. We

know only that a part of humanity is saved, the rest damned. To assume that human merit or guilt play a part

in determining this destiny would be to think of God's absolutely free decrees, which have been settled from

eternity, as subject to change by human influence, an impossible contradiction. The Father in heaven of the

New Testament, so human and understanding, who rejoices over the repentance of a sinner as a woman over

the lost piece of silver she has found, is gone. His place has been taken by a transcendental being, beyond the

reach of human understanding, who With His quite incomprehensible decrees has decided the fate of every

individual and regulated the tiniest details of the cosmos from eternity. God's grace is, since His decrees

cannot change, as impossible for those to whom He has granted it to lose as it is unattainable for those to

In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation

which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the

single individual. In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his

eternal salvation, he was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him

from eternity. No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the word of God only in

his own heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments had been ordained by God for the increase of His

glory, and must hence be scrupulously observed, they are not a means to the attainment of grace, but only the

subjective externa subsidia of faith. No Church, for though it was held that extra ecclesiam nulla salus in the

sense that whoever kept away from the true Church could never belong to God's chosen band, nevertheless

the membership of the external Church included the doomed. They should belong to it and be subjected to its

discipline, not in order thus to attain salvation, that is impossible, but because, for the glory of God, they too

must be forced to obey His commandments. Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the

elect, for whose benefit God had decreed His martyrdom from eternity. This, the complete elimination of

salvation through the Church and the sacraments (which was in Lutheranism by no means developed to its

final conclusions), was what formed the absolutely decisive difference from Catholicism.

That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which

had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had

repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion. The

genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest

without song or ritual in order that no superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental forces

There was not only no magical means of attaining the grace of God for those to whom God had decided to

deny it, but no means whatever. Combined with the harsh doctrines of the absolute transcendentiality of God

and the corruption of everything pertaining to the flesh, this inner isolation of the individual contains, on the

one hand, the reason for the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional

elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no use toward salvation and promote sentimental

illusions and idolatrous superstitions. Thus it provides a basis for a fundamental antagonism to sensuous

culture of all kinds. On the other hand, it forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically

inclined individualism which can even today be identified in the national characters and the institutions of

the peoples with a Puritan past, in such a striking contrast to the quite different spectacles through which the

Enlightenment later looked upon men .We can clearly identify the traces of the influence of the doctrine of

predestination in the elementary forms of conduct and attitude toward life in the era with which we are

concerned, even where its authority as a dogma was on the decline. It was in fact only the most extreme form

of that exclusive trust in God in which we are here interested. It comes out for instance in the strikingly

frequent repetition, especially in the English Puritan literature, of warnings against any trust in the aid of

friendship of men. Even the amiable Baxter counsels deep distrust of even one's closest friend, and Bailey

directly exhorts to trust no one and to say nothing compromising to anyone. Only God should be your

confidant. In striking contrast to Lutheranism, this attitude toward life was also connected with the quiet

disappearance of the private confession, of which Calvin was suspicious only on account of its possible

sacramental misinterpretation, from all the regions of fully developed Calvinism. That was an occurrence of

the greatest importance. In the first place it is a symptom of the type of influence this religion exercised.

Further, however, it was a psychological stimulus to the development Of their ethical attitude. The means to a

Of the consequences for the ethical conduct of everyday life we speak later. But for the general religious

situation of a man the consequences are evident. In spite of the necessity of membership in the true Church

for salvation, the Calvinist's intercourse with his God was carried on in deep spiritual isolation. To see the

specific results of this peculiar atmosphere, it is only necessary to read Bunyan's, Pilgrim's Progress, by far

the most widely read book of the whole Puritan literature. In the description of Christian's attitude after he

had realized that he was living in the City of Destruction and he had received the call to take tip his

pilgrimage to the celestial city, wife and children cling to him, but stopping his ears with his fingers and

crying, "life, eternal life", he staggers forth across the fields. No refinement could surpass the naive feeling of

the tinker who, writing in his prison cell, earned the applause of a believing world, in expressing the emotions

of the faithful Puritan, thinking only of his own salvation. It is expressed in the unctuous conversations which

he holds with fellowseekers on the way, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Gottfried Keller's Gerechte

Kammacher. Only when he himself is safe does it occur to him that it would be nice to have his family with

him. It is the same anxious fear of death and the beyond which we feel so vividly in Alfonso of Liguori, as

Dollinger has described him to us. It is worlds removed from that spirit of proud worldliness which

Machiavelli expresses in relating the fame of those Florentine citizens who, in their struggle against the Pope

and his excommunication, had held "Love of their native city higher than the fear for the salvation of their

souls". And it is of course even farther from the feelings which Richard Wagner puts into the mouth of

Siegmund before his fatal combat, "Grusse mir Wotan, grusse mir WallhallDoch von Wallhall's sproden

Wonnen sprich du wahrlich mir nicht". But the effects of this fear on Bunyan and Liguori are

characteristically different. The same fear which drives the latter to every conceivable self humiliation spurs

the former on to a restless and systematic struggle with life. Whence comes this difference?

It seems at first a mystery how the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organization can be

connected with this tendency to tear the individual away from the closed ties with which he is bound to this

world. But, however strange it may seem, it follows from the peculiar form which the Christian brotherly

love was forced to take under the pressure of the inner isolation of the individual through the Calvinistic faith.

In the first place it follows dogmatically. The world exists to serve the glorification of God and for that

purpose alone. The elected Christian is in the world only to increase this glory of God by fulfilling His

commandments to the best of his ability. But God requires social achievement of the Christian because He

wills that social life shall be organized according to His commandments, in accordance with that purpose.

The social activity of the Christian in the world is' solely activity in majorem gloriam Dei. This character is

hence shared by labor in a calling which serves the mundane life of the community. Even in Luther we found

specialized labor in callings justified in terms of brotherly love. But what for him remained an uncertain,

purely intellectual suggestion became for the Calvinists a characteristic element in their ethical system.

Brotherly love, since it may only be practiced for the glory of God and not in the service of the flesh, is

expressed in the first place in the fulfillment of the daily tasks given by the lex naturae; and in the Process

this fulfillment assumes a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the

rational organization of our social environment. For the wonderfully purposeful organization and

arrangement of this cosmos is, according both to the revelation of the Bible and to natural intuition, evidently

usefulness appear to promote the glory of God and hence to he willed by Him. The complete elimination of

the theodicy problem and of all those questions about the meaning of the world and of life, which have

tortured others, was as selfevident to the Puritan as, for quite different reasons, to the Jew, and even in a

To this economy of forces Calvinism added another tendency which worked in the same direction. The

conflict between the individual and the ethic (in Soren Kierkegaard's sense) did not exist for Calvinism,

although it placed the individual entirely on his own responsibility in religious matters. This is not the place

to analyze the reasons for this fact, or its significance for the political and economic rationalism of

Calvinism. The source of the utilitarian character of Calvinistic ethics lies here, and important peculiarities of

the Calvinistic idea of the calling were derived from the same source as well. But for the moment we must

For us the decisive problem is: How was this doctrine borne in an age to which the afterlife was not only

more important, but in many ways also more certain, than all the interests of life in this world ? The question,

Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests

into the background. And how can I be sure of this state of grace? For Calvin himself this was not a problem.

He felt himself to be a chosen agent of the Lord, and was certain of his own salvation. Accordingly, to the

question of how the individual can be certain of his own election, he has at bottom only the answer that we

should be content with the knowledge that God has chosen and depend further only on that implicit trust in

Christ which is the result of true faith. He rejects in principle the assumption that one can learn from the

conduct of others whether they are chosen or damned. It is an unjustifiable attempt to force God's secrets. The

elect differ externally in this life in no way from the damned; and even all the subjective experiences of the

chosen are, as ludibria spiritus sancti, possible for the damned with the single exception of that finaliter

expectant, trusting faith. The elect thus are and remain God's invisible Church.

Quite naturally this attitude was impossible for his followers as early as Beza, and, above all, for the broad

mass of ordinary men. For them the certitudo salutis in the sense of the recognizability of the state of grace

necessarily became of absolutely dominant importance. So, wherever the doctrine of predestination was held,

the question could not be suppressed whether there were any infallible criteria by which membership in the

electi could be known. Not only has this question continually had a central importance in the development

of the Pietism which first arose on the basis of the Reformed Church; it has in fact in a certain sense at times

been fundamental to it. But when we consider the great political and social importance of the Reformed

doctrine and practice of the Communion, we shall see how great a part was played during the whole

seventeenth century outside of Pietism by the possibility of ascertaining the state of grace of the individual.

On it depended, for instance, his admission to Communion, i.e. to the central religious ceremony which

It was impossible, at least so far as the question of a man's own state of grace arose, to be satisfied with

Calvin's trust in the testimony of the expectant faith resulting from grace, even though the orthodox doctrine

had never formally abandoned that criterion." Above all, practical pastoral work, which had immediately to

deal with all the suffering caused by the doctrine, could not be satisfied. It met these difficulties in various

ways. So far as predestination was not reinterpreted, toned down, or fundamentally abandoned, two principal,

mutually connected, types of pastoral advice appear. On the one hand it is held to be an absolute duty to

consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of selfconfidence is

the result of insufficient faith, hence of imperfect grace. The exhortation of the apostle to make fast one's own

call is here interpreted as a duty to attain certainty of one's own election and justification in the daily struggle

of life. In the place of the humble sinners to whom Luther promises grace if they trust themselves to God in

penitent faith are bred those selfconfident saints whom we can rediscover in the hard Puritan merchants of

the heroic age of capitalism and in isolated instances down to the present. On the other hand, in order to attain

that selfconfidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone

That worldly activity should be considered capable of this achievement, that it could, so to speak, be

considered the most suitable means of counteracting feelings of religious anxiety, finds its explanation in the

fundamental peculiarities of religious feeling in the Reformed Church, which come most clearly to light in its

differences from Lutheranism in the doctrine of justification by faith. These differences are analyzed so

subtly and with such objectivity and avoidance of value judgments in Schneckenburger's excellent lectures,

that the following brief observations can for the most part simply rest upon his discussion.

The highest religious experience which the Lutheran faith strives to attain, especially as it developed in the

course of the seventeenth century, is the unio mystica with the deity. As the name itself, which is unknown to

the Reformed faith in this form, suggests, it is a feeling of actual absorption in the deity, that of a real

entrance of the divine into the soul of the believer. It is qualitatively similar to the aim of the contemplation

of the German mystics and is characterized by its passive search for the fulfillment of the yearning for rest in

Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be

compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact; it may even support it directly on

account of the repudiation of dialectic doctrines. Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the

interests of rational conduct. Nevertheless, the positive valuation of external activity is lacking in its relation

to the world. In addition to this, Lutheranism combines the unio mystica with that deep feeling of sinstained

unworthiness which is essential to preserve the poenitentia quotidiana of the faithful Lutheran, thereby

maintaining the humility and simplicity indispensable for the forgiveness of sins. The typical religion of the

Reformed Church, on the other hand, has from the beginning repudiated both this purely inward emotional

piety of Lutheranism and the Quietist escape from everything of Pascal. A real penetration of the human

soul by the divine was made impossible by the absolute transcendentiality of God compared to the flesh:

finitum non est capax infiniti. The community of the elect with their God could only take place and be

perceptible to them in that God worked (operatur) through them and that they were conscious of it. That is,

their action originated from the faith caused by God's grace, and this faith in turn justified itself by the quality

of that action. Deep lying differences of the most important conditions of salvation" which apply to the

classification of all practical religious activity appear here. The religious believer can make himself sure of

his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine

will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action;

Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted

to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they

might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm

foundation for the certitudo salutis. It must be a fides efficax, the call to salvation an effectual calling

If we now ask further, by what fruits the Calvinist thought himself able to identify true faith? the answer is:

by a type of Christian conduct which served to increase the glory of God. just what does so serve is to be seen

in his own will as revealed either directly through the Bible or indirectly through the purposeful order of the

world which he has created (lex naturae). Especially by comparing the condition of one's own soul with that

of the elect, for instance the patriarchs, according to the Bible, could the state of one's own grace be known .

Only one of the elect really has the fides efficax, only he is able by virtue of his rebirth (regeneratio) and the

resulting sanctification (sanctificatio) of his whole life, to augment the glory of God by real, and not merely

apparent, good works. It was through the consciousness that his conduct, at least in its fundamental character

and constant ideal (propositum obcedientiae,), rested on a power" within himself working for the glory of

God; that it is not only willed of God but rather done by God that he attained the highest good towards which

this religion strove, the certainty of salvation. That it was attainable was proved by 2 Cor. xiii 5.19 Thus,

however useless good works might be as a means of attaining salvation, for even the elect remain beings of

the flesh, and everything they do falls infinitely short of divine standards , nevertheless, they are

indispensable as a sign of election". They are the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting

rid of the fear of damnation. In this sense they are occasionally referred to as directly necessary for salvation

In practice this means that God helps those who help themselves . Thus the Calvinist, as it is sometimes put,

himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it. But this creation cannot,

as in Catholicism, consist in a gradual accumulation of individual good works to one's credit, but rather in a

systematic selfcontrol which at every moment stands before the inexorable alternative, chosen or damned.

This brings us to a very important point in our investigation. It is common knowledge that Lutherans have

again and again accused this line of thought, which was worked out in the Reformed Churches and sects with

increasing clarity, of reversion to the doctrine of salvation by works. And however justified the protest of the

accused against identification of their dogmatic position with the Catholic doctrine, this accusation has surely

been made with reason if by it is meant the practical consequences for the everyday life of the average

Christian of the Reformed Church." For a more intensive form of the religious valuation of moral action than

that to which Calvinism led its adherents has perhaps never existed. But what is important for the practical

significance of this sort of salvation by works must be sought in a knowledge of the particular qualities which

characterized their type of ethical conduct and distinguished it from the everyday life of an average Christian

of the Middle Ages. The difference may well be formulated as follows: the normal medieval Catholic layman

lived ethically, so to speak, from hand to mouth. In the first place he conscientiously fulfilled his traditional

duties. But beyond that minimum his good works did not necessarily form a connected, or at least not a

rationalized, system of life, but rather remained a succession of individual acts. He could use them as

occasion demanded, to atone for particular sins, to better his chances for salvation, or, toward the end of his

life, as a sort of insurance premium. Of course the Catholic ethic was an ethic of intentions. But the concrete

intentio of the single act determined its value. And the single good or bad action was credited to the doer

determining his temporal and eternal fate. Quite realistically the Church recognized that man was not an

absolutely clearly defined unity to be judged one way or the other, but that his moral life was normally

subject to conflicting motives and his action contradictory. Of course, it required as an ideal a change of life

in principle . But it weakened just this requirement (for the average) by one of its most important means of

power and education, the sacrament of absolution, the function of which was connected with the deepest

The rationalization of the world, the elimination of magic as a means to salvation, the Catholics had not

carried nearly so far as the Puritans (and before them the Jews) had done. To the Catholics the absolution of

his Church was a compensation for his own imperfection. The priest was a magician who performed the

miracle of transubstantiation, and who held the key to eternal life in his hand. One could turn to him in grief

and penitence. He dispensed atonement, hope of grace, certainty of forgiveness, and thereby granted release

from that tremendous tension to which the Calvinist was doomed by an inexorable fate, admitting of no

mitigation. For him such friendly and human comforts did not exist. He could not hope to atone for hours of

weakness or of thoughtlessness by increased good will at other times, as the Catholic or even the Lutheran

could. The God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works

combined into a unified system." There was no place for the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance,

atonement, release, followed by renewed sin. Nor was there any balance of merit for a life as a whole which

The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and

subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole. It is no accident that the name of Methodists stuck to

the participants in the last great revival of Puritan ideas in the eighteenth century just as the term Precisians,

which has the same meaning, was applied to their spiritual ancestors in the seventeenth century. For only by a

fundamental change in the whole meaning of life at every moment and in every action could the effects of

grace transforming a man from the status naturae, to the status gratiae be proved.

The life of the saint was directed solely toward a transcendental end, salvation. But precisely for that reason it

was thoroughly rationalized in this world and dominated entirely by the aim to add to the glory of God on

earth. Never has the precept omnia in majorem dei gloriam been taken with more bitter seriousness. Only a

life guided by constant thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature. Descartes's cogito ergo sum

was taken over by the contemporary Puritans with this ethical reinterpretation. It was this rationalization

which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic tendency, and is the basis both of its relationship to and its

conflict with Catholicism. For naturally similar things were not unknown to Catholicism.

Without doubt Christian asceticism, both outwardly and in its inner meaning, contains many different things.

But it has had a definitely rational character in its highest Occidental forms as early as the Middle Ages, and

in several forms even in antiquity. The great historical significance of Western monasticism, as contrasted

with that of the Orient, is based on this fact, not in all cases, but in its general type. In the rules of St.

Benedict, still more with the monks of Cluny, again with the Cistercians, and most strongly the Jesuits, it has

become emancipated from planless otherworldliness and irrational selftorture. It had developed a systematic

method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae, to free man from the power of

irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature. It attempted to subject man to the

supremacy of a purposeful will,to bring his actions under constant selfcontrol with a careful consideration of

their ethical consequences. Thus it trained the monk, objectively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of

God, and thereby further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul. This active selfcontrol, which

formed the end of the exercitia of St. Ignatius and of the rational monastic virtues everywhere was also the

most important practical ideal of Puritanism . In the deep contempt with which the cool reserve of its

adherents is contrasted, in the reports of the trials of its martyrs, with the undisciplined blustering of the noble

prelates and officials can be seen that respect for quiet selfcontrol which still distinguishes the best type of

English or American gentleman today. To put it in our terms: The Puritan, like every rational type of

asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it g in

itself, against the emotions. In this formal psychological sense of the term it tried to make him into a

personality. Contrary to many popular ideas, the end of this asceticism was to be able to lead an alert,

intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment, the most important

means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents. All these important points are emphasized in the

rules of Catholic monasticism as strongly as in the principles of conduct of the Calvinists." On this

methodical control over the whole man rests the enormous expansive power of both, especially the ability of

Calvinism as against Lutheranism to defend the cause of Protestantism as the Church militant.

On the other hand, the difference of the Calvinistic from the medieval asceticism is evident. It consisted in

the disappearance of the consilia evangelica and the accompanying transformation of asceticism to activity

within the world. It is not as though Catholicism had restricted the methodical life to monastic cells. This was

by no means the case either in theory or in practice. On the contrary, it has already been pointed out that, in

spite of the greater ethical moderation of Catholicism, an ethically unsystematic life did not satisfy the

highest ideals which it had set up even for the life of the layman. The tertiary order of St. Francis was, for

instance, a powerful attempt in the direction of an ascetic penetration of everyday life, and, as we know, by

no means the only one. But, in fact, works like the Nachfolge Christi show, through the manner in which

their strong influence was exerted, that the way of life preached in them was felt to be something higher than

the everyday morality which sufficed as a minimum, and that this latter was not measured by such standards

as Puritanism demanded. Moreover, the practical use made of certain institutions of the Church, above all of

indulgences inevitably counteracted the tendencies toward systematic worldly asceticism. For that reason it

was not felt at the time of the Reformation to be merely an unessential abuse, but one of the most

But the most important thing was the fact that the man who, par excellence, lived a rational life in the

religious sense was, and remained, alone the monk. Thus asceticism, the more strongly it gripped an

individual, simply served to drive him farther away from everyday life, because the holiest task was

definitely to surpass all worldly morality.' Luther, who was not in any sense fulfilling any law of

development, but acting upon his quite personal experience, which was, though at first somewhat uncertain in

its practical consequences, later pushed farther by the political situation, had repudiated that tendency, and

Calvinism simply took this over from him. Sebastian Franck struck the central characteristic of this type of

religion when he saw the significance of the Reformation in the fact that now every Christian had to be a

monk all his life. The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those

passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to

pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations. But in the course of its development Calvinism

added something positive to this, the idea of the necessity of proving one's faith in worldly activity. Therein it

gave the broader groups of religiously inclined people a positive incentive to asceticism. By founding its

ethic in the doctrine of predestination, it substituted for the spiritual aristocracy of monks outside of and

above the world the spiritual aristocracy of the predestined saints of God within the world. It was an

aristocracy which, with its character indelebilis, was divided from the eternally damned remainder of

humanity by a more impassable and in its invisibility more terrifying gulf, than separated the monk of the

Middle Ages from the rest of the world about him, a gulf which penetrated all social relations with its sharp

brutality. This consciousness of divine grace of the elect and holy was accompanied by an attitude toward the

sin of one's neighbour, not of sympathetic understanding based on consciousness of one's own weakness, but

of hatred and contempt for him as an enemy of God bearing the signs of eternal damnation. This sort of

feeling was capable of such intensity that it sometimes resulted in the formation of sects. This was the case

when, as in the Independent movement of the seventeenth century, the genuine Calvinist doctrine that the

glory of God required the Church to bring the damned under the law, was outweighed by the conviction that

it was an insult to God if an unregenerate soul should be admitted to His house and partake in the sacraments,

or even, as a minister, administer them . Thus, as a consequence of the doctrine of proof, the Donatist idea of

the Church appeared, as in the case of the Calvinistic Baptists. The full logical consequence of the demand

for a pure Church, a community of those proved to be in a state of grace, was not often drawn by forming

sects. Modifications in the constitution of the Church resulted from the attempt to separate regenerate from

unregenerate Christians, those who were from those who were not prepared for the sacrament, to keep the

government of the Church or some other privilege in the hands of the former, and only to ordain ministers of

The norm by which it could always measure itself, of which it was evidently in need, this asceticism naturally

found in the Bible. It is important to note that the wellknown bibliocracy of the Calvinists held the moral

precepts of the Old Testament, since it was fully as authentically revealed, on the same level of esteem as

those of the New. It was only necessary that they should not obviously be applicable only to the historical

circumstances of the Hebrews, or have been specifically denied by Christ. For the believer, the law was an

ideal though never quite attainable normal while Luther, on the other hand, originally had prized freedom

from subjugation to the law as a divine privilege of the believer. The influence of the Godfearing but

perfectly unemotional wisdom of the Hebrews, which is expressed in the books most read by the Puritans, the

Proverbs and the Psalms, can be felt in their whole attitude toward life. In particular, its rational suppression

of the mystical, in fact the whole emotional side of religion, has rightly been attributed by Sanford to the

influence of the Old Testament. But this Old Testament rationalism was as such essentially of a small

bourgeois, traditionalistic type, and was mixed not only with the powerful pathos of the prophets, but also

with elements which encouraged the development of a peculiarly emotional type of religion even in the

Middle Ages. It was thus in the last analysis the peculiar, fundamentally ascetic, character of Calvinism itself

which made it select and assimilate those elements of Old Testament religion which suited it best.

Now that systematization of ethical conduct which the asceticism of Calvinistic Protestantism had in common

with the rational forms of life in the Catholic orders is expressed quite superficially in the way in which the

conscientious Puritan continually supervised his own state of grace. To be sure, the religious accountbooks

in which sins, temptations, and progress made in grace were entered or tabulated were common to both the

most enthusiastic Reformed circle and some parts of modern Catholicism (especially in France), above all

under the influence of the Jesuits. But in Catholicism it served the purpose of completeness of the confession,

or gave the directeur de I'ame a basis for his authoritarian guidance of the Christian (mostly female). The

Reformed Christian, however, felt his own pulse with its aid. It is mentioned by all the moralists and

theologians, while Benjamin Franklin's tabulated statistical bookkeeping on his progress in the different

On the other hand, the old medieval (even ancient) idea of God's bookkeeping is carried by Bunyan to the

characteristically tasteless extreme of comparing the relation of a sinner to his God with that of customer and

shopkeeper. One who has once got into debt may well, by the product of all his virtuous acts, succeed in

paying off the accumulated interest but never the principal. As he observed his own conduct, the later Puritan

also observed that of God and saw His finger in all the details of life. And, contrary to the strict doctrine of

Calvin, he always knew why God took this or that measure. The process of sanctifying life could thus almost

take on the character of a business enterprise. A thoroughgoing Christianization of the whole of life was the

consequence of this methodical quality of ethical conduct into which Calvinism as distinct from Lutheranism

forced men. That this rationality was decisive in its influence on practical life must always be borne in mind

in order rightly to understand the influence of Calvinism. On the one hand we can see that it took this element

to exercise such an influence at all. But other faiths as well necessarily bad a similar influence when their

So far we have considered only Calvinism, and have thus assumed the doctrine of predestination as the

dogmatic background of the Puritan morality in the sense of methodically rationalized ethical conduct. This

could be done because the influence of that dogma in fact extended far beyond the single religious group

which held in all respects strictly to Calvinistic principles, the Presbyterians. Not only the Independent

Savoy Declaration of 1658, but also the Baptist Confession of Hanserd Knolly of 1689 contained it, and it

had a place within Methodism. Although John Wesley, the great organizing genius of the movement, was a

believer in the universality of Grace, one of the great agitators of the first generation of Methodists and their

most consistent thinker, Whitefield, was an adherent of the doctrine. The same was true of the circle around

Lady Huntingdon, which for a time had considerable influence. It was this doctrine in its magnificent

consistency which, in the fateful epoch of the seventeenth century, upheld the belief of the militant defenders

of the holy life that they were weapons in the hand of God, and executors of His providential Will. Moreover,

it prevented a premature collapse into a purely utilitarian doctrine of good works in this world which would

never have been capable of motivating such tremendous sacrifices for nonrational ideal ends.

The combination of faith in absolutely valid norms with absolute determinism and the complete

transcendentality of God was in its way a product of great genius. At the same time it was, in principle, very

much more modern than the milder doctrine, Making greater concessions to the feelings which subjected God

to the moral law. Above all, we shall see again and again how fundamental is the idea of proof for our

problem. Since its practical significance as a psychological basis for rational morality could be studied in

such purity in the doctrine of predestination, it was best to start there with the doctrine in its most consistent

form. But it forms a recurring framework. for the connection between faith and conduct in the denominations

to be studied below. Within the Protestant movement the consequences which it inevitably had for the ascetic

tendencies of the conduct of its first adherents form in principle the strongest antithesis to the relative moral

helplessness of Lutheranism. The Lutheran gratia amissibilis, which could always be regained through

penitent contrition evidently, in itself, contained no sanction for what is for us the most important result of

ascetic Protestantism, a systematic rational ordering of the moral life as a whole. The Lutheran faith thus left

the spontaneous vitality of impulsive action and naive emotion more nearly unchanged. The motive to

constant selfcontrol and thus to a deliberate regulation of one's own life, which the gloomy doctrine of

Calvinism gave, was lacking. A religious genius like Luther could live in this atmosphere of openness and

freedom without difficulty and, so long as his enthusiasm was powerful enough, without danger of falling

back into the status naturalis. That simple, sensitive, and peculiarly emotional form of piety, which is the

ornament of many of the highest types of Lutherans, like their free and spontaneous morality, finds few

parallels in genuine Puritanism, but many more in the mild Anglicanism of such men as Hooker,

Chillingsworth, etc. But for the everyday Lutheran, even the able one, nothing was more certain than that he

was only temporarily, as long as the single confession or sermon affected' him, raised above the status

naturalis. There was a great difference which was very striking to contemporaries between the moral

standards of the courts of Reformed and of Lutheran princes, the latter often being degraded by drunkenness

Moreover, the helplessness of the Lutheran clergy, with their emphasis on faith alone, against the ascetic

Baptist movement, is well known. The typical German quality often called good nature (Gemutlichkeit) or

naturalness contrasts strongly, even in the facial expressions of people, with the effects of that thorough

destruction of the spontaneity of the status naturalis in the AngloAmerican atmosphere, which Germans are

accustomed to judge unfavourably as narrowness, unfreeness, and inner constraint. But the differences of

conduct, which are very striking, have clearly originated in the lesser degree of ascetic penetration of life in

Lutheranism as distinguished from Calvinism. The antipathy of every spontaneous child of nature to

everything ascetic is expressed in those feelings. The fact is that Lutheranism, on account of its doctrine of

grace, lacked a psychological sanction of systematic conduct to compel the methodical rationalization of

This sanction, which conditions the ascetic character of religion, could doubtless in itself have been furnished

by various different religious motives, as we shall soon see. The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination was

only one of several possibilities. But nevertheless we have become convinced that in its way it had not only a

quite unique consistency, but that its psychological effect was extraordinarily powerful. In comparison with it

the nonCalvinistic ascetic movements, considered purely from the viewpoint of the religious motivation

of asceticism, form an attenuation of the inner consistency and power of Calvinism.

But even in the actual historical development the situation was, for the most part, such that the Calvinistic

form of asceticism was either imitated by the other ascetic movements or used as a source of inspiration or of

comparison in the development of their divergent principles. Where, in spite of a different doctrinal basis,

similar ascetic features have appeared, this has generally been the result of Church organization. Of this we

Historically the doctrine of predestination is also the startingpoint of the ascetic movement usually known

as Pietism. In so far as the movement remained within the Reformed Church, it is almost impossible to draw

the line between Pietistic and nonPietistic Calvinists. Almost all the leading representatives of Puritanism

are sometimes classed among the Pietists. It is even quite legitimate to look upon the whole connection

between predestination and the doctrine of proof, with its fundamental interest in the attainment of the

certitudo salutis as discussed above, as in itself a Pietistic development of Calvin's original doctrines. The

occurrence of ascetic revivals within the Reformed Church was, especially in Holland, regularly accompanied

by a regeneration of the doctrine of predestination which had been temporarily forgotten or not strictly held

But even the Continental (Dutch and Lower Rhenish) Pietism in the Reformed Church was, at least

fundamentally, just as much a simple intensification of the Reformed asceticism as, for instance, the

doctrines of Bailey. The emphasis was placed so strongly on the praxis pietatis that doctrinal orthodoxy was

pushed into the background; at times, in fact, it seemed quite a matter of indifference. Those predestined for

grace could occasionally be subject to dogmatic error as well as to other sins and experience showed that

often those Christians who were quite uninstructed in the theology of the schools exhibited the fruits of faith

most clearly, while on the other hand it became evident that mere knowledge of theology by no means

Thus election could not be proved by theological learning at all. Hence Pietism, with a deep distrust of the

Church of the theologians, to whichthis is characteristic of itit still belonged officially, began to gather the

adherents of the praxis pietatis in conventicles removed from the world . It wished to make the invisible

Church of the elect visible on this earth. Without going so far as to form a separate sect, its members

attempted to live, in this community, a life freed from all the temptations of the world and in all its details

dictated by God's will, and thus to be made certain of their own rebirth by external signs manifested in their

daily conduct. Thus the ecclesiola of the true converts this was common to all genuinely Pietistic groups

wished, by means of intensified asceticism, to enjoy the blissfulness of community with God in this life.

Now this latter tendency had something closely, related to the Lutheran unio mystica, and very often led to a

greater emphasis on the emotional side of religion than was acceptable to orthodox Calvinism. In fact this

may, from our viewpoint, be said to be the decisive characteristic of the Pietism which developed within the

Reformed Church. For this element of emotion, which was originally quite foreign to Calvinism, but on the

other hand related to certain mediaeval forms of religion, led religion in practice to strive for the enjoyment

of salvation in this world rather than to engage in the ascetic struggle for certainty about the future world.

Moreover, the emotion was capable of such intensity, that religion took on a positively hysterical character,

resulting in the alternation which is familiar from examples without number and neuropathologically

understandable, of halfconscious states of religious ecstasy with periods of nervous exhaustion, which were

felt as abandonment by God. The effect was the direct opposite of the strict and temperate discipline under

which men were placed by the systematic life of holiness of the Puritan. It meant a weakening of the

inhibitions which protected the rational personality of the Calvinist from his passions. Similarly it was

possible for the Calvinistic idea of the depravity of the flesh, taken emotionally, for instance in the form of

the socalled wormfeeling, to lead to a deadening of enterprise in worldly activity. Even the doctrine of

predestination could lead to fatalism if, contrary to the predominant tendencies of rational Calvinism, it were

made the object of emotional contemplation. Finally, the desire to separate the elect from the world could,

with a strong emotional intensity, lead to a sort of monastic community life of halfcommunistic character,

as the history of Pietism, even within the Reformed Church, has shown again and again.

But so long as this extreme effect, conditioned by this emphasis on emotion, did not appear, as long as

Reformed Pietism strove to make sure of salvation within the everyday routine of life in a worldly calling, the

practical effect of Pietistic principles was an even stricter ascetic control of conduct in the calling, which

provided a still more solid religious basis for the ethic of the calling, than the mere worldly respectability of

the normal Reformed Christian, which was felt by the superior Pietist to be a secondrate Christianity. The

religious aristocracy of the elect, which developed in every form of Calvinistic asceticism, the more seriously

it was taken, the more surely, was then organized, in Holland, on a voluntary basis in the form of conventicles

within the Church. In English Puritanism, on the other hand, it led partly to a virtual differentiation between

active and passive Christians within the Church organization, and partly, as has been shown above, to the

On the other hand, the development of German Pietism from a Lutheran basis, with which the names of

Spener, Francke, and Zinzendorf are connected, led away from the doctrine of predestination. But at the same

time it was by no means outside the body of ideas of which that dogma formed the logical climax, as is

especially attested by Spener's own account of the influence which English and Dutch Pietism had upon him,

From our special point of view, at any rate, Pietism meant simply the penetration of methodically controlled

and supervised, thus of ascetic, conduct into the nonCalvinistic denominations." But Lutheranism

necessarily felt this rational asceticism to be a foreign element, and the lack of consistency in German

Pietistic doctrines was the result of the difficulties growing out of that fact. As a dogmatic basis of systematic

religious conduct Spener combines Lutheran ideas with the specifically Calvinistic doctrine of good works as

such which are undertaken with the "intention of doing honour to God". He also has a faith, suggestive of

Calvinism, in the possibility of the elect attaining a relative degree of Christian perfection. But the theory

lacked consistency. Spener, who was strongly influenced by the mystics,attempted, in a rather uncertain but

essentially Lutheran manner, rather to describe the systematic type of Christian conduct which was essential

to even his form of Pietism than to justify it. He did not derive the certitudo salutis from sanctification;

instead of the idea of proof, he adopted Luther's somewhat loose connection between faith and works, which

has been discussed above. But again and again, in so far as the rational and ascetic element of Pietism

outweighed the emotional, the ideas essential to our thesis maintained their place.

These were: (1) that the methodical development of one's own state of grace to a higher and higher degree of

certainty and perfection in terms of the law was a sign of grace ; and (2) that "God's Providence works

through those in such a state of perfection", i.e. in that He gives them His signs if they wait patiently and

deliberate methodically.Labour in a calling was also the ascetic activity par excellence for A. H. Francke .

that God Himself blessed His chosen ones through the success of their labours was as undeniable to him as

we shall find it to have been to the Puritans. And as a substitute for the double decree Pietism worked out

ideas which, in a way essentially similar to Calvinism, though milder, established an aristocracy of the elect

resting on God's especial grace, with all the psychological results pointed out above. Among them belongs,

for instance, the socalled doctrine of Terminism, which was generally (though unjustly) attributed to Pietism

by its opponents. It assumes that grace is offered to all men, but for everyone either once at a definite moment

in his life or at some moment for the last time. Anyone who let that moment pass was beyond the help of the

universality of grace; he was in the same situation as those neglected by God in the Calvinistic doctrine.

Quite close to this theory was the idea which Francke took from his personal experience, and which was very

widespread in Pietism, one may even say predominant, that grace could only become effective under certain

unique and peculiar circumstances, namely, after previous repentance. Since, according to Pietist doctrine,

not everyone was capable of such experiences, those who, in spite of the use of the ascetic methods

recommended by the Pietists to bring it about, did not attain it, remained in the eyes of the regenerate a sort of

passive Christian. On the other hand, by the creation, of a method to induce repentance even the attainment of

Moreover, the antagonism to the private confessional, which, though not shared by allfor instance, not b

Franckewas characteristic of many Pietists, especially as the repeated questions in Spener show, of Pieti

pastors, resulted from this aristocracy of grace. This antagonism helped to weaken its ties with Lutheranism

The visible effects on conduct of grace gained through repentance formed a necessary criterion for admission

to absolution; hence it was impossible to let contritio alone suffice. Zinzendorf's conception of his own

religious position, even though it vacillated in the face of attack from orthodoxy, tended generally toward the

instrumental idea. Beyond that, however, the doctrine standpoint of this remarkable religious dilettante,

Ritschl calls him, is scarcely capable of clear formulation in the points of importance for us.He repeatedly

designated himself a representative of PaulineLutheran Christianity; hence he opposed the Pietistic type

associated with Jansen with its adherence to the law. But the Brotherhood itself in practice upheld, as early as

its Protocol of August 22, 1729, a standpoint which in many respects closely resembled that of the Calvinistic

aristocracy of the elect. And in spite of his repeated avowals of Lutheranism, he permitted and encouraged it.

The famous stand of attributing the Old Testament to Christ, taken on November 2, 1741, was the outward

expression of somewhat the same attitude. However, of the three branches of the Brotherhood, both the

Calvinistic and the Moravian accepted the Reformed ethics in essentials from the beginning. And even

Zinzendorf followed the Puritans in expressing to John Wesley the opinion that even though a man himself

But on the other hand, in the peculiar piety of Herrnhut, the emotional element held a very prominent place.

In particular Zinzendorf himself continually attempted to counteract the tendency to ascetic sanctification in

the Puritan sense and to turn the interpretation of good works in a Lutheran direction. Also under the

influence of the repudiation of conventicles and the retention of the confession, there developed an essentially

Lutheran dependence on the sacraments. Moreover, Zinzendorf's peculiar principle that the childlikeness of

religious feeling was a sign of its genuineness, as well as the use of the lot as a means of revealing God's will,

strongly counteracted the influence of rationality in conduct. On the whole, within the sphere of influence of

the Count, the antirational, emotional elements predominated much more in the religion of the Herrnhuters

than elsewhere inpietism. The connection between morality and the forgiveness of sins in Spangenberg's Idea

fides fratrum is as loosel. as in Lutheranism generally. Zinzendorf's repudiation of the Methodist pursuit of

perfection is part, here as everywhere, of his fundamentally eudaemonistic ideal of having men experience

eternal bliss (he calls it happiness) emotionally in the present, instead of encouraging them by rational labour

Nevertheless, the idea that the most important value of the Brotherhood as contrasted with other Churches lay

in an active Christian life, in missionary, and, which was brought into connection with it, in professional

work in a calling, remained a vital force with them. In addition, the practical rationalization of life from the

standpoint of utility was very essential to Zinzendorf's philosophy . It was derived for him, as for other

Pietists, on the one hand from his decided dislike of philosophical speculation as dangerous to faith, and his

corresponding preference for empirical knowledge ; on the other hand, from the shrewd common sense of the

professional missionary. The Brotherhood was, as a great mission centre, at the same time a business

enterprise. Thus it led its members into the paths of worldly asceticism, which everywhere first seeks for

tasks and then carries them out carefully and systematically. However, the glorification of the apostolic

poverty, of the disciples chosen by God through predestination, which was derived from the example of the

apostles as missionaries, formed another obstacle. It meant in effect a partial revival of the consilia

evangelica. The development of a rational economic ethic similar to the Calvinistic was certainly retarded by

these factors, even though, as the development of the Baptist movement shows, it was not impossible, but

on the contrary subjectively strongly encouraged by the idea of work solely for the sake of the calling.

All in all, when we consider German Pietism from the point of view important for us, we must admit a

vacillation and uncertainty in the religious basis of its asceticism which makes it definitely weaker than the

iron consistency of Calvinism, and which is partly the result of Lutheran influences and partly of its

emotional character. To be sure, it is very onesided to make this emotional element the distinguishing

characteristic of Pietism as opposed to Lutheranism. But compared to Calvinism, the rationalization of life

was necessarily less intense because the pressure of occupation with a state of grace which had continually to

be proved, and which was concerned for the future in eternity, was diverted to the present emotional state.

The place of the selfconfidence which the elect sought to attain, and continually to renew in restless and

successful work at his calling, was taken by an attitude of humility and abnegation. This in turn was partly

the result of emotional stimulus directed solely toward spiritual experience; partly of the Lutheran institution

of the confession, which, though it was often looked upon with serious doubts by Pietism, was still generally

tolerated. All this shows the influence of the peculiarly Lutheran conception of salvation by the forgiveness

of sins and not by practical sanctification. In place of the systematic rational struggle to attain and retain

certain knowledge of future (otherworldly) salvation comes here the need to feel reconciliation and

community with God now. Thus the tendency of the pursuit of present enjoyment to hinder the rational

organization of economic life, depending as it does on provision for the future, has in a certain sense a

Evidently, then, the orientation of religious needs to present emotional satisfaction could not develop so

powerful a motive to rationalize worldly activity, as the need of the Calvinistic elect for proof with their

exclusive preoccupation with the beyond. On the other hand, it was considerably more favourable to the

methodical penetration of conduct with religion than the traditionalistic faith of the orthodox Lutheran, bound

as it was to the Word and the sacraments. On the whole Pietism from Francke and Spener to Zinzendorf

tended toward increasing emphasis on the emotional side. But this was not in any sense the expression of an

immanent law of development. The differences resulted from differences of the religious (and social)

environments from which the leaders came. We cannot enter into that here, nor can we discuss how the

peculiarities of German Pietism have affected its social and geographical extension. We must again remind

ourselves that this emotional Pietism of course shades off into the way of life of the Puritan elect by quite

gradual stages. If we can, at least provisionally, point out any practical consequence of the difference, we

may say that the virtues favoured by Pietism were more those on the one hand of the faithful official, clerk,

labourer, or domestic worker, and on the other of the predominantly patriarchal employer with a pious

condescension (in Zinzendorf's manner). Calvinism, in comparison, appears to be more closely related to the

hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeoiscapitalistic entrepreneurs. Finally, the purely emotional

form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure classes. However far this

characterization falls short of being exhaustive, it helps to explain certain differences in the character

(including the economic character) of peoples which have been under the influence of one or the other of

The combination of an emotional but still ascetic type of religion with increasing indifference to or

repudiation of the dogmatic basis of Calvinistic asceticism is characteristic also of the AngloAmerican

movement corresponding to Continental Pietism, namely Methodism. The name in itself shows what

impressed contemporaries as characteristic of its adherents: the methodical, systematic nature of conduct for

the purpose of attaining the certitudo salutis. This was from the beginning the centre of religious aspiration

for this movement also, and remained so. In spite of all the differences, the undoubted relationship to certain

branches of German Pietism is shown above all by the fact that the method was used primarily to bring about

the emotional act of conversion. And the emphasis on feeling, in John Wesley awakened by Moravian and

Lutheran influences, led Methodism, which from the beginning saw its mission among the masses, to take on

a strongly emotional character, especially in America. The attainment of repentance under certain

circumstances involved an emotional struggle of such intensity as to lead to the most terrible ecstasies, which

in America often took place in a public meeting. This formed the basis of a belief in the undeserved

possession of divine grace and at the same time of an immediate consciousness of justification and

Now this emotional religion entered into a peculiar alliance, containing no small inherent difficulties, with

the ascetic ethics which had for good and all been stamped with rationality by Puritanism. For one thing,

unlike Calvinism, which held everything emotional to be illusory, the only sure basis for the certitudo salutis

was in principle held to be a pure feeling of absolute certainty of forgiveness, derived immediately from the

testimony of the spirit, the coming of which could be definitely placed to the hour. Added to this is Wesley's

doctrine of sanctification which, though a decided departure from the orthodox doctrine, is a logical

development of it. According to it, one reborn in this manner can, by virtue of the divine grace already

working in him, even in this life attain sanctification, the consciousness of perfection in the sense of

freedom from sin, by a second, generally separate and often sudden spiritual transformation. However

difficult of attainment this end is, generally not till toward the end of one's life, it must inevitably be sought,

because it finally guarantees the certitudo salutis and substitutes a serene confidence for the sullen worry of

the Calvinist. And it distinguishes the true convert in his own eyes and those of others by the fact that sin at

In spite of the great significance of selfevident feeling, righteous conduct according to the law was thus

naturally also adhered to. Whenever Wesley attacked the emphasis on works of his time, it was only to revive

the old Puritan doctrine that works are not the cause, but only the means of knowing one's state of grace, and

even this only when they are performed solely for the glory of God. Righteous conduct alone did not suffice,

as he had found out for himself. The feeling of grace was necessary in addition. He himself sometimes

described works as a condition of grace, and in the Declaration of August 9, 1771 , he emphasized that he

who performed no good works was not a true believer. In fact, the Methodists have always maintained that

they did not differ from the Established Church in doctrine, but only in religious practice. This emphasis on

the fruits of belief was mostly justified by I John iii, 9; conduct is taken as a clear sign of rebirth.

But in spite of all that there were difficulties. For those Methodists who were adherents of the doctrine of

predestination, to think of the certitudo salutis as appearing in the immediate feeling of grace and perfection

instead of the consciousness of grace which grew out of ascetic conduct in continual proof of faith since then

the certainty of the perservantia depended only on the single act of repentancemeant one of two things. For

weak natures there was a fatalistic interpretation of Christian freedom, and with it the breakdown of

methodical conduct; or, where this path was rejected, the selfconfidence of the righteous man reached

untold heights, an emotional intensification of the Puritan type. In the face of the attacks of opponents, the

attempt was made to meet these consequences. On the one hand by increased emphasis on the normative

authority of the Bible and the indispensability of proof ; on the other by, in effect, strengthening Wesley's

antiCalvinistic faction within the movement with its doctrine that grace could be lost. The strong Lutheran

influences to which Wesley was exposed through the Moravians strengthened this tendency and increased the

uncertainty of the religious basis of the Methodist ethics. In the end only the concept of regeneration, an

emotional certainty of salvation as the immediate result of faith, was definitely maintained as the

indispensable foundation of grace; and with it sanctification, resulting in (at least virtual) freedom from the

power of sin, as the consequent proof of grace. The significance of external means of grace, especially the

sacraments, was correspondingly diminished. In any case, the general awakening which followed Methodism

everywhere, for example in New England, meant a victory for the doctrine of grace and election .

Thus from our viewpoint the Methodist ethic appears to rest on a foundation of uncertainty similar to

Pietism. But the aspiration to the higher life, the second blessedness, served it as a sort of makeshift for the

doctrine of predestination. Moreover, being English in origin, its ethical practice was closely related to that of

English Puritanism, the revival of which it aspired to be. The emotional act of conversion was methodically

induced. And after it was attained there did not follow a pious enjoyment of community with God, after the

manner of the emotional Pietism of Zinzendorf, but the emotion, once awakened, was directed into a rational

struggle for perfection. Hence the emotional character of its faith did not lead to a spiritualized religion of

feeling like German Pietism. It has already been shown by Schneckenburger that this fact was connected with

the less intensive. development of the sense of sin (partly directly on account of the emotional experience of

conversion), and this has remained an accepted point in the discussion of Methodism. The fundamentally

Calvinistic character of its religious feeling here remained decisive. The emotional excitement took the form

of enthusiasm which was only occasionally, but then powerfully stirred, but which by no means destroyed the

otherwise rational character of conduct. The regeneration of Methodism thus created only a supplement to the

pure doctrine of works, a religious basis for ascetic conduct after the doctrine of predestination had been

given up. The signs given by conduct which formed an indispensable means of ascertaining true conversion,

even its condition as Wesley occasionally says, were in fact just the same as those of Calvinism. As a late

product we can, in the following discussion, generally neglect Methodism, as it added nothing new to the

The Pietism of the Continent of Europe and the Methodism of the AngloSaxon peoples are, considered both

in their content of ideas and their historical significance, secondary movements. On the other hand, we find a

second independent source of Protestant asceticism besides Calvinism in the Baptist movement and the sects

which, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, came directly from it or adopted its forms of

religious thought, the Baptists, Mennonites, and, above all, the Quakers. With them we approach religious

groups whose ethics rest upon a basis differing in principle from the Calvinistic doctrine. The following

sketch, which only emphasizes what is important for us, can give no true impression of the diversity of this

movement. Again we lay the principal emphasis on the development in the older capitalistic countries.

The feature of all these communities, which is both historically and in principle most important, but whose

influence on the development of culture can only be made quite clear in a somewhat different connection, is

something with which we are already familiar, the believer's Church .This means that the religious

community, the visible Church in the language of the Reformation Churches, was no longer looked upon as a

sort of trust foundation for supernatural ends, an institution, necessarily including both the just and the unjust,

whether for increasing the glory of God (Calvinistic) or as a medium for bringing the means of salvation to

men (Catholic and Lutheran), but solely as a community of personal believers of the reborn, and only these.

In other words, not as a Church but as a Sect. This is all that the principle, in itself purely external, that only

adults who have personally gained their own faith should be baptized, is meant to symbolize . The

justification through this faith was for the Baptists, as they have insistently repeated in all religious

discussions, radically different from the idea of work in the world in the service of Christ, such as dominated

the orthodox dogma of the older Protestantism . It consisted rather in taking spiritual possession of His gift of

salvation. But this occurred through individual revelation, by the working of the Divine Spirit in the

individual, and only in that way. It was offered to everyone, and it sufficed to wait for the Spirit, and not to

resist its coming by a sinful attachment to the world. The significance of faith in the sense of knowledge of

the doctrines of the Church, but also in that of a repentant search for divine grace, was consequently quite

minimized, and there took place, naturally with great modifications, a renaissance of Early Christian

pneumatic doctrines. For instance, the sect to which Menno Simons in his Fondamentboek gave the first

reasonably consistent doctrine, wished, like the other Baptist sects, to be the true blameless Church of

Christ; like the apostolic community, consisting entirely of those personally awakened and called by God.

Those who have been born again, and they alone, are brethren of Christ, because they, like Him, have been

created in spirit directly by God. A strict avoidance of the world, in the sense of all not strictly necessary

intercourse with worldly people, together with the strictest bibliocracy in the sense of taking the life of the

first generations of Christians as a model, were the results for the first Baptist communities, and this principle

of avoidance of the world never quite disappeared so long as the old spirit remained alive."'

As a permanent possession, the Baptist sects retained from these dominating motives of their early period a

principle with which, on a somewhat different foundation, we have already become acquainted in Calvinism,

and the fundamental importance of which will again and again come out. They absolutely repudiated all

idolatry of the flesh, as a detraction from the reverence due to God alone The Biblical way of life was

conceived by the first Swiss and South German Baptists with a radicalism similar to that of the young St.

Francis, as a sharp break with all the enjoyment of life, a life modelled directly on that of the Apostles. And,

in truth, the life of many of the earlier Baptists is reminiscent of that of St. Giles. But this strict observation of

Biblical precepts was not on very secure foundations in its connection with the pneumatic character of the

faith. What God had revealed to the prophets and apostles was not all that He could and would reveal. On the

contrary, the continued life of the Word, not as a written document, but as the force of the Holy Spirit

working in daily life, which speaks directly to any individual who is willing to hear, was the sole

characteristic of the true Church. That, as Schwenkfeld taught as against Luther and later Fox against the

Presbyterians, was the testimony of the early Christian communities. From this idea of the continuance of

revelation developed the wellknown doctrine, later consistently worked out by the Quakers, of the (in the

last analysis decisive) significance of the inner testimony of the Spirit in reason and conscience. This did

away, not with the authority, but with the sole authority, of the Bible, and started a development which in the

end radically eliminated all that remained of the doctrine of salvation through the Church; for the Quakers

even with Baptism and the Communion. The Baptist denominations along with the predestinationists,

especially the strict Calvinists, carried out the most radical devaluation of all sacraments as means to

salvation, and thus accomplished the religious rationalization of the world in its most extreme form.

Only the inner light of continual revelation could enable one truly to understand even the Biblical revelations

of God. On the other hand, at least according to the Quaker doctrine which here drew the logical conclusion,

its effects could be extended to people who had never known revelation in its Biblical form. The proposition

extra ecclesiam nulla salus held only for this invisible Church of those illuminated by the Spirit. Without the

inner light, the natural man, even the man guided by natural reason, remained purely a creature of the flesh,

whose godlessness was condemned by the Baptists, including the Quakers, almost even more harshly than by

the Calvinists. On the other hand, the new birth caused by the Spirit, if we wait for it and open our hearts to

it, may, since it is divinely caused, lead to a state of such complete conquest of the power of sin that relapses,

to say nothing of the loss of the state of grace, become practically impossible. However, as in Methodism at a

later time, the attainment of that state was not thought of as the rule, but rather the degree of perfection of the

But all Baptist communities desired to be pure Churches in the sense of the blameless conduct of their

members. A sincere repudiation of the world and its interests, and unconditional submission to God as

speaking through the conscience, were the only unchallengeable signs of true rebirth, and a corresponding

type of conduct was thus indispensable to salvation. And hence the gift of God's grace could not be earned,

but only one who followed the dictates of his conscience could be justified in considering himself reborn.

Good works in this sense were a causa sine qua non. As we see, this last reasoning of Barclay, to whose

exposition we have adhered, was again the equivalent in practice of the Calvinistic doctrine, and was

certainly developed under the influence of the Calvinistic asceticism, which surrounded the Baptist sects in

England and the Netherlands. George Fox devoted the whole of his early missionary activity to the preaching

But, since predestination was rejected, the peculiarly rational character of Baptist morality rested

psychologically above all on the idea of expectant waiting for the Spirit to descend, which even today is

characteristic of the Quaker meeting, and is well analysed by Barclay. The purpose of this silent waiting is to

overcome everything impulsive and irrational, the passions and subjective interests of the natural man. He

must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard. Of

course, this waiting might result in hysterical conditions, prophecy, and, as long as eschatological hopes

survived, under certain circumstances even in an outbreak of chiliastic enthusiasm, as is possible in all similar

types of religion. That actually happened in the movement which went to pieces in Munster.

But in so far as Baptism affected the normal workaday world, the idea that God only speaks when the flesh is

silent evidently meant an incentive to the deliberate weighing of courses of action and their careful

justification in terms of the individual conscience. The later Baptist communities, most particularly the

Quakers, adopted this quiet, moderate, eminently conscientious character of conduct. The radical elimination

of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since

these communities would have nothing to do with the political powers and their doings, the external result

also was the penetration of life in the calling with these ascetic virtues. The leaders of the earliest Baptist

movement were ruthlessly radical in their rejection of worldliness. But naturally,even in the first generation,

the strictly apostolic way of life was not maintained as absolutely essential to the proof of rebirth for

everyone. Welltodo bourgeois there were, even in this generation and even before Menno, who definitely

defended the practical worldly virtues and the system of private property; the strict morality of the Baptists

had turned in practice into the path prepared by the Calvinistic ethic.This was simply because the road to the

otherworldly monastic form of asceticism had been closed as unbiblical and savouring of salvation by works

since Luther, whom the Baptists also followed in this respect. Nevertheless, apart from the halfcommunistic

communities of the early period, one Baptist sect, the socalled Dunckards (Tunker, dompelaers), has to

this day maintained its condemnation of education and of every form of possession beyond that indispensable

to life. And even Barclay looks upon the obligation to one's calling not in Calvinistic or even Lutheran terms,

but rather Thomistically, as naturali ratione, the necessary consequence of the believers, having to live in the

This attitude meant a weakening of the Calvinistic conception of the calling similar to those of Spener and the

German Pietists. But, on the other hand, the intensity of interest in economic occupations was considerably

increased by various factors at work in the Baptist sects. In the first place, by the refusal to accept office in

the service of the State, which originated as a religious duty following from the repudiation of everything

worldly. After its abandonment in principle it still remained, at least for the Mennonites and Quakers,

effective in practice, because the strict refusal to bear arms or to take oaths formed a sufficient

disqualification for office. Hand in hand with it in all Baptists' denominations went an invincible antagonism

to any sort of aristocratic way of life. Partly, as with the Calvinists, it was a consequence of the prohibition of

all idolatry of the flesh, partly a result of the aforementioned unpolitical or even antipolitical principles,

The whole shrewd and conscientious rationality of Baptist conduct was thus forced into nonpolitical

At the same time, the immense importance which was attributed by the Baptist doctrine of salvation to the

role of the conscience as the revelation of God to the individual gave their conduct in worldly callings a

character which was of the greatest significance for the development of the spirit of capitalism. We shall have

to postpone its consideration until later, and it can then be studied only in so far as this is possible without

entering into the whole political and social ethics of Protestant asceticism. But, to anticipate this much, we

have already called attention to that most important principle of the capitalistic ethic which is generally

formulated "honesty is the best policy" Its classical document is the tract of Franklin quoted above. And even

in the judgment of the seventeenth century the specific form of the worldly asceticism of the Baptists,

especially the Quakers, lay in the practical adoption of this maxim.1m On the other hand, we shall expect to

find that the influence of Calvinism was exerted more in the direction of the liberation of energy for private

acquisition. For in spite of all the formal legalism of the elect, Goethe's remark in fact applied often enough

to the Calvinist: "The man of action is always ruthless; no one has a conscience but an observer."

A further important element which promoted the intensity of the worldly asceticism of the Baptist

denominations can in its full significance also be considered only in another connection. Nevertheless, we

may anticipate a few remarks on it to justify the order of presentation we have chosen. We have quite

deliberately not taken as a startingpoint the objective social institutions of the older Protestant Churches,

and their ethical influences, especially not the very important Church discipline. We have preferred rather to

take the results which subjective adoption of an ascetic faith might have had in the conduct of the individual.

This was not only because this side of the thing has previously received far less attention than the other, but

also because the effect of Church discipline was by no means always a similar one. On the contrary, the

ecclesiastical supervision of the life of the individual, which, as it was practised in the Calvinistic State

Churches, almost amounted to an inquisition, might even retard that liberation of individual powers which

was conditioned by the rational ascetic pursuit of salvation, and in some cases actually did so.

The mercantilistic regulations of the State might develop industries, but not, or certainly not alone, the spirit

of capitalism; where they assumed a despotic, authoritarian character, they to a large extent directly hindered

it. Thus a similar effect might well have resulted from ecclesiastical regimentation when it became

excessively despotic. It enforced a particular type of external conformity, but in some cases weakened the

subjective motives of rational conduct. Any discussion of this point must take account of the great difference

between the results of the authoritarian moral discipline of the Established Churches and tile corresponding

discipline in the sects which rested on voluntary submission. That the Baptist movement everywhere and in

principle founded sects and not Churches was certainly as favourable to the intensity of their asceticism as

was the case, to differing degrees, with those Calvinistic, Methodist, and Pietist communities which were

It is our next task to follow out the results of the Puritan idea of the calling in the business world, now that the

above sketch has attempted to show its religious foundations. With all the differences of detail and emphasis

which these different ascetic movements show in the aspects with which we have been concerned, much the

same characteristics are present and important in all of them. But for our purposes the decisive point was, to

recapitulate, the conception of the state of religious grace, common to all the denominations, as a status

which marks off its possessor from the degradation of the flesh, from the world.

On the other hand, though the means by which it was attained differed for different doctrines, it could not be

guaranteed by any magical sacraments, by relief in the confession, nor by individual good works. That was

only possible by proof in a specific type of conduct unmistakably different from the way of life of the natural

man. From that followed for the individual an incentive methodically to supervise his own state of grace in

his own conduct, and thus to penetrate it with asceticism. But, as we have seen, this ascetic conduct meant a

rational planning of the whole of one's life in accordance with God's will. And this asceticism was no longer

an opus supererogationis, but something which could be required of everyone who would be certain of

salvation. The religious life of the saints, as distinguished from the natural life, wasthe most important

pointno longer lived outside the world in monastic communities, but within the world and its institutions.

This rationalization of conduct within this world, but for the sake of the world beyond, was the consequence

Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had

renounced from the monastery and through the Church. But it had, on the whole, left the naturally

spontaneous character of daily life in the world untouched. Now it strode into the marketplace of life

slammed the door of the monastery behind it, an undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its

methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world. With what result, we

In order to understand the connection between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its

maxims for everyday economic conduct, it is necessary to examine with especial care such writings as have

evidently been derived from ministerial practice. For in a time in which the beyond meant everything, when

the social position of the Christian depended upon his admission to the communion, the clergyman, through

his ministry, Church discipline, and preaching, exercised an influence (as a glance at collections of consilia,

casus conscientia, etc., shows) which we modem men are entirely unable to picture. In such a time the

religious forces which express themselves through such channels are the decisive influences in the formation

For the purposes of this chapter, though by no means for all purposes, we can treat ascetic Protestantism as a

single whole. But since that side of English Puritanism which was derived from Calvinism gives the most

consistent religious basis for the idea of the calling, we shall, following our previous method, place one of its

representatives at the centre of the discussion. Richard Baxter stands out above many other writers on Puritan

ethics, both because of his eminently practical and realistic attitude, and, at the same time, because of the

universal recognition accorded to his works, which have gone through many new editions and translations.

He was a Presbyterian and an apologist of the Westminster Synod, but at the same time, like so many of the

best spirits of his time, gradually grew away from the dogmas of pure Calvinism. At heart he opposed

Cromwell's usurpation as he would any revolution. He was unfavourable to the sects and the fanatical

enthusiasm of the saints, but was very broadminded about external peculiarities and objective towards his

opponents. He sought his field of labour most especially in the practical promotion of the moral life through

the Church. In the pursuit of this end, as one of the most successful ministers known to history, he placed his

services at the disposal of the Parliamentary Government, of Cromwell, and of the Restoration,' until he

retired, from office under the last, before St. Bartholomew�s day. His Christian Directory is the most

compendium of Puritan ethics, and is c adjusted to the practical experiences of his of his own ministerial

activity. In comparison we shall m Spener's Theologische Bedenken, as representative o German Pietism,

Barclay's Apology for the Quakers and some other representatives of ascetic ethics, which, however, in the

Now, in glancing at Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, or his Christian Directory, or similar works of others,'

one is struck at first glance by the emphasis placed, in the discussion of wealth and its acquisition, on the

ebionitic elements of the New testament. Wealth as such is a great danger; its temptations never end and its

pursuit is not only senseless as compared with the dominating importance of the Kingdom of God, but itis

morally suspect. Here asceticism seems to have turned much more sharply against the acquisition of earthly

goods than it did in Calvin, who saw no hindrance to the effectiveness of the clergy in their wealth, but

rather a thoroughly desirable enhancement of their prestige. Hence he permitted them to employ their means

profitably. Examples of the condemnation of the pursuit of money and goods may be gathered without end

from Puritan writings, and may be contrasted with the late mediaeval ethical literature , which was much

more openminded on this point. Moreover, these doubts were meant with perfect seriousness; only it is

necessary to examine them somewhat more closely in order to understand their true ethical significance and

implications. The real. moral objection is to relaxation in the security of possession, the enjoyment of wealth

with the consequence of idleness and the temptations of the flesh, above all of distraction from the pursuit

of a righteous life. In fact, it is only because possession involves this danger of relaxation that it is

objectionable at all. For the saints' everlasting rest is in the next world; on earth man must, to be certain of his

state of grace, "do the works of him who sent him, as long as it is yet day". Not leisure and enjoyment, but

only activity serves to increase the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will.

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short

and precious to make sure of one's own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury," even

more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral

condemnation. It does not yet hold, with Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain

spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God. Thus

inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one's daily

work. For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling. Besides, Sunday is

provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have

Accordingly, Baxter's principal work is dominated by the continually repeated, often almost passionate

preaching of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour.It is due to a combination of two different motives.

Labour is, on the one hand, an approved ascetic technique, as it always has been in the Western Church, in

sharp contrast not only to the Orient but to almost all monastic rules the world over. It is in particular the

specific defence against all those temptations which Puritanism united under the name of the unclean life,

whose role for it was by no means small. The sexual asceticism of Puritanism differs only in degree, not in

fundamental principle, from that of monasticism; and on account of the Puritan conception of marriage, its

practical influence is more farreaching than that of the latter. For sexual intercourse is permitted, even

within marriage, only as the means willed by God for the increase of His glory according to the

commandment, "Be fruitful and Multiply." Along with a moderate vegetable diet and cold baths, the same

prescription is given for all sexual temptations as is used against religious doubts and a sense of moral

unworthiness: "Work hard in your calling." But the most important thing was that even beyond that labour

came to he considered in itself the end of life, ordained as such by God. St. Paul's "He who will not work

shall not eat" holds unconditionally for everyone. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of

Here the difference from the medieval viewpoint becomes quite evident. Thomas Aquinas also gave an

interpretation of that statement of St. Paul. But for him labour is only necessary naturali ratione for the

maintenance of individual and community. Where this end is achieved, the precept ceases to have any

meaning. Moreover, it holds only for the race, not for every individual. It does not apply to anyone who can

live without 'labour on his possessions, and of course contemplation, as a spiritual form of action in the

Kingdom of God, takes precedence over the commandment in its literal sense. Moreover, for the popular

theology of the time, the highest form of monastic productivity lay in the increase of the Thesaurus ecclesie

Now only do these exceptions to the duty to labour naturally no longer hold for Baxter, but he holds most

emphatically that wealth does not exempt anyone from the unconditional command. Even the wealthy shall

not cat without working, for even though they do not need to labour to support their own needs, there is God's

commandment which they, like the poor, must obey. For everyone without exception God's Providence has

prepared a calling, which he should profess and in which he should labour. And this calling is not, as it was

for the Lutheran, a fate to which he must submit and which he must make the best of, but God's

commandment to the individual to work for the divine glory. This seemingly subtle difference had

farreaching psychological consequences, and became connected with a further development of the

providential interpretation of the economic order which had begun in scholasticism.

The phenomenon of the division of labour and occupations in society had, among others, been interpreted

by Thomas Aquinas, to whom we may most conveniently refer, as a direct consequence of the divine scheme

of things. But the places assigned to each man in this cosmos follow ex causis naturalibus and are fortuitous

(contingent in the Scholastic terminology). The differentiation of men into the classes and occupations

established through historical development became for Luther, as we have seen, a direct result of the divine

will. The perseverance of the individual in the place and within the limits which God had assigned to him was

a religious duty. This was the more certainly the consequence since the relations of Lutheranism to the world

were in general uncertain from the beginning and remained so. Ethical principles for the reform of the world

could not be found in Luther's realm of ideas; in fact it never quite freed itself from Pauline indifference.

Hence the world had to be accepted as it was, and this alone could be made a religious duty But in the

Puritan view, the providential character of the play of private economic interests takes on a somewhat

different emphasis. True to the Puritan tendency to pragmatic interpretations, the providential purpose of the

division of labour is to be known by its fruits. On this point Baxter expresses himself in terms which more

than once directly recall Adam Smith's wellknown apotheosis of the division of labour. The specialization

of occupations leads, since it makes the development of skill possible, to a quantitative and qualitative

improvement in production, and thus serves the common good, which is identical with the good of the

greatest possible number. So far, the motivation is purely utilitarian, and is closely related to the customary

But the characteristic Puritan element appears when Baxter sets at the head of his discussion the statement

that "outside of a wellmarked calling the accomplishments of a man are only casual and irregular, and he

spends more time in idleness than at work", and when he concludes it as follows: "and he [the specialized

worker) will carry out his work in order while another remains in constant confusion, and his business knows

neither time nor place . . . therefore is a certain calling the best for everyone". Irregular work, which the

ordinary labourer is often forced to accept, is often unavoidable, but always an unwelcome state of transition.

A man without a calling thus lacks the systematic, methodical character which is, as we have seen, demanded

The Quaker ethic also holds that a man's life in his calling is an exercise in ascetic virtue, a proof of his state

of grace through his conscientiousness, which is expressed in the care and method with which he pursues his

calling. What God demands is not labour in itself, but rational labour in a calling. In the Puritan concept of

the calling the emphasis is always placed on this methodical character of worldly asceticism, not, as with

Luther, on the acceptance of the lot which God has irretrievably assigned to man.

Hence the question whether anyone may combine several callings is answered in the affirmative, if it is

useful for the common good or one's own, and not injurious to anyone, and if it does not lead to

unfaithfulness in one of the callings. Even a change of calling is by no means regarded as objectionable, if it

is not thoughtless and is made for the purpose of pursuing a calling more pleasing to God,which means, on

general principles, one more useful. It is true that the usefulness of a calling, and thus its favour in the sight of

God, is measured primarily in moral terms, and thus in terms of the importance of the goods produced in it

for the community. But a further, and, above all, in practice the most important, criterion is found in private

profitableness. For if that God, whose hand the Puritan sees in all the occurrences of life, shows one of His

elect a chance of profit, he must do it with a purpose. Hence the faithful Christian must follow the call by

taking advantage of the opportunity. "If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in

another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way,

you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward, and to accept His gifts and use

them for Him, when He requireth it: you may labour to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin."

Wealth is thus bad ethically only in so far as it is a temptation to idleness and sinful enjoyment of life, and its

acquisition is bad only when it is with the purpose of later living merrily and without care. But as a

performance of duty in a calling it is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined .The parable of the

servant who was rejected because he did not increase the talent which was entrusted to him seemed to say so

directly. To wish to be poor was, it was often argued, the same as wishing to be unhealthy ; it is objectionable

as a glorification of works and derogatory to the glory of God. Especially begging, on the part of one able to

work, is not only the sin of slothfulness, but a violation of the duty of brotherly love according to the

Apostle's own word. The emphasis on the ascetic importance of a fixed calling provided an ethical

justification of the modern specialized division of labour. In a similar way the providential interpretation of

profitmaking justified the activities of the business man. The superior indulgence of the seigneur and the

But, on the other hand, it has the highest ethical appreciation of the sober, middleclass, selfmade Man.

"God blesseth His trade" is a stock remark about those good men who had successfully followed the divine

hints. The whole power of the God of the Old Testament, who rewards His people for their obedience in this

life, necessarily exercised a similar influence on the Puritan who, following Baxter's advice, compared his

own state of grace with that of the heroes of the Bible, and in the process interpreted the statements of the

Of course, the words of the Old Testament were not entirely without ambiguity. We have seen that Luther

first used the concept of the calling in the secular sense in translating a passage from Jesus Sirach. But the

book of Jesus Sirach belongs, with the whole atmosphere expressed in it, to those parts of the broadened

Old Testament with distinctly traditionalistic tendency, in spite of Hellenistic influences. It is characteristic

that down to the present day this book seems to enjoy a special favour among Lutheran German peasants just

as the Lutheran influence in large sections of German Pietism has been expressed by a preference for Jesus

The Puritans repudiated the Apocrypha as not inspired, consistently with their sharp distinction between

things divine and things of the flesh. But among the canonical books that of Job had all the more influence.

On the one hand it contained a grand conception of the absolute sovereign majesty, of God, beyond all human

comprehension, which was closely related to that of Calvinism. With that, on the other hand, it combined the

certainty which, though incidental for Calvin, came to be of great importance for Puritanism, that God

would bless His own in this life in the book of Job onlyand also in the material sense .The Oriental

quietism, which appears in several of the finest verses of the Psalms and in the Proverbs, was interpreted

away, just as Baxter did with the traditionalistic tinge of the passage in the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, so

But all the more emphasis was placed on those parts of the Old Testament which praise formal legality as a

sign of conduct pleasing to God. They held the theory that the Mosaic Law had only lost its validity through

Christ in so far as it contained ceremonial or purely historical precepts applying only to the Jewish people,

but that otherwise it had always been valid as an expression of the natural law, and must hence be retained .

This made it possible, on the one hand, to eliminate elements which could not be reconciled with modern life.

But still, through its numerous related features, Old Testament morality was able to give a powerful impetus

to that spirit of selfrighteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism of this

Thus when authors, as was the case with several contemporaries as well as later writers, characterize the basic

ethical tendency of Puritanism, especially in England, as English Hebrews they are, correctly understood, not

wrong. It is necessary, however, not to think of Palestinian Judaism at the time of the writing of the

Scriptures, but of Judaism as it became under the influence of many centuries of formalistic, legalistic, and

Talmudic education. Even then one must be very careful in drawing parallels. The general tendency of the

older Judaism toward a naive acceptance of life as such was far removed from the special characteristics of

Puritanism. It was, however, just as farand this ought not to be overlookedfrom the economic ethics of

mediaeval and modern Judaism, in the traits which determined the positions of both in the development of the

capitalistic ethos. The Jews stood on the side of the politically and speculatively oriented adventurous

capitalism; their ethos was, in a word, that of pariahcapitalism. But Puritanism carried the ethos of the

rational organization of capital and labour. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this

To analyse the effects on the character of peoples of the penetration of life with Old Testament normsa

tempting task which, however, has not yet satisfactorily been done even for Judaismwould be impossible

within the limits of this sketch. In addition to the relationships already pointed out, it is important for the

general inner attitude of the Puritans, above all, that the belief that they were God's chosen people saw in

them a great renaissance. Even the kindly Baxter thanked God that he was born in England, and thus in the

true Church, and nowhere else. This thankfulness for one's own perfection by the grace of God penetrated the

attitude toward life of the Puritan middle class, and played its part in developing that formalistic, hard, correct

Let us now try to clarify the points in which the Puritan idea of the calling and the premium it placed upon

ascetic conduct was bound directly to influence the development of a capitalistic way of life. As we have

seen, this asceticism turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it

had to offer. This is perhaps most characteristically brought out in the struggle over the Book of Sports "

which James I and Charles I made into law expressly as a means of counteracting Puritanism, and which the

latter ordered to be read from all the pulpits. The fanatical opposition of the Puritans to the ordinances of the

King, permitting certain popular amusements on Sunday outside of Church hours by law, was not only

explained by the disturbance of the Sabbath rest, but also by resentment against the intentional diversion from

the ordered life of the saint, which it caused. And, on his side, the King's threats of severe punishment for

every attack on the legality of those sports were motivated by his purpose of breaking the antiauthoritarian

ascetic tendency of Puritanism, which was so dangerous to the State. The feudal and monarchical forces

protected the pleasure seekers against the rising middleclass morality and the antiauthoritarian ascetic

conventicles, just as today capitalistic society tends to protect those willing to work against the class

As against this the Puritans upheld their decisive characteristic, the principle of ascetic conduct. For

otherwise the Puritan aversion to sport, even for the Quakers, was by no means simply one of principle. Sport

was accepted if it served a rational purpose, that of recreation necessary for physical efficiency. But as a

means for the spontaneous expression of undisciplined impulses, it was under suspicion; and in so far as it

became purely a means of enjoyment, or awakened pride, raw instincts or the irrational gambling instinct, it

was of course strictly condemned. Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling

and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or

Its attitude was thus suspicious and often hostile to the aspects of culture without any immediate religious

value. It is not, however, true that the ideals of Puritanism implied a solemn, narrowminded contempt of

culture. Quite the contrary is the case at least for science, with the exception of the hatred of Scholasticism.

Moreover, the great men of the Puritan movement were thoroughly steeped in the culture of the

Renaissance. The sermons of the Presbyterian divines abound with classical allusions and even the Radicals,

although they objected to it, were not ashamed to display that kind of learning in theological polemics.

Perhaps no country, was ever so full of graduates as New England in the first generation of its existence. The

satire of their opponents, such as, for instance, Butler's Hudibras, also attacks primarily the pedantry and

highly trained dialectics of the Puritans. This is partially due to the religious valuation of knowledge which

But the situation is quite different when one looks at nonscientific literature and especially the fine arts.

Here asceticism descended like a frost on the life of "Merrie old England." And not only worldly merriment

felt its effect. The Puritan's ferocious hatred of everything which smacked of superstition, of all survivals of

magical or sacramental salvation, applied to the Christmas festivities and the May Pole and all spontaneous

religious art. That there was room in Holland for a great, often uncouthly realistic art proves only how far

from completely the authoritarian moral discipline of that country was able to counteract the influence of the

court and the regents (a class of rentiers), and also the joy in life of the parvenu bourgeoisie, after the short

supremacy of the Calvinistic theocracy had been transformed into a moderate national Church, and with it

The theatre was obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict exclusion of the erotic and of nudity from the

realm of toleration, a radical view of either literature or art could not exist. The conceptions of idle talk, of

superfluities, and of vain ostentation, all designations of an irrational attitude without objective purpose, thus

not ascetic, and especially not serving the glory of God, but of man, were always at hand to serve in deciding

in favour of sober utility as against any artistic tendencies. This was especially true in the case of decoration

of the person, for instance clothing. That powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which today so

immensely aids the capitalistic interest in the standardization of production," had its ideal foundations in the

Of course we must not forget that Puritanism included a world of contradictions, and that the instinctive

sense of eternal greatness in art was certainly stronger among its leaders than in the atmosphere of the

Cavaliers. Moreover, a unique genius like Rembrandt, however little his conduct may have been acceptable

to God in the eyes of the Puritans, was very strongly influenced in the character of his work by his religious

environment. But that does not alter the picture as a whole. In so far as the development of the Puritan

tradition could, and in part did, lead to a powerful spiritualization of personality, it was a decided benefit to

literature. But for the most part that benefit only accrued to later generations.

Although we cannot here enter upon a discussion of the influence of Puritanism in all these directions, we

should call attention to the fact that the toleration of pleasure in cultural goods, which contributed to purely

aesthetic or athletic enjoyment, certainly always ran up against one characteristic limitation: they must not

cost anything. Man is only a trustee of the goods which "have come to him through God's grace. He must,

like the servant in the parable, give an account of every penny entrusted to him, and it is at least hazardous to

spend any of it for a purpose which does not serve the glory of God but only one's own enjoyment. What

person, who keeps his eyes open, has not met representatives of this viewpoint even in the present?

The idea of a man's duty to his possessions, to which he subordinates himself as an obedient steward, or even

as an acquisitive machine, bears with chilling weight J. on his life. The greater the possessions the heavier, if

the ascetic attitude toward life stands the test, the feeling of responsibility for them, for holding them

undiminished for the glory of God and increasing them by restless effort. The origin of this type of life also

extends in certain roots, like so many aspects of the spirit of capitalism, back into the Middle Ages. But it

was in the ethic of ascetic Protestantism that it first r found a consistent ethical foundation. Its significance for

the development of capitalism is obvious. This worldly Protestant asceticism, as we may recapitulate up to

this point, acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption,

especially of luxuries. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods

from the inhibitions of traditionalistic ethics. It broke the bonds of the impulse of acquisition in that it not

only legalized it, but (in the sense discussed) looked upon it as directly willed by God. The campaign against

the temptations of the flesh, and the dependence on external things, was, as besides the Puritans the great

Quaker apologist Barclay expressly says, not a struggle against the rational acquisition, but against the

But this irrational use was exemplified in the outward forms of luxury which their code condemned as

idolatry of the flesh, however natural they had appeared to the feudal mind. On the other hand, they approved

the rational and utilitarian uses of wealth which were willed by God for the needs of the individual and the

community. They did not wish to impose mortification on the man of wealth, but the use of his means for

necessary and practical things. The idea of comfort characteristically limits the extent of ethically

permissible expenditures. It is naturally no accident that the development of a manner of living consistent

with that idea may be observed earliest and most clearly among the most consistent representatives of this

whole attitude toward life. Over against the glitter and ostentation of feudal magnificence which, resting on

an unsound economic basis, prefers a sordid elegance to a sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid

On the side of the production of private wealth, asceticism condemned both dishonesty and impulsive

avarice. What was condemned as covetousness, Mammonism, etc., was the pursuit of riches for their own

sake. For wealth in itself was a temptation. But here asceticism was the power "which ever seeks the good but

ever creates evil" what was evil in its sense was possession and its temptations. For, in conformity with the

Old Testament and in analogy to the ethical valuation of good works, asceticism looked upon the pursuit of

wealth as an end in itself as highly reprehensible; but the attainment of it as a fruit of labour in a calling was a

sign of God's blessing. And even more important: the religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic

work in a worldly calling, a the highest means to asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident

proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of

When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable

practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save. The restraints which

were imposed upon the consumption of wealth naturally served to increase it by making possible the

productive investment of capital. How strong this influence was is not, unfortunately, susceptible o exact

statistical demonstration. In New England the connection is so evident that it did not escape the eye of so

discerning a historian as Doyle. But also in Holland, which was really only dominated by strict Calvinism for

seven years, the greater simplicity of life in the more seriously religious circles, in combination with great

That, furthermore, the tendency which has existed everywhere and at all times, being quite strong in Germany

today, for middleclass fortunes to be absorbed into the nobility, was necessarily checked by the Puritan

antipathy to the feudal way of life, is evident. English Mercantilist writers of the seventeenth century

attributed the superiority of Dutch capital to English to the circumstance that newly acquired wealth there did

not regularly seek investment in land. Also, since it is not simply a question of the purchase of land, it did not

there seek to transfer itself to feudal habits of life, and thereby to remove itself from the possibility of

capitalistic investment." The high esteem for agriculture as a peculiarly important branch of activity, also

especially consistent with piety, which the Puritans shared, applied (for instance in Baxter) not to the

landlord, but to the yeoman and farmer, in the eighteenth century not to the squire, but the rational cultivator.

Through the whole of English society in the time since the seventeenth century goes the conflict between the

squirearchy, the representatives of "merrie old England", and the Puritan circles of widely varying social

influence. Both elements, that of an unspoiled naive joy of life, and of a strictly regulated, reserved

selfcontrol, and conventional ethical conduct are even today combined to form the English national

character. Similarly, the early history of the North American Colonies is dominated by the sharp contrast of

the adventurers, who wanted to set up plantations with the labour of indentured servants, and live as feudal

As far as the influence of the Puritan outlook extended, under all circumstancesand this is, of course, much

more important than the mere encouragement of capital accumulationit favoured the development of a

rational bourgeois economic life; it was the most important, and above all the only consistent influence in the

To be sure, these Puritanical ideals tended to give way under excessive pressure from the temptations of

wealth, as the Puritans themselves knew very well. With great regularity we find the most genuine adherents

of Puritanism among the classes which were rising from a lowly status, the small bourgeois and farmers,

while the beati possidentes, even among Quakers, are often found tending to repudiate the old ideals. It was

the same fate which again and again befell the predecessor of this worldly asceticism, the monastic asceticism

of the Middle Ages. In the latter case, when rational economic activity had worked out its full effects by strict

regulation of conduct and limitation of consumption, the wealth accumulated either succumbed directly to the

nobility, as in the time before the Reformation, or monastic discipline threatened to break down, and one of

In fact the whole history of monasticism is in a certain sense the history of a continual struggle with the

problem of the secularizing influence of wealth. The same is true on a grand scale of the worldly asceticism

of Puritanism. The great revival of Methodism, which preceded the expansion of English industry toward the

end of the eighteenth century, may well be compared with such a monastic reform. We may hence quote here

a passage from John Wesley himself which might well serve as a motto for everything which has been said

above. For it shows that the leaders of these ascetic movements understood the seemingly paradoxical

relationships which we have here analysed perfectly well, and in the same sense that we have given them. He

"I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion.

Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue

long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches.

But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible

that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue

in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods.

Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and

the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no

way to prevent thisthis continual decay of pure religion? We ought not to prevent people from being diligent

and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to

There follows the advice that those who gain all they can and save all they can should also give all they can,

so that they will grow in grace and lay up a treasure in heaven. It is clear that Wesley here expresses, even in

detail, just what we have been trying to point out. As Wesley here says, the full economic effect of those

great religious movements, whose significance for economic development lay above all in their ascetic

educative influence, generally came only after the peak of the purely religious enthusiasm was past. Then the

intensity of the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic

virtue; the religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness. Then, as Dowden puts it, as

in Robinson Crusoe, the isolated economic man who carries on missionary activities on the side takes the

place of the lonely spiritual search for the Kingdom of Heaven of Bunyan's pilgrim, hurrying through the

marketplace of Vanity. When later the principle "to make the most of both worlds" became dominant in the

end, as Dowden has remarked, a good conscience simply became one of the means of enjoying a comfortable

bourgeois life, as is well expressed in the German proverb about the soft pillow. What the great religious

epoch of the seventeenth century bequeathed to its utilitarian successor was, however, above all an

amazingly good, we may even say a pharisaically good, conscience in the acquisition of money, so long as it

A specifically bourgeois economic ethic had grown up. With the consciousness of standing in the fullness of

God's grace and being visibly blessed by Him, the bourgeois business man, as long as he remained within the

bounds of formal correctness, as long as his moral conduct was spotless and the use to which he put his

wealth was not objectionable, could follow his pecuniary interests as he would and feel that he was fulfilling

a duty in doing so. The power of religious asceticism provided him in addition with sober, conscientious, and

unusually industrious workmen, who clung to their work as to a life purpose willed by God.

Finally, it gave him the comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a

special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret

ends unknown to men.Calvin himself had made the muchquoted statement that only when the people, i.e.

the mass of labourers and craftsmen, were poor did they remain obedient to God. In the Netherlands (Pieter

de la Court and others), that had been secularized to the effect that the mass of men only labour when

necessity forces them to do so. This formulation of a leading idea of capitalistic economy later entered into

the current theories of the productivity of low wages. Here also, with the dying out of the religious root, the

utilitarian interpretation crept in unnoticed, in the line of development which we have again and again

observed. Mediaeval ethics not only tolerated begging but actually glorified it in the mendicant orders. Even

secular beggars, since they gave theperson of means opportunity for good works through giving alms, were

sometimes considered an estate and treated as such. Even the Anglican social ethic of the Stuarts was very

close to this attitude. It remained for Puritan Asceticism to take part in the severe English Poor Relief

Legislation which fundamentally changed the situation. And it could do that because the Protestant sects and

the strict Puritan communities actually did not know any begging in their own midst.

On the other hand, seen from the side of the workers, the Zinzendorf branch of Pietism, for instance, glorified

the loyal worker who did not seek acquisition, but lived according to the apostolic model, and was thus

endowed with the charisma of the disciples.Similar ideas had originally been prevalent among the Baptists

Now naturally the whole ascetic literature of almost all denominations is saturated with the idea that faithful

labour, even at low wages, on the part of those whom , life offers no other opportunities, is highly pleasing to

God. In this respect Protestant Asceticism added in itself nothing new. But it not only deepened this idea

most powerfully, it also created the force which was alone decisive for its effectiveness: the psychological

sanction of it through the conception of this labour as a calling, as the best, often in the last analysis the only

means of attaining certainty of grace. And on the other hand it legalized the exploitation of this specific

willingness to work, in that it also interpreted the employer's business activity as a calling. It is obvious how

powerfully the exclusive search for the Kingdom of God only through the fulfilment of duty in the calling,

and the strict asceticism which Church discipline naturally imposed, especially on the propertyless classes,

was bound to affect the productivity of labour in the capitalistic sense of the word. The treatment of labour as

a calling became as characteristic of the modern worker as the corresponding attitude toward acquisition of

the business man. It was a perception of this situation, new at his time, which caused so able an observer as

Sir William Petty to attribute the economic power of Holland in the seventeenth century to the fact that the

very numerous dissenters in that country (Calvinists and Baptists) "are for the most part thinking, sober men,

Calvinism opposed organic social organization in the fiscalmonopolistic form which it assumed in

Anglicanism under the Stuarts, especially in the conceptions of Laud, this alliance of Church and State with

the monopolists on the basis of a Christian , social ethical foundation. Its leaders were universally among the

most passionate opponents of this type of politically privileged commercial, puttingout, and colonial

capitalism. Over against it they placed the individualistic motives of rational legal acquisition by virtue of

one's own ability and initiative. And, while the politically privileged monopoly industries in England all

disappeared in short order, this attitude played a large and decisive part in the development of the industries

which grew up in spite of and against the authority of the State. The Puritans (Prynne, Parker) repudiated all

connection with the largescale capitalistic courtiers and projectors as an ethically suspicious class. On the

other hand, they took pride in their own superior middleclass business morality, which formed the true

reason for the persecutions to which they were subjected on the part of those circles. Defoe proposed to win

the battle against dissent by boycotting bank credit and withdrawing deposits. The difference of the two types

of capitalistic attitude went to a very large extent hand in hand with religious differences. The opponents of

the Nonconformists, even in the eighteenth century, again and again ridiculed them for personifying the spirit

of shopkeepers, and for having, ruined the ideals of old England. Here also lay the difference of the Puritan

economic ethic from the Jewish; and contemporaries (Prynne) knew well that the former and not the latter

One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modem capitalism, and not only of that but of all modern

culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling, was bornthat is what this discussion has

sought to demonstratefrom the spirit of Christian asceticism. One has only to reread the passage from

Franklin, quoted at the beginning of this essay, in order to see that the essential elements of the attitude which

was there called the spirit of capitalism are the same as what we have just shown to be the content of the

Puritan worldly asceticism, only without the religious basis, which by Franklin's time bad died away. The

idea that modern labour has an : ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a

renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the

modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other today. This fundamentally

ascetic trait of middleclass life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any,

was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wanderjahren, and in the end which

he gave to the life of his Faust . For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full

and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of

monastic cells into evervday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the

tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic

conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into

this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps

it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view tile care for external

goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have

gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

Today the spirit of religious asceticismwhether finally, who knows?has escaped from the cage. But

victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of

its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's

calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling

cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not

be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In

the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and

ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development,

entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,

mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive selfimportance. For of the fast stage of this

cultural development, it might well be truly said:' "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this

nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

But this brings us to the world of judgments o value and of faith, with which this purely historical discussion

need not be burdened. The next task would be rather to show the significance of ascetic rationalism which has

only been touched in the foregoing sketch for the content of practical social ethics, thus for the types of

organization and the functions of social groups from the conventicle to the State. Then its relations to

humanistic rationalism, its ideals of life and cultural influence; further to the development of philosophical

and scientific empiricism, to technical development and to spiritual ideals would have to be analysed. Then

its historical development from the mediaeval beginnings of worldly asceticism to its dissolution into pure

utilitarianism would have to be traced out through all the areas of ascetic religion. Only then could the

quantitative cultural significance of ascetic Protestantism in its relation to the other plastic elements of

Here we have only attempted to trace the fact and the direction of its influence to their motives in one, though

a very important point. But it would also further be necessary to investigate how Protestant Asceticism was in

turn influenced in its development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic.

The modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture

and national character which they deserve. But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a onesided

materialistic an equally one sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally

possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation,