These views of Baxter are not a reflection of the economic environment in which he lived. On the contrary, his autobiography 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. ↩
Thus Baxter, Saints’ Everlasting Rest, I, chap. X, 1, 9 (par. 24); I, p. 378, 2. In Proverbs 23:4: “Weary thyself not to be rich” means 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 possession 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. ↩
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 two ethics, very important in practice, have been finally crystallized, even for modern times, by the Jansenist controversy and the Bull Unigenitus. ↩
“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). ↩
Even in the Lutheran Confession of Duke Christopher of Württemberg, which was submitted to the Council of Trent, objection It 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. ↩
Thus in Baxter and also in Duke Christopher’s confession. Compare further passages 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 unemployed, 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 ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft,” Jena, 1912, pp. 69 ff.). ↩
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.
