This is, as must continually be emphasized, the final decisive religious motive (along with the purely ascetic desire to mortify the flesh). It is especially clear in the Quakers. ↩
Baxter (Saints’ Everlasting Rest, p. 12) repudiates this with precisely the same reasoning as the Jesuits: the body must have what it needs, otherwise one becomes a slave to it. ↩
This ideal is clearly present, especially for Quakerism, in the first period of its development, as has already been shown in important points by Weingarten in his Englische Revolutionskirchen. Also Barclay’s thorough discussion (Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, pp. 519 ff., 533) shows it very clearly. To be avoided are: (1) Worldly vanity; thus all ostentation, frivolity, and use of things having no practical purpose, or which are valuable only for their scarcity (i.e. for vanity’s sake). (2) Any unconscientious use of wealth, such as excessive expenditure for not very urgent needs above necessary provision for the real needs of life and for the future. The Quaker was, so to speak, a living law of marginal utility. “Moderate use of the creature” is definitely permissible, but in particular one might pay attention to the quality and durability of materials so long as it did not lead to vanity. On all this compare Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser, 1846, pp. 216 ff. Especially on comfort and solidity among the Quakers, compare Schneckenburger, Vorlesungen, pp. 96 f. ↩
Adapted by Weber from Faust, Act I. Goethe there depicts Mephistopheles as “Die Kraft, die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft.” —Translator’s Note ↩
It has already been remarked that we cannot here enter into the question of the class relations of these religious movements (see the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen). In order to see, however, that for example Baxter, of whom we make so much use in this study, did not see things solely as a bourgeois of his time, it will suffice to recall that even for him in the order of the religious value of callings, after the learned professions comes the husbandman, and only then mariners, clothiers, booksellers, tailors, etc. Also, under mariners (characteristically, enough) he probably thinks at least as often of fishermen as of shipowners. In this regard several things in the Talmud are in a different class. Compare, for instance, in Wünsche, Babylonische Talmud, II, pp. 20, 21, the sayings of Rabbi Eleasar, which though not unchallenged, all contend in effect that business is better than agriculture. In between see II, 2, p. 68, on the wise investment of capital: one-third in land, one-third in merchandise, and one-third in cash.
For those to whom no causal explanation is adequate without an economic (or materialistic as it is unfortunately still called) interpretation, it may be remarked that I consider the influence of economic development on the fate of religious ideas to be very important and shall later attempt to show how in our case the process of mutual adaptation of the “two took place. On the other hand, those religious ideas themselves simply cannot be deduced from economic circumstances. They are in themselves, that is beyond doubt, the most powerful plastic elements of national character, and contain a law of development and a compelling force entirely their own. Moreover, the most important differences, so far as non-religious factors play a part, are, as with Lutheranism and Calvinism, the result of political circumstances, not economic. ↩
That is what Eduard Bernstein means to express when he says, in the essay referred to above (pp. 625, 681), “Asceticism is a bourgeois virtue.” His discussion is the first which has suggested these important relationships. But the connection is a much wider one than he suspected. For not only the accumulation of capital, but the ascetic rationalization of the whole of economic life was involved.
For the American Colonies, the difference between the Puritan North, where, on account of the ascetic compulsion to save, capital in search of investment was always available, from the conditions in the South has already been clearly brought out by Doyle. ↩
Doyle, The English in America, II, chap. I. The existence of ironworks (1643), weaving for the market (1659), and also the high development of the handicrafts in New England in the first generation after the foundation of the colonies are, from a purely economic viewpoint, astounding. They are in striking contrast to the conditions in the South, as well as the non-Calvinistic Rhode Island with its complete freedom of conscience. There, in spite of the excellent harbour, the report of the Governor and Council of 1686
