Page:The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.djvu/287

 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, 1, 9 (par. 24); I, p. 378, 2. In Prov. xxiii. 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.

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