The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

his conscience. We should do, not the good in the general sense of natural reason, but God’s will as it is written in our hearts and known through the conscience (Barclay, pp. 73, 76). This irrationality of morality, derived from the exaggerated contrast between the divine and the flesh, is expressed in these fundamental tenets of Quaker ethics: “What a man does contrary to his faith, though his faith may be wrong, is in no way acceptable to God⁠—though the thing might have been lawful to another” (Barclay, p. 487). Of course that could not be upheld in practice. The “moral and perpetual statutes acknowledged by all Christians” are, for instance, for Barclay the limit of toleration. In practice the contemporaries felt their ethic, with certain peculiarities of its own, to be similar to that of the Reformed Pietists. “Everything good in the Church is suspected of being Quakerism,” as Spener repeatedly points out. It thus seems that Spener envied the Quakers this reputation. Consilia theologica, III, 6, 1, Dist. 2, No. 64. The repudiation of oaths on the basis of a passage in the Bible shows that the real emancipation from the Scriptures had not gone far. The significance for social ethics of the principle, “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you,” which many Quakers regarded as the essence of the whole Christian ethics, need not concern us here. ↩

The necessity of assuming this possibility Barclay justifies because without it “there should never be a place known by the Saints wherein they might be free of doubting and despair, which⁠—is most absurd.” It is evident that the certitudo salutis depends upon it. Thus Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, p. 20. ↩

There thus remains a difference in type between the Calvinistic and the Quaker rationalization of life. But when Baxter formulates it by saying that the spirit is supposed by the Quakers to act upon the soul as on a corpse, while the characteristically formulated Calvinistic principle is “reason and spirit are conjunct principles” (Christian Directory, II, p. 76), the distinction was no longer valid for his time in this form. ↩

Thus in the very careful articles “Menno” and “Mennoniten” by Cramer in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, especially p. 604. However excellent these articles are, the article “Baptisten” in the same encyclopedia is not very penetrating and in part simply incorrect. Its author does not know, for instance, the Publications of the Hanserd Knolly’s Society, which are indispensable for the history of Baptism. ↩

Thus Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, p. 404, explains that eating, drinking, and acquisition are natural, not spiritual acts, which may be performed without the special sanction of God. The explanation is in reply to the characteristic objection that if, as the Quakers teach, one cannot pray without a special motion of the Spirit, the same should apply to ploughing. It is, of course, significant that even in the modern resolutions of Quaker Synods the advice is sometimes given to retire from business after acquiring a sufficient fortune, in order, withdrawn from the bustle of the world, to be able to live in devotion to the Kingdom of God alone. But the same idea certainly occurs occasionally in other denominations, including Calvinism. That betrays the fact that the acceptance of the bourgeois practical ethics by these movements was the worldly application of an asceticism which had originally fled from the world. ↩

Veblen in his suggestive book The Theory of Business Enterprise is of the opinion that this motto belongs only to early capitalism. But economic supermen, who, like the present captains of industry, have stood beyond good and evil, have always existed, and the statement is still true of the broad underlying strata of business men. ↩

We may here again expressly call attention to the excellent remarks of Eduard Bernstein, Geschichte des Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1895, I, p. 50 ff.). To Kautsky’s highly schematic treatment of the Baptist movement and his theory of heretical communism in general (in the first volume of the same work) we shall return on another occasion. ↩

“In civil actions it is good to be as the many, in religious to be as the best,” says, for example, Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138). That sounds somewhat more drastic than it is meant to be. It means that the Puritan honesty is formalistic legality, just as the uprightness which the sometime Puritan people like to claim as a national virtue is something specifically different from the German Ehrlichkeit. Some good remarks on the subject from the educational standpoint may be found in the Preussische Jahrbücher, CXII (1903), p. 226. The formalism of the Puritan ethic is in turn the natural consequence of its relation to the law. ↩

Something is said on this in the following essay. ↩

This is the reason for the economic importance of the ascetic Protestant, but not Catholic, minorities. ↩

That the difference of dogmatic basis was not inconsistent with the adoption of the most important interest in proof is to be explained in the last analysis by the historical peculiarities of Christianity in general which cannot be discussed here. ↩

“Since God hath gathered us to be a people,” says Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, p. 357. I myself heard a Quaker sermon at Haverford College which laid great emphasis on the interpretation of saints as meaning separate. ↩

See the excellent sketch of his character in Dowden, Puritan and Anglican. A passable introduction to Baxter’s theology, after he had abandoned a strict