Religion and the Rise of Capitalism quotes

Since the brave days when Torrens could say of Political Economy, “Twenty years hence there will scarcely exist a doubt respecting any of its fundamental principles,” how many confident certainties have been undermined!

How many doctrines once dismissed as the emptiest of superstitions have revealed an unsuspected vitality!

The attempt to judge economic activity and social organization by ethical criteria raises problems which are eternal, and it is possible that a study of the thought of an age when that attempt was made, if with little success, at least with conviction and persistence, …

“Que pourrions-nous gagner,” once wrote a celebrated economist, “à recueillir des opinions absurdes, des doctrines décriées, et qui méritent de l’être? Il serait à la fois inutile et fastidieux de les exhumer.”

One who studies the development of social theory can hardly hope to avoid the criticism which is brought against those who disturb the dust in forgotten lumber-rooms.

If he seeks an excuse beyond his own curiosity, he may find it, perhaps, in the reflection that the past reveals to the present what the present is capable of seeing, and that the face which to one age is a blank may to another …

Nor is it to be refuted by insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often a decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism.

A medieval cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, remarked that “he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes to the workhouse.”

Mr. Coulton does well to remind us that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid practice.

The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human.

The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod.

But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them.

Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasize that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion.

Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design.

They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.”

At Rome, everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the marks of silver.

Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti, Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.

“Thus,” exclaimed St. Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money. … O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane!

The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.

”

The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities.

The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.

If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they required to be translated into terms of the particular transactions by which trade is conducted and property acquired.

The economic background of it all was very simple.

The medieval consumer⁠—we can sympathize with him today more easily than in 1914⁠—is like a traveller condemned to spend his life at a station hotel.

He occupies a tied house and is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is inevitable.

It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian liberalism of the French Revolution.

The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed its mouth.

The Church of the third century, a minority of believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest and criticize.

… evaded by treating them as applicable only to those relations of life in which their application is least exacting, it is something to have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand against commercial unscrupulousness, but yet sufficiently elastic to admit any legitimate transaction.

If it is proper to insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high places, it is not less important to observe that men called these vices by their right names, and had not learned to persuade themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice economy.

Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them.

Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes.

Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity.

Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor.

Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise.

When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reestablished them by political art.

The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war.

… in the last resort a little German banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played in the world of finance the part of the condottieri in war, and represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince.

Compared with these financial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Valois and Tudors were puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.

The financier received his payment partly in cash, partly in concessions, which still further elaborated the network of financial connections that were making Europe an economic unity. The range of interests in which the German banking-houses were involved is astonishing.

and found the money with which Charles raised troops to fight the Protestants in 1552. The head of the firm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in his native town of Augsburg.

He died in the odor of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the Empire, having seen his firm pay 54 percent for the preceding sixteen years.

Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany and in England, the Humanists turned a stream of pungent criticism on the social evils of their age.

Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel—to mention but the best-known names—all contributed to the debate. Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth century may have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the part of men of religion.

If the world could be saved by sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise.

That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history.

It was partly that they were pièces de circonstance, thrown off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely the refinements of law and logic which Luther detested.

Confronted with the complexities of foreign trade and financial organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine.

He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity. Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity.

Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of Adam.

The children of the mind are like the children of the body.

Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if their parents could foresee their future development, it would sometimes break their hearts.

Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’ ” After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated.

A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence. Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined;

and Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and finance as for the bludgeon of revolt.

Let him who can receive it, receive it; he cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts whom the spirit of God urges forward.”

Luther’s impotence was not accidental.

It sprang directly from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He attacked the casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching with regard to which his criticism was justified were only too numerous.

Denunciations such as Luther launched against the Fuggers and the peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and simplicity, such as he advanced in his tract On Trade and Usury.

Pious rhetoric may be edifying, but it is hardly the panoply recommended by St. Paul.

“As the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works.

It enormously deepened spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new freedoms, abhorrent to Luther, were to spring.

But it riveted on the social thought of Protestantism a dualism which, as its implications were developed, emptied religion of its social content, and society of its soul.

Between light and darkness a great gulf was fixed. Unable to climb upwards plane by plane, man must choose between salvation and damnation. If he despairs of attaining the austere heights where alone true faith is found, no human institution can avail to help him.

Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority, expelled from the altar, finds a new and securer home upon the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to the hands of the State.

Skeptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster, the God-fearing Prince.

The most characteristic and influential form of Protestantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is that which descends, by one path or another, from the teaching of Calvin.

Strictly construed, the famous pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its rigor than by its indulgence.

“Calvin,” wrote an English divine a generation after his death, “deals with usurie as the apothecarie doth with poyson.”

The apologetic was just, for neither his letter to Oecolampadius, nor his sermon on the same subject, reveal any excessive tolerance for the trade of the financier.

The picture of Calvin, the organizer and disciplinarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a legend.

Like the author of another revolution in economic theory, he might have turned on his popularizers with the protest: “I am not a Calvinist.”

Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its defenders were correct in regarding Calvin’s treatment of capital as a watershed.

Calvinism stood, in short, not only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new ideal of social conduct.

Its practical message, it might perhaps be said, was la carrière ouverte⁠—not aux talents, but au caractère.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of order. While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere the spearhead of revolution.

Its practical message, it might perhaps be said, was la carrière ouverte—not aux talents, but au caractère.

Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of order.

While their victories were still to win, they were everywhere the spearhead of revolution.

… set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the vices of the established order at its worst, taught them to feel that they were a chosen people, made them conscious of their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to realize it.

The new law was graven on tablets of flesh; it not merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul.

Compared with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility of most European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bankrupt monarchies, the middle classes in whom Calvinism took root most deeply, were a race of iron.

The essence of the system was not preaching or propaganda, though it was prolific of both, but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life of a visible society, which should be at once a Church and a State.

Having overthrown monasticism, its aim was to turn the secular world into a gigantic monastery, and at Geneva, for a short time, it almost succeeded.

“In other places,” wrote Knox of that devoted city, “I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.”

It is sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Governments which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness.

… regarded Beza’s remarks as a personal reflection, was rash enough to demand to be heard before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty, condemned to pay a fine, and compelled to forfeit fifty crowns which he had lent at 10 percent interest.

Evidently, when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one, however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe.

The Council and the ministers had already had words over the sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a year or two later over the administration of the local hospital.

On this occasion the Council complained that the clergy were interfering with the magistrates’ duties, and implied politely that they would be well advised to mind their own business.

So monstrous a suggestion⁠—as though there were any human activity which was not the business of the Church!

—evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of the ministers, in which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth in all its majesty.

Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius,

Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either.

That it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent.

Most tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor.

Calvinism had little pity for poverty;

but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the rich.

Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron.

… reassertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism.

They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.

Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a new age began.

The legend, still repeated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations, though unveracious, is not surprising.

The wish was father to the thought.

It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea …

Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned.

The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think.

Naturally it was shouldered aside.

It was neglected because it had become negligible.

The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesiastical pretensions.

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned.

The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think.

Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down.

It was not that there was any relapse into abnormal inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an independent standard of values, to which social institutions were amenable, had been abandoned.

The surrender had been made long before the battle began.

The spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century.

It was not that there was any relapse into abnormal inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an independent standard of values, to which social institutions were amenable, had been abandoned. The surrender had been made long before the battle began.

The spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century.

… it is will—will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.

The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by its rebound.

Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.

Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.

Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle classes.

It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without eradicating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpugnable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence, without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could beat upon the forge, not a …

But the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility together. When the shriveled tissues lie in our hand, the spiritual bond still eludes us.

In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant.

The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action. There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary;

… Calvin for his economic rigor, their successors in Restoration England, if of one persuasion, denounced him as the parent of economic license, if of another, applauded Calvinist communities for their commercial enterprise and for their freedom from antiquated prejudices on the subject of economic morality.

So little do those who shoot the arrows of the spirit know where they will light.

“One beam in a dark place,” wrote one who knew the travail of the spirit, “hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine.”

To win all, he renounces all. When earthly props have been cast down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God.

Infinity is attained by a process of subtraction.

To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their greed to the infinite creativeness of …

We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own.

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.

Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own.

The moral self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny hangs on a private transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is left for human intervention?

Its note was not the attempt to establish on earth a “Kingdom of Christ,” but an ideal of personal character and conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and private duties.

Its theory had been discipline; its practical result was liberty.

Given the social and political conditions of England, the transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of Presbyterianism with the stratified arrangement of English society had been remarked by Hooker.

… Next to the saving his soul, [the tradesman’s] care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.”

When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be a duty?

Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county of Coveting in the north. The inference was illogical, but how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as to preach at St.

… by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages.

Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues.

They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries no sting.

Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well.

For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered.

Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.

It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of economic enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some resemblance to those associated later with the name of Smiles.

The good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic man.

To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with them.

… the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the shifting of industry from its accustomed seats—it is perhaps not fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force contributing to the change in social policy which is noticeable after the middle of the century.

The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow.

To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous discharge of private duties—how necessary! Yet how readily perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social obligations beyond and above them!

… may climb to greater heights, but something external, alien and irrelevant—something, at best, indifferent to the life of the spirit, and, at worse, the sphere of the letter which killeth and of the reliance on works which ensnares the soul into the slumber of death!

In emphasizing that God’s Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of God’s Kingdom.

The complacent victim of that false antithesis between the social mechanism and the life of the spirit, which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy of the individual soul, not without some sighs of …

… by relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be unnecessary—such doctrines turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze the impulse of natural pity with the assurance that, if indulged, it would perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay.

Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.

That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of ethical superiority.

By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause.

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

Advanced by men of religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society.

The former takes as its province the individual soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his fellows in the activities of business and the affairs of society. Provided that each keeps to its own territory, peace is assured.

They cannot collide, for they can never meet.

History is a stage where forces which are within human control contend and cooperate with forces which are not. The change of opinion described in these pages drew nourishment from both.

It did not occur to them that character is social, and society, since it is the expression of character, spiritual.

Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light itself.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

It did not occur to them that character is social, and society, since it is the expression of character, spiritual. Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light itself.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

Few will refuse their admiration to the magnificent conception of a community penetrated from apex to foundation by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great reformers, not less than of the better minds of the Middle Ages.

Their obstinate refusal to revise old formulae in the light of new facts exposed them helpless to a counterattack, in which the whole fabric of their philosophy, truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed together.

They despised knowledge, and knowledge destroyed them.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

But, in order to subdue the tough world of material interests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy with its tortuous ways as is needed to understand them.

The Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous hearing and a fair trial, and those who will not give him his due are wont to find that, in the long run, he turns the tables by taking his due and something over.

Common sense and a respect for realities are not less graces of the spirit than moral zeal.

Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.

If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.

Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn the mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end the wheels revolve, still remains;

and on that question the naive and uncritical worship of economic power, which is the mood of unreason too often engendered in those whom that new Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no light.

Its result is not seldom a world in which men commands a mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an organization which has every perfection except that of motion.

Er nennt’s Vernunft und braucht’s allein, Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.

The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry.

But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much.

Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley—who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.