How completely this idea, that all idolatry of the flesh is incon- sistent with the glory of God and hence unconditionally bad, dominated ascetic Protestantism is clearly shown by the doubts and hesitation which it cost even Spener, who certainly was not infected with democracy, to maintain the use of titles as äöidi])opov against numerous objections. He finally comforted himself with the reflection that even in the Bible the Praetor Festus was given the title of KpdriajoQ by the Apostles. The political side of the question does not arise in this connection.
34. "The inconstant man is a stranger in his own house", says Thomas Adams {Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 77).
35. On this, see especially George Fox's remarks in the Friends' Library (ed. W. & T. Evans, Philadelphia, 1837), I, p. 130.
36. Above all, this sort.of religious ethic cannot be regarded as a reflex of economic conditions. The specialization of occupations had, if anything, gone further. in mediaeval Italy than in the England of that period.
37. For, as is often pointed out in the Puritan literature, God never commanded "love thy neighbour more than thyself", but only as thyself. Hence self-regard is also a duty. For instance, a man who can make better use of his possessions, to the greater glory of God, than his neighbour, is not obliged by the duty of brotherly love to part with them.
38. Spener is also close to this view-point. But even in the case of transfer from commercial occupations (regarded as especially dangerous to virtue) to theology, he remains hesitaiit and on the wholeopposed to it (o/). a7., HI, pp. 435, 443; I, p. 524). The frequent occurrence of the reply to just this question (of the permissibility of changing a calling) in Spener's naturally biassed opinion shows, incidentally, how eminently practical the different ways of inter- preting I Corinthians vii were.
39. Such ideas are not to be found, at least in the writings, of the leading Continental Pietists. Spener's attitude vacillates between the Lutheran (that of satisfaction of needs) and Mercantilist arguments for the usefulness of the prosperity of commerce, etc. {op. cit., HI, PP- 330i'332; I, p. 418: "the cultivation of tobacco brings money into the country and is thus useful, hence not sinful". Compare also HI, pp. 426-7, 429, 434). But he does not neglect to point out that, as the example of the Quakers and the Mennonites shows, one can make profit and yet remain pious; in fact, that even especially high profits, as we shall point out later, may be the direct result of pious uprightness {op. cit., p. 435).
. 40. These views of Baxter are not a reflection of the economic environment in which he lived. On the contrary, his autobiography 266 Notes shows that the success of his home missionary work was partly due to the fact that the Kidderminster tradesmen were not rich, but only earned food and raiment, and that the master craftsmen had to live from hand to mouth just as their employees did. "It is the poor who receive the glad tidings of the Gospel." Thomas Adams remarks on the pursuit of gain: "He [the knowing man] knows...that money may make a man richer, not better, and thereupon chooseth rather to sleep with a good conscience than a full purse...therefore desires no more wealth than an honest man may bear away" {Works of the Puritan Divines, LI). But he does want that much, and that means that every formally honest gain is legitimate.
41. Thus Baxter, op. cit., I, chap, x, i, 9 (par. 24); I, p. 378, 2. In Prov. xxiii. 4: "Weary thyself not to be rich" nKeans only "riches for our fleshly ends must not ultimately be intended". Possession in the feudal-seigneurial form of its use is what is odious (cf. the remark, op. cit., I, p. 380, on the "debauched part of the gentry"), not posses- sion in itself. Milton, in the first Defensio pro populo Anglicano, held the well-known theory that only the middle class can maintain virtue. That middle class here means bourgeoisie as against the aristocracy is shown by the statement that both luxury and necessity are unfavourable to virtue.
42. This is most important. We may again add the general remark: we are here naturally not so much concerned with what concepts the theological moralists developed in their ethical theories, but, rather, what was the effective morality in the life of believers — that is, how the religious background of economic ethics affected practice. In the casuistic literature of Catholicism, especially the Jesuit, one can occasionally read discussions which — for instance on the question of the justification of interest, into which we do not enter here — sound like those of many Protestant casuists, or even seem to go farther in permitting or tolerating things. The Puritans have since often enough been reproached that their ethic is at bottom the same as that of the Jesuits. Just as the Calvinists often cite Catholic moralists, not only Thomas Aquinas, Bernhard of Clairvaux, Bonaventura, etc., but also contemporaries, the Catholic casuists also took notice of heretical ethics. We cannot discuss all that here.
But quite apart from the decisive fact of the religious sanction of the ascetic life for the layman, there is the fundamental difference, even in theory, that these latitudinarian ideas within Catholicism were the products of peculiarly lax ethical theories, not sanctioned by the authority of the Church, but opposed by the most serious and strictest disciples of it. On the other hand, the Protestant idea of the calling in effect placed the most serious enthusiasts for asceticism in the service of capitalistic acquisition. What in the one case might under certain conditions be allowed, appeared in the other as a positive moral good. The fundamental differences of the 267 f — The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism two ethics, very important in practice, have been finally crystallized, even for modern times, by the Jansenist controversy and the Bull Unigenittis.
43. "You may labour in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain. You are bound to improve all your talents." There follows the passage cited above in the text. A direct parallel between the pursuit of wealth in the Kingdom of Heaven and the pursuit of success in an earthly calling is found in Janeway, Heaven upon Earth {Works of the Puritan Divines, p, 275).
44. Even in the Lutheran Confession of Duke Christopher of / Württemberg, which was submitted to the Council of Trent, objection J is made to the oath of poverty. He who is poor in his station should bear it, but if he swore to remain so it would be the same as if he swore to remain sick or to maintain a bad reputation.
45. Thus in Baxter and also in Duke Christopher's confession. Compare further pasages like: "...the vagrant rogues whose lives are nothing but an exorbitant course; the main begging", etc. (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines; p. 259). Even Calvin had strictly forbidden begging, and the Dutch Synods campaigned against licences to beg. During the epoch of the Stuarts, especially Laud's regime under Charles I, which had systematically developed the principle of public poor relief and provision of work for the un- employed, the Puritan battle-cry was: "Giving alms is no charity" (title of Defoe's later well-known work). Towards the end of the seventeenth century they began the deterrent system of workhouses for the unemployed (compare Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, Cambridge, 1900, and H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökono- mischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, Jena, 1912, pp. 69 ff.).
46. The President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, G. White, said emphatically in his inaugural address before the assembly in London in 1903 (Baptist Handbook, 1904, p. 104): "The best men on the roll of our Puritan Churches were men of y_affairs, who believed that religion should permeate the whole of life.* 47. Here also lies the characteristic difference from all feudal view -points. For the latter only the descendants of the parvenu (political or social) can reap the benefit of his success in a recognized station (characteristically expressed in the Spanish Hidalgo = hijo d'algo =filius de aliquo where the aliquid means an inherited properly) However rapidly these differences are to-day fading out in the rapid change and Europeanization of the American national character, nevertheless the precisely opposite bourgeois attitude which glorifies business success and earnings as a symptom of mental achievement, but has no respect for mere inherited wealth, is still sometimes represented there. On the other hand, in Europe (as James Bryce once remarked) in effect almost every social honour is now purchasable 268 JSotes 268 JSotes for money, so long as the buyer has not himself stood behind the counter, and carries out the necessary metamorphosis of his property (formation of trusts, etc.). Against the aristocracy of blood, see for instance Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 216.
48. That was, for instance, already true of the founder of the Familist sect, Hendrik Nicklaes, who was a merchant (Barclay, ^Jnner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, p. 34).
49. This is, for instance, definitely true for Hoornbeek, since Matt. V. 5 and i Tim. iv. 8 also made purely worldly promises to the saints {op. cit., I, p. 193). Everything is the work of God's Pro- vidence, but in particular He takes care of His own. Op. cit., p. 192: "Super alios autem summa cura et modis singularissimis versatur Dei Providentia circa fideles." There follows a discussion of how one can know that a stroke of luck comes not from the communis Providentia, but from that special care. Bailey also {op. cit., p. igi) explains success in worldly labours by reference to Providence. That prosperity is often the reward of a godly life is a common expression in Quaker writings (for example see such an expression as late as 1848 in Selection from the Christian Advices, issued by the General Meeting of the Society of Friends, London, sixth edition, 1851, p. 209). We shall return to the connection with the Quaker ethics.
50. Thomas Adams's analysis of the quarrel of Jacob and Esau may serve as an example of this attention to the patriarchs, which is equally characteristic of the Puritan view of life {Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 235): "His [Esau's] folly may be argued from the base estimation of the birthright" [the passage is also important for the development of the idea of the birthright, of which more later] "that he would so lightly pass from it and on so easy condition as a pottage." But then it was perfidious that he would not recognize the sale, charging he had been cheated. He is, in other words, "a cunning hunter, a man of the fields"; a man of irrational, barbarous life; while Jacob, "a plain man, dwelling in tents", represents the "man of grace".
The sense of an inner relationship to Judaism, which is expressed even in the well-known work of Roosevelt, Köhler {op. cit.) found widespread among the peasants in Holland. But, on the other hand, Puritanism was fully conscious of its differences from Hebrew ethics in practical affairs, as Prynne's attack on the Jews (apropos of Cromwell's proposals for toleration) plainly shows. See below, note 58.
5 1. Zur bäuerlichen Glaubens- und Sittenlehre. Von einem thüring- ischen Landpfarrer, second edition, Gotha, 1890, p. 16. The peasants who are here described are characteristic products of the Lutheran Church. Again and again I wrote Lutheran in the margin when the excellent author spoke of peasant religion in general.
52. Compare for instance the passage cited in Ritschl, Pietismus n, p. 158. Spener also bases his objections to change of calling and 26f The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism pursuit of gain partly on passages in Jesus Sirach. Theologische Bedenken, III, p. 426.
53. It is true that Bailey, nevertheless, recommends reading them, and references to the Apocrypha occur now and then, though naturally not often. I can remember none to Jesus Sirach just now (though perhaps by chance).
54. Where outward success comes to persons evidently damned, the Calvinist (as for instance Hoombeek) comforts himself with the reflection, following the theory of stubbornness, that God allows it to them in order to harden them and make their doom the more certain.
55. We cannot go farther into this point in this connection. We are here interested only in the formalistic character of Puritan righteousness. On the significance of Old Testament ethics for the lex natures there is much in Troeltsch's Soziallehren.
56. The binding character of the ethical norms of the Scriptures goes for Baxter (Christian Directory, III, p. 173 f.) so far that they are (i) only a transcript of the law of nature, or (2) bear the "express character of universality and perpetuity".
57. For instance Dowden (with reference to Bunyan), op. cit., P- 39- 58. More on this point in the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. The enormous influence which, for instance, the second commandment ("thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image") has had on the development of the Jewish character, its rationality and abhorrence of sensuous culture, cannot be analysed here. However, it may perhaps be noted as characteristic that one of the leaders of the Educational Alliance in the United States, an organization which carries on the Americanization of Jewish immi- grants on a grand scale and with astonishing success, told me that one of the first purposes aimed at in all forms of artistic and social educational work was emancipation from the second commandment. To the Israelite's prohibition of any anthropomorphic representation of God corresponds in Puritanism the somewhat different but in effect similar prohibition of idolatry of the flesh.
As far as Talmudic Judaism is concerned, some fundamental traits of Puritan morality are certainly related to it. For instance, it is stated in the Talmud (in Wünsche, Bdbyl. Talmud, II, p. 34) that it is better and will be more richly rewarded by God if one does a good deed for duty's sake than one which is not commanded by the law. In other words, loveless fulfillment of duty stands higher ethically than sentimental philanthropy. The Puritan ethics would accept that in essentials. Kant in effect also comes close to it, being partly of Scotch ancestry and strongly influenced by Pietism in his bringing up. Though we cannot discuss the subject here, many of his formulations are closely related to ideas of ascetic Protestantism.
270 Notes But nevertheless the Talmudic ethic is deeply saturated with Oriental traditionalism. "R. Tanchum said to Ben Chanilai, 'Never alter a custom'" (Gemara to Mischna. VII, i, 86b, No. 93, in Wünsche. It is a question of the standard of living of day labourers). The only exception to this conformity is relation to strangers.
Moreover, the Puritan conception of lawfulness as proof evidently provided a much stronger motive to positive action than the Jewish unquestioned fulfillment of all commandments. The idea that success reveals the blessing of God is of course not unknown to Judaism. But the fundamental difference in religious and ethical significance which it took on for Judaism on account of the double ethic pre- vented the appearance of similar results at just the most important point. Acts toward a stranger were allowed which were forbidden toward a brother. For that reason alone it was impossible for success in this field of what was not commanded but only allowed to be a sign of religious worth and a motive to methodical conduct in the way in which it was for the Puritan. On this whole problem, which Sombart, in his book Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, has often dealt with incorrectly, see the essays referred to above. The details have no place here.
The Jewish ethics, however strange that may at first sound, remained very strongly traditionalistic. We can likewise not enter into the tremendous change which the inner attitude toward the world underwent with the Christian form of the ideas of grace and salvation which contained in a peculiar way the seeds of new possi- bilities of development. On Old Testament lawfulness compare for example Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, II, p. 265.
To the English Puritans, the Jews of their time were representatives of that type of capitalism which was involved in war, Government contracts. State monopolies, speculative promotions, and the con- struction and financial projects of princes, which they themselves condemned. In fact the difference may, in general, with the necessary qualifications, be formulated: that Jewish capitalism was speculative pariah-capitalism, while the Puritan was bourgeois organization of labour.
59. The truth of the Holy Scriptures follows for JBaxter in the last analysis from the "wonderful difference of the godly and ungodly", the absolute diflFerence of the renewed man from others, and God's evident quite special care for His chosen people (which may of course be expressed in temptations). Christian Directory, I, p. 165.
60. As a characterization of this, it is only necessary to read how tortuously even Bunyan, who still occasionally approaches the atmosphere of Luther's Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (for example in Of the Law and a Christian, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 254), reconciles himself with the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican 271 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (see the sermon The Pharisee and the Publican, op. cit., p. loo). Why is the Pharisee condemned? He does not truly keep God's commandments, for he is evidently a sectarian who is only concerned with external details and ceremonies (p. 107), but above all because he ascribes merit to himself, and at the same time, like the Quakers, thanks God for virtue by misuse of His name. In a sinful manner he exalts this virtue (p. 126), and thus implicitly contests God's predestination (p. 139). His prayer is thus idolatry of the flesh, and that is the reason it is sinful. On the other hand, the publican is, as the honesty of his confession shows, spiritually reborn, for, as it is put with a characteristic Puritan mitigation of the Lutheran sense oi sin, "to a right and sincere conviction of sin there must be a con- viction of the probability of mercy" (p. 209).
'61. Printed in Gardiner's Constitutional Documents. One may compare this struggle against anti-authoritarian asceticism with Louis XIV's persecution of Port Royal and the Jansenists.
62. Calvin's own standpoint was in this respect distinctly less drastic, at least in so far as the finer aristocratic forms of the enjoy- ment of life were concerned. The only limitation is the Bible. Whoever adheres to it and has a good conscience, need not observe his every impulse to enjoy life with anxiety. The discussion in Chapter X of the Instit. Christ (for instance, "nee fugere ea quoque possumus quae videntur oblectatione magis quam necessitate inservire") might in itself have opened the way to a very lax practice. Along with increasing anxiety over the certitudo salutis the most important circumstance for the later disciples was, however, as we shall point out in another place, that in the era of the ecclesia militans it was the small bourgeoisie who were the principal representatives of Calvinistic ethics.
63. Thomas Adams {Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 3) begins a sermon on the "three divine sisters" ("but love is the greatest of these") with the remark that even Paris gave the golden apple to Aphrodite!
64. Novels and the like should not be read; they are "wastetimes" (Baxter, Christian Directory, I, p. 51). The decline of lyric poetry and folk-music, as well as the drama, after the Elizabethan age in England is well known. In the pictorial arts Puritanism perhaps did not find very much to suppress. But very striking is the decline from what seemed to be a promising musical beginning (England's part in the history of music was by no means unimportant) to that absolute musical vacuum which we find typical of the Anglo-Saxon peoples later, and even to-day. Except for the negro churches, and the professional singers whom the Churches now engage as attractions (Trinity Church in Boston in 1904 for $8,000 annually), in America one also hears as community singing in general only a noise which is intolerable to German ears (partly analogous things in Holland also).
272 Notes 65. Just the same in Holland, as the reports of the Synods show. (See the resolutions on the Maypole in the Reitmaas Collection, VI, 78, 139.)
66. That the "Renaissance of the Old Testament" and the Pietistic orientation to certain Christian attitudes hostile to beauty in art, which in the last analysis go back to Isaiah and the 22nd Psalm, must have contributed to making ugliness more of a possible object for art, and that the Puritan repudiation of idolatry of the flesh played a part, seems likely. But in detail everything seems uncertain. In the Roman Church quite different demagogic motives led to outwardly similar effects, but, however, with quite different artistic results. Standing before Rembrandt's Saul and David (in the Mauritshuis), one seems directly to feel the powerful influence of Puritan emotions. The excellent analysis of Dutch cultural influences in Carl Neumann's Rembra7tdt probably gives everything that for the time being we can know about how far ascetic Protestantism may be credited with a positive fructifying influence on art.
67. The most complex causes, into which we cannot go here, wei:e responsible for the relatively smaller extent to which the Calvinistic ethic penetrated practical life there. The ascetic spirit began to wealcen in Holland as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century (the English Congregationalists who fled to Holland in 1608 were disturbed by the lack of respect for the Sabbath there), but especially under the Stadtholder Frederick Henry. Moreover, Dutch Puritanism had in general much less expansive power than English. The reasons for it lay in part in the political constitution (par- ticularistic confederation of towns and provinces) and in the far smaller degree of military force (the War of Independence was soon fought principally with the money of Amsterdam and mercenary armies. English preachers illustrated the Babylonian confusion of tongues by reference to the Dutch Arrny). Thus the burden of the war of religion was to a large extent passed on to others, but at the same time a part of their political power was lost. On the other hand, Cromwell's army, even though it was partly conscripted, felt that it was an army of citizens. It was, to be sure, all the more characteristic that just this army adopted the abolition of conscription in its programme, because one could fight justly only for the glory of God in a cause hallowed by conscience, but not at the whim of a sovereign. The constitution of the British Army, so immoral to traditional German ideas, had its historical origin in very moral motives, and was an attainment of soldiers who had never been beaten. Only after the Restoration was it placed in the service of the interests of the Crown.
The Dutch schutterijen, the champions of Calvinism in the period of the Great War, only half a generation after the Synod of Dordrecht, do not look in the least ascetic in the pictures of Hals. Protests of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism the Synods against their conduct occur frequently. The Dutch concept of Deftigkeit is a mixture of bourgeois-rational honesty and patrician consciousness of status. The division of church pews according to classes in the Dutch churches shows the aristocratic character of this religion even to-day. The continuance of the town economy hampered industry. It prospered almost alone through refugees, and hence only sporadically. Nevertheless, the worldly asceticism of Calvinism and Pietism was an important influence in Holland in the same direction as elsewhere. Also in the sense to be referred to presently of ascetic compulsion to save, as Groen van Prinsterer shows in the passage cited below, note 87.
Moreover, the almost complete lack of belles lettres in Calvinistic Holland is of course no accident (see for instance Busken-Huet, Het Land van Rembrandt). The significance of Dutch religion as ascetic compulsion to save appears clearly even in the eighteenth century in the writings of Albertus Haller. For the characteristic peculiarities of the Dutch attitude toward art and its motives, compare for example the autobiographical remarks of Constantine Huyghens (written in 1629-31) in Oud Holland, 1891. The work of Groen van Prinsterer, La Hollande et Vinfluence de Calvin, 1864, already referred to, offers nothing important for our problems. The Ntew Netherlands colony in America was socially a half-feudal settlement of patroons, merchants who advanced capital, and, unlike New England, it was difficult to persuade small people to settle there.
68. We may recall that the Puritan town government closed the theatre at Stratford-on-Avon while Shakespeare was still alive and residing there in his last years, Shakespeare's hatred and contempt of the Puritans appear on every occasion. As late as 1777 the City of Birmingham refused to license a theatre because it was conducive to slothfulness, and hence unfavourable to trade (Ashley, Birmingham Trade and Commerce, 191 3).
69. Here also it was of decisive importance that for the Puritan there was only the alternative of divine will or earthly vanity. Hence for him there could be no adiaphora. As we have already pointed out, Calvin's own view was different in this respect. What one eats, wears, etc., as long as there is no enslavement of the soul to earthly desire as a result, is indifferent. Freedom from the world should be expressed, as for the Jesuits, in indifference, which for Calvin meant an indifferent, un covetous use of whatever goods the earth offered (pp. 409 ff. of the original edition of the Jnstit. Christ).
70. The Quaker attitude in this respect is well known. But as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century the heaviest storms shook the pious congregation of exiles in Amsterdam for a decade over the fashionable hats and dresses of a preacher's wife (charmingly described in Dexter's Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years). Sanford (op. cit.) has pointed out that the present-day male 274 Notes hair-cut is that of the ridiculous Roundheads, and the equally ridiculous (for the time) male clothing of the Puritans is at least in principle fundamentally the same as that of to-day.
71. On this point again see Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise.
yz. Again and again we come back to this attitude. It explains statements like the following: "Every penny which is paid upon yourselves and children and friends must be done as by God's own appointment and to serve and please Him. Watch narrowly, or else that thievish, carnal self will leave God nothing" (Baxter, op. cit., I, p. 108). This is decisive; what is expended for personal ends is withdrawn from' the service of God's glory.
73. Quite rightly it is customary to recall (Dowden, op. cit.) that Cromwell saved Raphael's drawings and Mantegna's Triumph of Ctssar from destruction, while Charles II tried to sell them. More- over, the society of the Restoration was distinctly cool or even hostile to English national literature. In fact the influence of Versailles was all-powerful at courts everywhere. A detailed analysis of the influence of the unfavourable atmosphere for the spontaneous enjoyment of everyday life on the spirit of the higher types of Puritan, and the men who went through the schooling of Puritanism, is a task which cannot be undertaken within the limits of this sketch. Washington Irving {Bracebridge Hall) forniulates it in the usual English terms thus: "It [he says political freedom, we should say Puritanism] evinces less play of the fancy, but more power of the imagination." It is only necessary to think of the place of the Scotch in science, literature, and technical invention, as well as in the business life of Great Britain, to be convinced that this remark approaches the truth, even though put somewhat too narrowly. We cannot speak here of its significance for the development of technique and the empirical sciences. The relation itself is always appearing in everyday life. For the Quakers, for instance, the recreatjons which are permissible (according to Barclay) are: visiting of friends, reading of historical works, mathematical and physical experiments, gardening, discussion of business and other occurrences in the world, etc. The reason is that pointed out above.