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Title: Religion and the rise of capitalism
A historical study

Author: R. H. Tawney

Release date: July 18, 2023 [eBook #71223]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Harcourth, Brace and Company,
Inc., 1926

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RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. pp. 464. 8o. $3.75.

THE ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY
Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1921. pp. 242. 8o. $1.50.

STUDIES IN THE MINIMUM WAGE

i. The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-making Industry.
G. Bell & Sons. 1914. pp. 157. 8o. 1/6.

ii. The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Industry. 1915.
pp. 274. 8o. 3/6.

A DISCOURSE UPON USURY BY THOMAS
WILSON.
Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1925. pp. 392. 8o. $5.00.

With A. E. BLAND and P. A. BROWN
ENGLISH ECONOMIC HISTORY: SELECT
DOCUMENTS
Harcourt, Brace & Co. pp. 730. 1914. 8o. $2.75.

With DR. E. POWER
TUDOR ECONOMIC DOCUMENTS
Longmans, Green & Co. 1924. 3 vols. 8o. $5.00 each.

RELIGION
AND THE
RISE OF CAPITALISM
A HISTORICAL STUDY
(HOLLAND MEMORIAL LECTURES, 1922)
BY R. H. TAWNEY
READER IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON; SOMETIME FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE,
OXFORD

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.

TO
DR. CHARLES GORE
WITH
AFFECTION AND GRATITUDE

“Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated
upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly
make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry
patriot and a sorry statesman.”
Bishop Berkeley, Siris, 350.

INTRODUCTION
The object of this book is to trace some strands in the development of
religious thought on social and economic questions in the period which saw
the transition from medieval to modern theories of social organization. It
does not carry the subject beyond the beginning of the eighteenth century,
and it makes no pretense of dealing with the history either of economic
theory or of economic practice, except in so far as theory and practice were
related to changes in religious opinion. In reality, however, the connection
between them was intimate and vital. The revolutions, at once religious,
political and social, which herald the transition from the medieval to the
modern world, were hardly less decisive for the economic character of the
new civilization than for its ecclesiastical organization and religious
doctrines. The economic categories of modern society have their roots in
the economic expansion and social convulsions which accompanied the age
of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The history of religious thought on questions of social ethics is a topic
which has been treated in England by the late Dr. Cunningham, by Sir
William Ashley, whose essay on The Canonist Doctrine first interested me
in the subject, by Mr. G. G. Coulton, Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O’Brien.
But it is no reflection on their work to say that the most important
contributions of recent years have come from continental students, in
particular Troeltsch, Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy and, above all, Max
Weber, whose celebrated essay on Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist
des Kapitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No one can work, on
however humble a scale, in the same field, without being conscious of the
heavy obligation under which these scholars have laid him. While I have
not always been able to accept their conclusions, I am glad to have this
opportunity of expressing my indebtedness to them. I regret that Mr.
Coulton’s The Mediæval Village appeared too late for me to make use of its
abundant stores of learning and insight.
It only remains for me to thank the friends whose assistance has
enabled me to make this book somewhat less imperfect than it would

otherwise have been. Mr. J. L. Hammond, Dr. E. Power, and Mr. A. P.
Wadsworth have been kind enough to read, and to improve, the manuscript.
Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to reading the proofs, has helped me most
generously throughout with advice and criticism. I am deeply indebted both
to Miss Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the
proofs and making an index, and to the London School of Economics and
the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund for enabling me to make
use of her services. My obligation to the help given by my wife is beyond
acknowledgment.
R. H. Tawney.

CONTENTS
PAGE

Introduction ix
CHAPTER

I. THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 1
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
14
THE SIN OF AVARICE
36
THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY
55

II. THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS 63
THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
66
LUTHER
79
CALVIN
102

III. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 133
THE LAND QUESTION
137
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY
150
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM
175

IV. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 195
PURITANISM AND SOCIETY
198
A GODLY DISCIPLINE VERSUS THE RELIGION OF TRADE
211
THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES
227

THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY
253

V. CONCLUSION 275

NOTES 289

INDEX 327

CHAPTER I
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
“La miséricorde de Dieu est infinie: elle sauvera même un riche.”
Anatole France, Le Puits de Sainte Claire.

“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.”[1] 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 be pregnant with meaning. Writing when economic science
was in the first flush of its dogmatic youth, it was natural that Say should
dismiss as an unprofitable dilettantism an interest in the speculations of
ages unillumined by the radiance of the new Gospel. But to determine the
significance of opinion is, perhaps, not altogether so simple a matter as he
supposed. 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,”[2] 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, may prove, even today, not
wholly without instruction. In the present century, the old issues seem,
indeed, to have acquired a new actuality. The philosophy which would keep
economic interests and ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate
compartments finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly restive. On the
one hand, it is evident that the whole body of regulations, by which modern

societies set limits to the free play of economic self-interest, implies the
acceptance, whether deliberate or unconscious, of moral standards, by
reference to which certain kinds of economic conduct are pronounced
illegitimate. On the other hand, there are indications that religious thought
is no longer content to dismiss the transactions of business and the
institutions of society as matters irrelevant to the life of the spirit.
Silently, but unmistakably, the conception of the scope and content of
Christian ethics which was generally, though not universally, accepted in
the nineteenth century, is undergoing a revision; and in that revision the
appeal to the experience of mankind, which is history, has played some part,
and will play a larger one. There have been periods in which a tacit
agreement, accepted in practice if not stated in theory, excluded economic
activities and social institutions from examination or criticism in the light of
religion. A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose conception of
the relations of Church and State appears to have been modeled on those of
Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a
clerical reformer with the protest, “Things have come to a pretty pass if
religion is going to interfere with private life”; and a more recent occupant
of his office has explained the catastrophe which must follow, if the Church
crosses the Rubicon which divides the outlying provinces of the spirit from
the secular capital of public affairs.[3]
Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident today that the line
of division between the spheres of religion and secular business, which they
assume as self-evident, is shifting. By common consent the treaty of
partition has lapsed and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of
which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pretensions, could
write, with perhaps exaggerated severity, that the spokesmen of religion
“leave the present world to the men of business and the devil,”[4] shows
some signs of drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with
its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent and in America, not
only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and
Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical
implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently
comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective
actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere both of international
politics and of social organization. It is being made today. It has been made

in the past. Whether it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future
at some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical affairs men
will say,

Here nature first begins
r farthest verge, and chaos to retire
from her outmost works, a broken foe,

will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that, as in the
analogous problem of the relations between Church and State, issues which
were thought to have been buried by the discretion of centuries have shown
in our own day that they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms
which they have assumed and the phases through which they have passed,
even in the narrow field of a single country and a limited period, is not mere
antiquarianism. It is to summon the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to
see from a new angle the problems of our own age, by widening the
experience brought to their consideration.
In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgis[5] has described the secularization of
political theory as the most momentous of the intellectual changes which
ushered in the modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it
was only gradually that its full consequences became apparent, so that seeds
which were sown before the Reformation yielded their fruit in England only
after the Civil War. The political aspects of the transformation are familiar.
The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle Ages
to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science, ultimately
a group of sciences, and theology at best one science among others. Reason
takes the place of revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is
expediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the master-
interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of life with boundaries
which it is extravagant to overstep.
The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institution, armed
with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the Middle Ages was a kind of State,
the State of the Tudors had some of the characteristics of a Church; and it
was precisely the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of
conceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately vital but

publicly indifferent, which in England made irreconcilable the quarrel
between Puritanism and the monarchy. When the mass had been heated in
the furnace of the Civil War, its component parts were ready to be
disengaged from each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the
secular State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has
emerged from the theory which had regarded both as dual aspects of a
single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter
do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system,
which is the concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually
ends with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The age of the wars of
economic nationalism virtually begins with the war between England and
Holland under the Commonwealth and Charles II. The State, first in
England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but
in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual
protection and the convenience of mutual assistance. It appeals to no
supernatural commission, but exists to protect individuals in the enjoyment
of those absolute rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws
of nature. “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths and
putting themselves under government is the preservation of their
property.”[6]
While the political significance of this development has often been
described, the analogous changes in social and economic thought have
received less attention. They were, however, momentous, and deserve
consideration. The emergence of an objective and passionless economic
science took place more slowly than the corresponding movement in the
theory of the State, because the issues were less absorbing, and, while one
marched in the high lights of the open stage, the other lurked on the back
stairs and in the wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had
emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the self-contained
department with laws of its own begins generally to be applied to the world
of business relations, and even in the England of the early seventeenth
century, to discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms of
pecuniary profit and loss still wears an air of not quite reputable cynicism.
When the sixteenth century opens, not only political but social theory is
saturated with doctrines drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and
economic phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as

naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed them in terms
of mechanism.
Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of society is
between those which regard the world of human affairs as self-contained,
and those which appeal to a supernatural criterion. Modern social theory,
like modern political theory, develops only when society is given a
naturalistic instead of a religious explanation, and a capital fact which
presides at the birth of both is a change in the conception held of the nature
and functions of a Church. The crucial period is the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The most important arena (apart from Holland) is
England, because it is in England, with its new geographical position as the
entrepôt between Europe and America, its achievement of internal
economic unity two centuries before France and two and a half centuries
before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its powerful bourgeoisie
of bankers, ship-owners, and merchants, that the transformation of the
structure of society is earliest, swiftest, and most complete. Its essence is
the secularization of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is
resolved into its elements—politics, business, and spiritual exercises; each
assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys the laws of its own
being. The social functions matured within the Church, and long identified
with it, are transferred to the State, which in turn is idolized as the dispenser
of prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a hierarchy of
values, embracing all human interests and activities in a system of which
the apex is religion, is replaced by the conception of separate and parallel
compartments, between which a due balance should be maintained, but
which have no vital connection with each other.
The intellectual movement is, of course, very gradual, and is
compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which seem to refute its
general character. It is easy to detect premonitions of the coming
philosophy in the later Middle Ages, and reversions to an earlier manner at
the very end of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth century
can anticipate the monetary theory associated with the name of Gresham; in
the fifteenth century Laurentius de Rudolfis can distinguish between trade
bills and finance bills, and St. Antonino describe the significance of capital;
while Baxter in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in the style of a
medieval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can dissect the economic iniquities

of Mr. Badman, who ground the poor with high prices and usury, in the
manner of a medieval friar.[7] But the distance traversed in the two
centuries between 1500 and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At the earlier
date, though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the typical
economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the typical popular teaching
is that of the sermon, or of manuals such as Dives et Pauper; the typical
appeal in difficult cases of conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers, the canon
law and its interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of
morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two centuries later it is
conducted in terms of economic expediency.
It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry VIII and Thomas
Cromwell had nothing to learn from the twentieth century as to the niceties
of political intrigue or commercial sharp practice. But a cynical
unscrupulousness in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in
the validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it. No one can
read the discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 on three
burning issues—the rise in prices, capital and interest, and the land question
in England—without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and
clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian
morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, is
still conceived to be the final authority. It is because it is regarded as the
final authority that the officers of the Church claim to be heard on questions
of social policy, and that, however Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and
Calvinists may differ on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, Luther and
Calvin, Latimer and Laud, John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed
that social morality is the province of the Church, and are prepared both to
teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.
By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered. After the
Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as well as of political,
thought. The claim of religion, at best a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of
good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished with the destruction of
Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and with the failure of the work
of the Westminster Assembly. After the Civil War, the attempt to maintain
the theory that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was
impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of
the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could

be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine of the Restoration
economists,[8] that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and
tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that
neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.
The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is quickly
occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred
years is not with the attempt to reaffirm, with due allowance for altered
circumstances, the conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in
their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political
Arithmetic, which asserts, at first with hesitation and then with confidence,
that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its
method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it
handles economic phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to distinguish
right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal
economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions are accepted by all
educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions
continue for long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, before the
days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester.
Some of the particular stages in this transition will be discussed later.
But that there was a transition, and that the intellectual and moral
conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of
some more familiar intellectual revolutions, is undeniable. 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.”[9] Mr. Coulton does well to remind us that, even in
the Age of Faith, resounding principles were compatible with very sordid
practice. In a discussion which has as its subject social thought, not the
history of business organization, it is not necessary to elaborate that truism.
Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast successive periods as
light with darkness or darkness with light, or yield to the temper which
finds romantic virtues in every age except its own. To appraise the merits of
different theories of social organization must be left to those who feel
confident that they possess an adequate criterion. All that can be attempted
in these pages is to endeavor to understand a few among them.

For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it does not follow
that to examine the former is to hunt abstractions. That men should have
thought as they did is sometimes as significant as that they should have
acted as they did, and not least significant when thought and practice are at
variance. It may be true that “theory is a criticism of life only in the same
sense as a good man is a criticism of a bad one.” But the emphasis of the
theorist on certain aspects and values is not arbitrary, but is itself an
interpretation, and, if his answers are to be discounted, his questions are
none the less evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they
were asked. It would be paradoxical to dismiss Machiavelli and Locke and
Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the political practice of their age,
merely on the ground that mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or
Whig or Individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dismiss
those who formulated economic and social theories in the Middle Ages or
in the sixteenth century merely because, behind canon law and summæ and
sermons, behind the good ordinances of borough and gild, behind statutes
and proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the immutable
appetites of the economic man.
There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality
of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so convincingly shown, on
the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of
habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed
within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the
groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has
altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his
world have undergone a succession of revolutions. 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. He steps into a social inheritance,
to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before
it bequeaths it to its successors.
There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment,
which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it.

And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The
economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of
contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as
its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the
most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of
society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions,
organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism
adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of
economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his
neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s
providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to
repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final
criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity
of economic interests can bridge, and which deserves at least to be
explored. To examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace the
change, from a view of economic activity which regarded it as one among
other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it as dependent upon
impersonal and almost automatic forces; to observe the struggle of
individualism, in the face of restrictions imposed in the name of religion by
the Church and of public policy by the State, first denounced, then palliated,
then triumphantly justified in the name of economic liberty; to watch how
ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its hold upon the spheres it had
claimed and finally abdicates them—to do this is not to indulge a vain
curiosity, but to stand at the sources of rivulets which are now a flood.
Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of social
organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to the life of the spirit, or
has it endeavored not only to christianize the individual but to make a
Christian civilization? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis
between personal morality and the practices which are permissible in
business? Does the idea of a Church involve the acceptance of any
particular standard of social ethics, and, if so, ought a Church to endeavor
to enforce it as among the obligations incumbent on its members? Such are
a few of the questions which men are asking today, and on which a more
competent examination of history than I can hope to offer might throw at
any rate an oblique and wavering light.

I. THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same
questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It
is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of
revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in
finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men
brought a body of doctrine, law and tradition, hammered out during the
preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often
shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met
them at first by a re-affirmation of the traditional doctrines, by which, it
seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As
the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact,
these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation
developed, different churches produced characteristic differences of social
opinion.
But these were later developments, which only gradually became
apparent. The new economic world was not accepted without a struggle.
Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely
innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church
councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness that
innovations in doctrine and church government involved any breach with
what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom.
Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different
schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic
environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must
place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine,
however summarily, the historical background.
That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and
implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was
derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon
law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and
religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law,
custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as
a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political
historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries

or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the
student of economic conditions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first
illusion to be discarded.
The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain
common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a
closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by
the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east,
where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively
short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily
commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and
easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes
before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined
that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to
south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster
in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within
this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition
and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different
lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain
and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex
economic structure rose were far removed from those of later generations, it
flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In spite of the
ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life
of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a center
of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society
exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is
between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw
from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic
squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the
economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the
Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the
Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the
student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely
associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Summæ of the
Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of development. The economic
teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more
complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to
the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic

parts of the system—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so far
from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.
There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may
adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may
stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very
nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from
which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can
conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as
matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no
concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and
passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw
itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some
crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will
inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and
criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites,
as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise,
and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a
temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are
too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their
different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It
finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is
everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in
the same degree.”
Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of
the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic
environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages
the ascetic temper predominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing
in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of
business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.[10]
It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the
secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it
succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive
austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but
abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of
movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its
communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the “just man is already lord

of all” and that “in this world God must serve the devil,” but an anticipation
of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly
misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the
persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their reward in Heaven,” and
which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the
pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the
Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it
was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who
accused them—the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred.
To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion
only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net, and to label
them “medieval thought,” is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree
which, if realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long
since passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern
Christianity has its root in medieval religion. There is a medieval
Puritanism and rationalism as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field
of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in his excellent
book,[11] Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have their true successors in
Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political thought is equally
true of economic and social doctrines. The social theories of Luther and
Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and
seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud,
Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of medieval
parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged from
savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an
immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the surrounding
barbarism, the work of conversion and of social construction had been
almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the
intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For
good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its
unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which
emerged from it endeavored, according to their different opportunities, to
perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or
indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks
a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all alike, in
one form or another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of
the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of
the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic.
The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth
century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is
religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the
Summæ of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which
takes the destination for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine,
medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however
arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea. The lines of its
scheme run up and down, and, since purpose is universal and all-embracing,
there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their
own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe.
“The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the vision of the divine
essence.”[12]
Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though
with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and
derive their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the
Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its
narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its
interpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is
final. Though practice is perpetually at variance with theory, there is no
absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is “the sphere
of religion,” and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal
mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is
irrelevant.
There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There
are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of
medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as
irreconcilable antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and
that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities,
passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other
animals the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in
addition, as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an
inclination to the life of the intellect and of society—“to know the truth
about God and to live in communities.”[13] These activities, which form his
life according to the law of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are

regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the
characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.
The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and
interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter
and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and
fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it,
but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An
attempt is made to give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of
human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious)
Bull: “The way of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things
which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to
the law of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally and
immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate
through the higher.”[14] Thus social institutions assume a character which
may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect
expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, society is an
organism of different grades, and human activities form a hierarchy of
functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of
value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by
the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the
dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards:

nzi è formale ad esto beato esse
nersi dentro alla divina voglia,
r ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily
food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw
an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the
middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say,
also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of
medieval speculation colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was
colored by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in
the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth
century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the
second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the

economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the
functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.
From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s
secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy
by which society is described—an analogy at once fundamental and
commonplace—is the same.[15] Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke
extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not
finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the
seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the
social order are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are
accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occasions, there is no
question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less
than the whole edifice of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression,
exploitation, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as
simply alien to religion, for religion is all-comprehensive. They must be
given some ethical meaning, must be shown to be the expression of some
larger plan. The meaning given them is simple. The facts of class status and
inequality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of
society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in the eighteenth by
the theory of economic harmonies; and the former took the same delight in
contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter
in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose
was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism
composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer,
or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means
suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be
equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go
short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class
cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to us—enjoy its rights.
Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil
peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in
their calling, and no more.
As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and
protective. “There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that
men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of
your underlings is damnable.”[16] As a philosophy of society, it attempted

to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which
should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of
mere money-making was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma
attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade,
the essense of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus
divitiarum infinitus, were not easily interpreted in terms of social function.
Comparatively late intruders in a world dominated by conceptions
hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted
harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew
to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of
the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity
of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the
spirit. 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 re-dedication 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. Gentlemen took hard tallages and
oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their
true function was “to defend God’s law by power of the world.”[17]
Craftsmen—the burden of endless sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was
perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to
the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be
defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and
peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard,
was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal
solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike
give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and
vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in
like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every
other.”[18]
If the medieval moralist was often too naïve in expecting sound
practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that

not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or
from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was
addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were
men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been more likely to be
honest, if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that
competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute
for honesty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of
economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though
varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as
each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto.
“The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and ...
laborers.... As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body
stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure
that Jesus Christ has ordained it.... Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and
his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body ... and thus should it be in parts
of the Church.... As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took
the service of another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the
Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that
God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the
Church.... Surely the Church shall never be whole before proportions of her
parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and [by] medicine of
men.”[19]
Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, however radical it is,
the established order. Clearly this patriarchal doctrine is a softened
reflection of the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine
of economic ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval industry.
A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of
conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of
business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics
and religion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they may be
relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the
economic environment was less intractable than it had been in the days of
the Empire or than it is today. In the great commercial centers there was
sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has
seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and
merchants.[20] But outside them trade, industry, the money-market, all that
we call the economic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual

trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a
world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition. There
was very little large-scale organization. With some important exceptions,
such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth
century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval artisan, especially in
backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of
temporary organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on
in London even before the end of the thirteenth century,[21] and the growth
of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the
conditions which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But
even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the
thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed
not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387
actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in
the service of 1,554 masters.[22]
In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and
their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations
and small enough for each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid
was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the
most characteristic of medieval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To
suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever
members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than
nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called
gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft organization.
Even in the towns it is a question whether there was not a considerable
population of casual workers—consider only the number of unskilled
workers that must have been required as laborers by the craftsmen building
a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes—who were rarely
organized in permanent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of
economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost,
monopolists, and the cases in which their vested interests came into
collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern
devotion to the conception of a unitary society over-riding particular
interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against
corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion
of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from
time to time more than a little justification for his complaint that “all new

fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse [against
false conspirators],” because “they conspire to bear up each other, yea, in
wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power.”[23] It
is significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social
reconstruction produced in Germany in the century before the Reformation
proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and
tyrannical.[24]
There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which
combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to
remember that the characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it
sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to
social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual
were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce petit monde antique,” writes the
historian of French gilds, “était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le
juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui,
des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une règle puissante s’imposait à tous
et d’une manière générale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par
l’Evangile.”[25] The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good
men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism by insisting that every
brother shall share his good fortune with another and stand by his neighbor
in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to
preserve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to
repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch
special advantages for himself to the injury of all—whether these things
outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a
question which each student will answer in accordance with his own
predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and
the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a
common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal,
intimate and direct, and there was little room for organization on a scale too
vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine
which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of
economic expediency.
Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not
unfavorable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which
brought to its task the tremendous claim to mediate between even the

humblest activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its
teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of
Christendom which promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion
as to the reality of economic motives in the Age of Faith. 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.[26]

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

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,
Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;
Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,
‘Payez, payez,’ dit le mot, si vis impetrare.[27]

The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center of the most
highly organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances
from all over Europe, and receiving them in money at a time when the
revenue of other Governments still included personal services and payments
in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine money-
lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of “peculiar sons of the
Roman Church.”[28] Grosstête rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop
of London expelled them, but papal protection brought them back.[29]
Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore Pope Nicholas III to
withdraw a threat of excommunication, intended to compel him to pay the
usurious interest demanded by Italian money-lenders, though, as the
archbishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special mandate, it would
be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders.”[30] The Papacy
was, in a sense, the greatest financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as
its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. The
abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the
fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can

hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained,
engage in trade and take usury.[31] Cathedral chapters lend money at high
rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have
been refused by churchmen, as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when
consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging
restitution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the
building of Notre-Dame.[32] “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.”[33]
The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M.
Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of
vices implies that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their
condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and,
when the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what principles
men valued, and what standards they erected. The economic doctrines
elaborated in the Summæ of the Schoolmen, in which that question receives
its most systematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the
fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throwing light on the
affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with those of the next. In
reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and
the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic questions were
eminently practical. The movement which prompted them was the growth
of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose
social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal
hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which
such developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new contractual
relations, which sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional
morality expounded by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries,
who damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal
to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were the pioneers of a
liberal intellectual movement. By lifting the weight of antiquated formulæ
they cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious authority for
new and mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual
justification for developments which earlier generations would have
condemned.

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to
scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific
contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were
less significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of
which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are
subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that
economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on
other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are
necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without them men
cannot support themselves and help one another; the wise ruler, as St.
Thomas said,[34] will consider in founding his State the natural resources
of the country. But economic motives are suspect. Because they are
powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud
them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear
field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic
activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of
society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a
constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as
an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval
thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of
social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human
attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the
sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental—sicut quædam
adminicula, quibus adjuvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. “It is lawful
to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though
setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness,
inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as instruments for acts
of virtue.”[35] Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man, not man for
riches.
At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against
allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a
man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To
seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is
legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was
intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure
that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he

takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a
necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute
less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be
tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in
itself; the ideal—if only man’s nature could rise to it—is communism.
“Communis enim,” wrote Gratian in his decretum, “usus omnium, quae
sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit.”[36] At best, indeed,
the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It
must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the
support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its
owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they are not
in actual destitution. Such were the conditions which commended
themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century
Europe.[37] There have been ages in which they would have been
described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on
it. For to defend the property of the peasant and small master is necessarily
to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.
The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple.
It was that the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to
the prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labor—the
common lot of mankind—is necessary and honorable; trade is necessary,
but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at
worst disreputable. This curious inversion of the social values of more
enlightened ages is best revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of
commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was
partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from classical models; it was
natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of
merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil;
had not the Philosopher himself praised αὐτάρκεια? But it was a convention
which coincided with a vital element in medieval social theory, and struck a
responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is not disputed, of
course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the
deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no
private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully
guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore,
are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to
the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.[38]

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why
should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively
sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of
dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are.
Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptionis negotiatio.[39] The
explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary economic
organization. The economy of the medieval borough—consider only its
treatment of food supplies and prices—was one in which consumption held
somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of
economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant
pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown, for whom he collected
taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as monasteries,
whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien
and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence
extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which
medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public
indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs
suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.
Apart, however, from the color which it took from its environment,
medieval social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as
distinct from labor, required some special justification. The suspicion of
economic motives had been one of the earliest elements in the social
teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life
of economic enterprise with a new sanctification. In medieval philosophy
the ascetic tradition, which condemned all commerce as the sphere of
iniquity, was softened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was
not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent to warn. For it
was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary prominence
the acquisitive appetites; and towards those appetites, which to most
modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of
the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The
craftsman labors for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to support him,
and no more. The merchant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The
traditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: “Whosoever
buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that it may be
a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who
buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he

bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from
God’s temple.”[40] By very definition a man who “buys in order that he
may sell dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his
own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private
charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation,
therefore, “is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of
gain.”[41]
The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the
soul and essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly
propounded for it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with
the qualification that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the
merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehensible as turpe lucrum.
The condition of the trader’s exoneration is that “he seeks gain, not as an
end, but as the wages of his labor.”[42] Theoretically convenient, the
doctrine was difficult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance
of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as “an
affectation not very common among merchants.” But the motives which
prompted it were characteristic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin
precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in
material wealth which modern societies applaud as a quality, and the vices
for which he reserved his most merciless denunciations were the more
refined and subtle of the economic virtues. “He who has enough to satisfy
his wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and nevertheless
ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social
position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or
that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are
incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.”[43] Two and a half
centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual
environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the
same.[44] The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be
demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who
transport them, for both labor in their vocation and serve the common need.
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.

II. THE SIN OF AVARICE

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. Their practical expression was the body
of economic casuistry, in which the best-known elements are the teaching
with regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These doctrines
sprang as much from the popular consciousness of the plain facts of the
economic situation as from the theorists who expounded them. The
innumerable fables of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or
whose money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, or who (as the
scrupulous recorder remarks), “about the year 1240,” on entering a church
to be married, was crushed by a stone figure falling from the porch, which
proved by the grace of God to be a carving of another usurer and his
money-bags being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than the
refinements of lawyers.[45]
On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor, as well as of
national governments, shows, the Church was preaching to the converted,
and to dismiss its teaching on economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of
professional moralists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas were
accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any unnatural
squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow rich. The best commentary
on ecclesiastical doctrines as to usury and prices is the secular legislation on
similar subjects, for, down at least to the middle of the sixteenth century,
their leading ideas were reflected in it. Plain men might curse the chicanery
of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and boroughs might forbid their
members to plead before ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they
themselves made for the conduct of business had more than a flavor of the
canon law. Florence was the financial capital of medieval Europe; but even
at Florence the secular authorities fined bankers right and left for usury in
the middle of the fourteenth century, and, fifty years later, first prohibited
credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to conduct a business
forbidden to Christians.[46] Cologne was one of the greatest of commercial
entrepôts; but, when its successful business man came to make his will, he
remembered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly sin, and
offered what atonement he could by directing his sons to make restitution

and to follow some less dangerous occupation than that of the merchant.
[47] The burgesses of Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common
rights for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that thriving
business city put usury on a par with adultery and fornication, and decreed
that no usurer could become mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.[48] It
was not that laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the Church
was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into men’s minds through a
hundred channels, and survived as a sentiment long after it was repudiated
as a command. It was that the facts of the economic situation imposed
themselves irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp collision
between the doctrine of the Church and the public policy of the world of
business—its individual practice was, of course, another matter—because
both were formed by the same environment, and accepted the same broad
assumptions as to social expediency.
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. Indeed, a great part of medieval industry is a system of
organized monopolies, endowed with a public status, which must be
watched with jealous eyes to see that they do not abuse their powers. It is a
society of small masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning
question, for, except in the great industrial centers of Italy and Flanders, the
permanent wage-earning class is small. Usury is, as it is today in similar
circumstances. For loans are made largely for consumption, not for
production. The farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the
artisan who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle, raw materials,
and his distress is the money-lender’s opportunity. Naturally, there is a
passionate popular sentiment against the engrosser who holds a town to
ransom, the monopolist who brings the livings of many into the hands of
one, the money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbor’s necessities to
get a lien on their land and foreclose. “The usurer would not loan to men
these goods, but if he hoped winning, that he loves more than charity. Many
other sins be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it more
than other sin.”[49]

No one who examines the cases actually heard by the courts in the
later Middle Ages will think that resentment surprising, for they throw a
lurid light on the possibilities of commercial immorality.[50] Among the
peasants and small masters who composed the mass of the population in
medieval England, borrowing and lending were common, and it was with
reference to their petty transactions, not to the world of high finance, that
the traditional attitude towards the money-lender had been crystallized. It
was natural that “Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer rate for
accommodation,” and John the Chaplain, qui est usurarius maximus,[51]
should be regarded as figures at once too scandalous to be tolerated by their
neighbors and too convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church
accepts this popular sentiment, gives it a religious significance, and
crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is preached from the
pulpit, emphasized in the confessional, and enforced, in the last resource,
through the courts.
The philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural law. “Every
law framed by man bears the character of a law exactly to that extent to
which it is derived from the law of nature. But if on any point it is in
conflict with the law of nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere
perversion of law.”[52] The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the
long run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not yet been invented. The
idea of a law of nature—of natural justice which ought to find expression in
positive law, but which is not exhausted in it—supplies an ideal standard by
which the equity of particular relations can be measured. The most
fundamental difference between medieval and modern economic thought
consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas the latter normally refers to
economic expediency, however it may be interpreted, for the justification of
any particular action, policy, or system of organization, the former starts
from the position that there is a moral authority to which considerations of
economic expediency must be subordinated. The practical application of
this conception is the attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right,
which is largely, though not wholly, independent of the fortuitous
combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask more than the
price fixed, either by public authorities, or, failing that, by common
estimation. True, prices even so will vary with scarcity; for, with all their
rigor, theologians are not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of
changing supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or

individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or even creates, a
temporary shortage, the man who makes money out of the turn of the
market, the man who, as Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have
been poor yesterday and rich today.[53]
The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through a
considerable development. The dominant conception of Aquinas—that
prices, though they will vary with the varying conditions of different
markets, should correspond with the labor and costs of the producer, as the
proper basis of the communis estimatio, conformity with which was the
safeguard against extortion—was qualified by subsequent writers. Several
Schoolmen of the fourteenth century emphasized the subjective element in
the common estimation, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and
drew the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be reached under
freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bargain had been struck
showed that both parties were satisfied.[54] In the fifteenth century St.
Antonino, who wrote with a highly developed commercial civilization
beneath his eyes, endeavored to effect a synthesis, in which the principle of
the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the necessary play should
be left to economic motives. After a subtle analysis of the conditions
affecting value, he concluded that the fairness of a price could at best be a
matter only of “probability and conjecture,” since it would vary with places,
periods and persons. His practical contribution was to introduce a new
elasticity into the whole conception by distinguishing three grades of prices
—a gradus pius, discretus, and rigidus. A seller who exceeded the price
fixed by more than 50 per cent. was bound, he argued, to make restitution,
and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required atonement in
the shape of alms. But accidental lapses were venial, and there was a
debatable ground within which prices might move without involving sin.
[55]
This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal forces of the
market, was the natural outcome of the intense economic activity of the
later Middle Ages, and evidently contained the seeds of an intellectual
revolution. The fact that it should have begun to be expounded as early as
the middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the economic
thought of Schoolmen contained elements much more various and much
more modern than is sometimes suggested. But the characteristic doctrine

was different. It was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard
against extortion. “To leave the prices of goods at the discretion of the
sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which goads almost all of them to seek
excessive gain.” Prices must be such, and no more than such, as will enable
each man to “have the necessaries of life suitable for his station.” The most
desirable course is that they should be fixed by public officials, after
making an enquiry into the supplies available and framing an estimate of
the requirements of different classes. Failing that, the individual must fix
prices for himself, guided by a consideration of “what he must charge in
order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably in it, and by a
reasonable estimate of his expenditure and labor.”[56] If the latter
recommendation was a counsel of perfection, the former was almost a
platitude. It was no more than an energetic mayor would carry out before
breakfast.
No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of course, take
the profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner’s risks. He may
buy a rent-charge; for the fruits of the earth are produced by nature, not
wrung from man. He may demand compensation—interesse—if he is not
repaid the principal at the time stipulated. He may ask payment
corresponding to any loss he incurs or gain he foregoes. He may purchase
an annuity, for the payment is contingent and speculative, not certain. It is
no usury when John Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 16s., binds himself
to pay a penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal, for
this is compensation for damages incurred; or when Geoffrey de Eston
grants William de Burwode three marks of silver in return for an annual rent
of six shillings, for this is the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when
James le Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin,
merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland, for this is a
partnership; or when the priory of Worcester sells annuities for a capital
sum paid down.[57] What remained to the end unlawful was that which
appears in modern economic text-books as “pure interest”—interest as a
fixed payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without
risk to the lender. “Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto debitum vel exactum ...
quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per pactum vel exactionem, usura est,
quodcunque nomen sibi imponat.”[58] The emphasis was on pactum. The
essence of usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower
gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of flesh. Medieval opinion, which

has no objection to rent or profits, provided that they are reasonable—for is
not every one in a small way a profit-maker?—has no mercy for the
debenture-holder. His crime is that he takes a payment for money which is
fixed and certain, and such a payment is usury.
The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more subtle than a
bald summary suggests. With the growth of the habit of investment, of a
market for capital, and of new forms of economic enterprise such as
insurance and exchange business, theory became steadily more elaborate,
and schools more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the
indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges produced one
controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the development of Monts de
Piété a third. Even before the end of the fourteenth century there had been
writers who argued that interest was the remuneration of the services
rendered by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they did not
draw the modern corollary) that present are more valuable than future
goods.[59] But on the iniquity of payment merely for the act of lending,
theological opinion, whether liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its
modern interpreter,[60] who sees in its indulgence to interesse the
condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in theological circles
in any age before that of Calvin. To take usury is contrary to Scripture; it is
contrary to Aristotle; it is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labor; it
is to sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of wicked men; it is
to rob those who use the money lent, and to whom, since they make it
profitable, the profits should belong; it is unjust in itself, for the benefit of
the loan to the borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent
him; it is in defiance of sound juristic principles, for when a loan of money
is made, the property in the thing lent passes to the borrower, and why
should the creditor demand payment from a man who is merely using what
is now his own?
The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There were the texts
in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35—apparently a
mistranslation; there was a passage in the Politics, which some now say was
mistranslated also.[61] But practical considerations contributed more to the
doctrine than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it in an
age in which most loans were not part of a credit system, but an exceptional
expedient, and in which it could be said that “he who borrows is always

under stress of necessity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men would
not give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when they could do
nought else, and so there would be so great a famine that all the poor would
die of hunger; for even if they could get land to cultivate, they would not be
able to get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the poor
themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the sake both of profit
and of security, would put their money into usury rather than into smaller
and more risky investments.”[62] The man who used these arguments was
not an academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate man of
business, a believer, even to excess, in Realpolitik, and one of the ablest
statesmen of his day.
True, the Church could not dispense with commercial wickedness in
high places. It was too convenient. The distinction between pawnbroking,
which is disreputable, and high finance, which is eminently honorable, was
as familiar in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no
reasonable judgment of the medieval denunciation of usury is possible,
unless it is remembered that whole ranges of financial business escaped
from it almost altogether. It was rarely applied to the large-scale
transactions of kings, feudal magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects,
squeezed to pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or rebel, but, if an
Edward III or a Count of Champagne was in the hands of financiers, who
could bring either debtor or creditor to book? It was even more rarely
applied to the Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international
banking-houses of the day, with a singular indifference, as was frequently
complained, to the morality of their business methods, took them under
their special protection, and sometimes enforced the payment of debts by
the threat of excommunication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the
international money-market escaped from it; in the fourteenth century Italy
was full of banking-houses doing foreign exchange business in every
commercial center from Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs,
such as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set aside for the
negotiation of loans and the settlement of debts.[63]
It was not that transactions of this type were expressly excepted; on the
contrary, each of them from time to time evoked the protests of moralists.
Nor was it mere hypocrisy which caused the traditional doctrine to be
repeated by writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce

nor government could be carried on without credit. It was that the whole
body of intellectual assumptions and practical interests, on which the
prohibition of usury was based, had reference to a quite different order of
economic activities from that represented by loans from great banking-
houses to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its object
was simple and direct—to prevent the well-to-do money-lender from
exploiting the necessities of the peasant or the craftsman; its categories,
which were quite appropriate to that type of transaction, were those of
personal morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small men
that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable. It was for them that
the Church’s scheme of economic ethics had been worked out, and with
reference to them, though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be
enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.
It was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly, in so far as the
rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by the machinery of
ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesiastical legislation on the subject of
usury has been so often analyzed that it is needless to do more than allude
to it. Early Councils had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.[64] The
Councils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbid it to be taken by
clergy or laity, and lay down rules for dealing with offenders. Clergy who
lend money to persons in need, take their possessions in pawn, and receive
profits beyond the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their office.[65]
Manifest usurers are not to be admitted to communion or Christian burial;
their offerings are not to be accepted; and ecclesiastics who fail to punish
them are to be suspended until they make satisfaction to their bishop.[66]
The high-water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury was probably
reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons (1274) and of Vienne
(1312). The former re-enacted the measures laid down by the third Lateran
Council (1175), and supplemented them by rules which virtually made the
money-lender an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of
excommunication or interdict, was to let houses to usurers, but was to expel
them (had they been admitted) within three months. They were to be
refused confession, absolution and Christian burial until they had made
restitution, and their wills were to be invalid.[67] The legislation of the
Council of Vienne was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned
with dismay that there are communities which, contrary to human and
divine law, sanction usury and compel debtors to observe usurious

contracts, it declares that all rulers and magistrates knowingly maintaining
such laws are to incur excommunication, and requires the legislation in
question to be revoked within three months. Since the true nature of
usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various specious devices,
money-lenders are to be compelled by the ecclesiastical authorities to
submit their accounts to examination. Any person obstinately declaring that
usury is not a sin is to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors are to
proceed against him tanquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de hæresi.
[68]
It would not be easy to find a more drastic example, either of
ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the superiority of the
moral law to economic expediency, than the requirement, under threat of
excommunication, that all secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be
repealed. But, for an understanding of the way in which the system was
intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps less illuminating
than the correspondence between the papal Curia and subordinate
ecclesiastical authorities on specific cases and questions of interpretation.
Are the heirs of those who have made money by usury bound to make
restitution? Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the
original offenders. The pious object of ransoming prisoners is not to justify
the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to be accounted a usurer, not only
if he charges interest, but if he allows for the element of time in a bargain,
by asking a higher price when he sells on credit. Even when debtors have
sworn not to proceed against usurers, the ecclesiastical authorities are to
compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if witnesses are terrorized by
the protection given to usurers by the powerful, punishment can be imposed
without their evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of common
notoriety. An archbishop of Canterbury is reminded that usury is perilous,
not only for the clergy, but for all men whatever, and is warned to use
ecclesiastical censures to secure the restoration, without the deduction of
interest, of property which has been pawned. Usurers, says a papal letter to
the archbishop of Salerno, object to restoring gains, or say that they have
not the means; he is to compel all who can to make restitution, either to
those from whom interest was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course
is possible, they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, non
remittitur peccatum, nisi restituitur ablatum. At Genoa, the Pope is
informed, a practice obtains of undertaking to pay, at the end of a given

term, a higher price for wares than they were worth at the moment when the
sale took place. It is not clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious;
nevertheless, the sellers run into sin, unless there is a probability that the
wares will have changed in value by the time that payment is made; “and
therefore your fellow-citizens would show a wise regard for their salvation
if they ceased making contracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men
cannot be concealed from Almighty God.”[69]
It is evident from the number of doubtful cases referred to Rome for
decision that the law with regard to usury was not easily administered. It is
evident, also, that efforts were made to offer guidance in dealing with
difficult and technical problems. In the book of common forms, drawn up in
the thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary in dealing
with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show how usurers should be
handled.[70] About the same time appeared St. Raymond’s guide to the
duties of an archdeacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made
on visitation, covering every conceivable kind of extortion, and designed to
expose the various illusory contracts—fictitious partnerships, loans under
the guise of sales, excessive deposits against advances—by which the
offence was concealed.[71] Instructions to confessors define in equal detail
the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a series of synodal
statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning merchandising, and other things
pertaining to avarice and covetousness.” Barons and knights are to be
requested to state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the liberty
of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking it, or oppressed their
subjects with undue tallages, tolls or services. “Concerning burgesses,
merchants and officers (ministrales) the priest is to make inquiry as to
rapine, usury, pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying
sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and craft. Concerning
cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to theft and detention of the
property of others, especially with regard to tithes ... also as to the removing
of landmarks and the occupation of other men’s land.... Concerning avarice
it is to be asked in this wise: hast thou been guilty of simony ... an unjust
judge ... a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a sacrilegious man, a gambler, a
remover of landmarks in fields ... a false merchant, an oppressor of any man
and above all of widows, wards and others in misery, for the sake of unjust
and greedy gain?” Those guilty of avarice are to do penance by giving large
alms, on the principle that “contraries are to be cured with contraries.” But

there are certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until restitution
has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury, it is to be noted, includes,
not only what would now be called interest, but the sin of those who, on
account of lapse of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons
restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to require that it
shall be made by his heirs, and, when the injured party cannot be found, the
money is to be spent, with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of
the priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the poor.”[72]
The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by the manuals
for use in the confessional and by books for the guidance of the devout. The
space given in them to the ethics of business was considerable. In the
fifteenth century, Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the
Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation, by taking as his
illustration the books which had been written on the text, “Lend, hoping for
nothing again,” and arguing that all this teaching upon usury was little
enough “to answer ... all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions which
all day have need to be assoiled in men’s bargains and chafferings
together.”[73] A century later there were regions in which such doctrine was
still being rehearsed with all the old rigor. In 1552 the Parliament which
made the Scottish Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism
of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that year, shows
no disposition to compromise with the economic frailties of his fellow-
countrymen. It denounces usurers, masters who withhold wages, covetous
merchants who sell fraudulent wares, covetous landlords who grind their
tenants, and in general—a comprehensive and embarrassing indictment
—“all wretches that will be grown rich incontinent,” and all “who may keep
their neighbor from poverty and mischance and do it not.”[74]
On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt in practice
with these matters, we have very little light. They are still almost an
unworked field. On the Continent we catch glimpses of occasional raids.
Bishops declare war on notorious usurers, only to evoke reprisals from the
secular authorities, to whom the money-lender is too convenient to be
victimized by any one but themselves.[75] At the end of the thirteenth
century an archbishop of Bourges makes some thirty-five usurers disgorge
at a sitting,[76] and seventy years later an inquisitor at Florence collects
7,000 florins in two years from usurers and blasphemers.[77] In England

commercial morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical and
secular authorities contended from time to time for jurisdiction. The
ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with cases of breach of contract in
general, on the ground that they involved læsio fidei, and with usury in
particular, as an offence against morality specifically forbidden by the
canon law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by municipal
bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of Clarendon,[78] had expressly
reserved proceedings as to debts for the royal courts, and the same rule was
laid down more than once in the course of the next century. The latter again
and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the courts christian, and
fined those who disregarded the prohibition.[79] Both, in spite of repeated
protests from the clergy,[80] made good their pretension to handle usurious
contracts in secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting the jurisdiction
of the Church. The question at issue was not whether the usurer should be
punished—a point as to which there was only one opinion—but who should
have the lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran the
gauntlet of all and of each. Local authorities, from the City of London to the
humblest manorial court, make by-laws against “unlawful chevisance” and
present offenders against them.[81] The Commons pray that Lombard
brokers may be banished, and that the ordinances of London concerning
them may be made of general application.[82] The justices in eyre hear
indictments of usurers,[83] and the Court of Chancery handles petitions
from victims who can get no redress at common law.[84] And Holy Church,
though there seems to be only one example of legislation on the subject by
an English Church Council,[85] continues to deal with the usurer after her
own manner.
For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising resentment
against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the expanding capitalism of
the later Middle Ages, it is evident that commercial cases continued, on
occasion at least, to come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle
of the fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury contested by
the secular authorities. A statute of 1341 enacted that (as laid down long
before) the King should have cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of
usurers living. The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated
when the question was taken up a century later under Henry VII, and
survived, an antiquated piece of common form, even into the age of lusty
capitalism under Elizabeth and James I.[86]

That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of enforcing the
canon law in connection with money-lending is improbable. It was naturally
in the commercial towns that cases of the kind most frequently arose, and
the towns did not look with favor on the interference of churchmen in
matters of business. In London, collisions between the courts of the
Official, the Mayor and the King were frequent in the early thirteenth
century. Men took proceedings before the first, it seems, when a speedy
decision was desired, or when their case was of a kind which secular courts
were not likely to regard with favor. Thus craftsmen, to give one curious
example out of many, were evidently using the courts christian as a means
of giving effect to trade union regulations, which were more likely to be
punished than enforced by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device of
imposing an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for breach of
faith. The smiths, for instance, made a “confederacy,” supported by an oath,
with the object, as they declared, of putting down night-work, but, as was
alleged in court, of preventing any but members of their organization from
working at the trade, and summoned blacklegs before the ecclesiastical
courts. The spurriers forbade any one to work between sunset and sunrise,
and haled an offending journeyman before the archdeacon, with the result
that “the said Richard, after being three times warned by the Official, had
been expelled from the Church and excommunicated, until he would swear
to keep the ordinance.”[87]
Even at a later period the glimpses which we catch of the activities of
the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show that it was not wholly a
dead letter. Priests accused of usury undergo correction at the hands of their
bishops.[88] Petitioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the
ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of bishops or
archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or usury have been begun
before “spiritual men.”[89] The records of ecclesiastical courts show that,
though sometimes commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the
secular courts, cases of breach of contract and usury continued,
nevertheless, to be settled by them.[90] The disreputable family of Marcroft
—William the father was a common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread
at Pentecost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day—is
punished by the ecclesiastical court of Whalley as it deserves.[91] At Ripon
a usurer and his victim are induced to settle the case out of court.[92] The
Commissary of London cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurariæ

pravitatis, on the ground that, having advanced four shillings on the
security of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence over and
above the principal, and suspends him when he does not appear in court.
[93] Nor did business of this kind cease with the Reformation. Cases of
usury were being heard by ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in
a great commercial center like the City of London it was still possible in the
reign of James I for the Bishop’s Commissary to be trying tradesmen for
“lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain.”[94]
It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an attempt was made
to raise a defensive barrier against the exactions of the money-lender. From
a very early date there was a school of opinion which held that, in view of
the various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be “colored,”
direct prohibition was almost necessarily impotent, and which favored the
policy of providing facilities for borrowing on more reasonable terms than
could be obtained from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to turn
the flank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the poor can raise
capital cheaply. Parishes, religious fraternities, gilds, hospitals and perhaps
monasteries lend corn, cattle and money.[95] In England, bishops are
organizing such loans with papal approval in the middle of the thirteenth
century,[96] and two centuries later, about 1462, the Franciscans lead the
movement for the creation of Monts de Piété, which, starting in Italy, spread
by the first half of the sixteenth century to France, Germany, and the Low
Countries, and, though never taken up in England—for the Reformation
intervened—supplied a topic of frequent comment and eulogy to English
writers on economic ethics.[97] The canon law on the subject of money-
lending underwent a steady development, caused by the necessity of
adapting it to the increasing complexity of business organization, down at
least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with which professional
opinion elaborated the code was itself a proof that considerable business—
and fees—were the result of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught.
The canonists, who had a bad reputation with the laity, were not, to put it
mildly, more innocent than other lawyers in the gentle art of making
business. The Italians, in particular, as was natural in the financial capital of
Europe, made the pace, and Italian canonists performed prodigies of legal
ingenuity. In England, on the other hand, either because Englishmen were
unusually virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, because “they do not
fear to make contracts on usury,”[98] or, most probably, because English

business was a conservative and slow-going affair, the English canonist
Lyndwood is content to quote a sentence from an English archbishop of the
thirteenth century and to leave it at that.[99]
But, however lawyers might distinguish and refine, the essential facts
were simple. The Church sees buying and selling, lending and borrowing,
as a simple case of neighborly or unneighborly conduct. Though a
rationalist like Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not
hateful to God,[100] it has a traditional prejudice against the arts by which
men—or at least laymen—acquire riches, and is apt to lump them together
under the ugly name of avarice. Merchants who organize a ring, or money-
lenders who grind the poor, it regards, not as business strategists, but as
nefandæ belluæ—monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and victualers “who
conspire wickedly together that none shall sell better cheap than another,”
and speculators “who buy up corn, meat and wine ... to amass money at the
cost of others,” they are “according to the laws of the Church no better than
common criminals.”[101] So, when the price of bread rises, or when the
London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit that they are “all poor and
caitiffs on account of their own simplicity, and if they would act on his
advice they would be rich and powerful,”[102] form a combine, to the great
loss and hardship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not console
themselves with the larger hope that the laws of supply and demand may
bring prices down again. Strong in the approval of all good Christians, they
stand the miller in the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of
the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on the sixth
commandment, choosing as his text the words of the Book of Proverbs,
“Give me neither riches nor poverty, but enough for my sustenance.”

III. THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY

Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic thought which
the sixteenth century inherited, and which it brought to the bewildering
changes in land tenure, in prices, in commercial and financial organization,
that made the age a watershed in economic development. It is evident that
the whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side, intensely
conservative. There was no question of progress, still less of any radical
social reconstruction. In the numerous heretical movements of the Middle

Ages social aspirations were often combined with criticisms of the luxury
and pomp of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The official Church, to which
independence of thought among the lower orders was but little less
abhorrent when it related to their temporal well-being than when it was
concerned with their eternal salvation, frowned upon these dangerous
speculations, and sometimes crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as
the most savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to the
most formidable of insurrections.
Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the static view,
which regarded the social order as a thing unalterable, to be accepted, not to
be improved. Except on rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the
conventional doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labor, the
hands to fight, and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore, they denounced
agitations, like the communal movement,[103] designed to overturn that
natural order, though the rise of the Free Cities was one of the glories of
medieval Europe and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in
civilization. They referred to questions of economic conduct, not because
they were anxious to promote reforms, but because they were concerned
with the maintenance of traditional standards of personal morality, of which
economic conduct formed an important part.
Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest, implicated to
the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on the side of agriculture and land
tenure. Itself the greatest of landowners, it could no more quarrel with the
feudal structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of mineral
owners today, can lead a crusade against royalties. The persecution of the
Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in defiance of the bull of John XXII, to
maintain St. Francis’ rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines
impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the teaching of
Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the Christian Church.
The basis of the whole medieval economic system, under which,
except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-tenths of the population
consisted of agriculturists, had been serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in
the sixteenth century with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture,
conservative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a vanished
age, which “knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie betwene the Lordes and
the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered his tenaunt as his childe, and the

tenaunts againe loved and obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the
father.”[104] Their idealization of the past is as misleading, as an account of
the conditions of previous centuries, as it is illuminating as a comment upon
those of their own. In reality, so far as the servile tenants, who formed the
bulk of medieval agriculturists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant
prosperity is, except here and there, a romantic myth, at which no one
would have been more surprised than the peasants themselves. The very
essence of feudal property was exploitation in its most naked and shameless
form, compulsory labor, additional corvées at the very moments when the
peasant’s labor was most urgently needed on his own holding, innumerable
dues and payments, the obligation to grind at the lord’s mill and bake at the
lord’s oven, the private justice of the lord’s court. The custom of the manor,
the scarcity of labor, and, in England, the steadily advancing encroachments
of the royal courts, blunted the edge of the system, and in fifteenth-century
England a prosperous yeomanry was rising on its ruins. But, during the
greater part of the Middle Ages, its cumulative weight had been,
nevertheless, immense. Those who lived under it had no illusions as to its
harshness. The first step which the peasant who had saved a little money
took was to buy himself out of the obligation to work on the lord’s
demesne. The Peasants’ Revolt in England, the Jacquerie in France and the
repeated risings of the German peasantry reveal a state of social
exasperation which has been surpassed in bitterness by few subsequent
movements.
It is natural to ask (though some writers on medieval economics refrain
from asking) what the attitude of religious opinion was towards serfdom.
And it is hardly possible to answer that question except by saying that, apart
from a few exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True, the
Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the serf should be
treated with humanity. True, it described the manumission of serfs as an act
of piety, like gifts to the poor. For serfs are not “living tools,” but men; in
the eyes of God all men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of
Heaven Lazarus is before Dives.[105] True, villeinage was a legal, not an
economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth century there were
serfs who were rich men. But to release the individual is not to condemn the
institution. Whatever “mad priests” might say and do, the official Church,
whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked with circumspection.

The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced serfdom.[106]
Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pronouncement against it. Aquinas
explains it as the result of sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on
economic grounds.[107] Almost all medieval writers appear to assume it or
excuse it. Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps somewhat more
conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to have been neither better
nor worse than other landlords. Rustica gens optima flens, pessima gaudens,
was a sentiment which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the
children of light concerned with rent rolls and farming profits, not less than
to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy were inextricably intermingled. When their chance came, John
Nameless, and John the Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to
have known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of St. Albans,
and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran riot on the estates of an abbot
of Kempten, with not less enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their
lay exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in Germany and
England, who appealed to the fact that “Christ has made all men free”;[108]
and in Germany, at least, their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to
them. The disappearance of serfdom—and, after all, it did not disappear
from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from Germany till the
nineteenth—was part of a general economic movement, with which the
Church had little to do, and which churchmen, as property-owners, had
sometimes resisted. 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. But, when the whole leaven
was mixed with the lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society,
but as society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it absorbed.
The result was a compromise—a compromise of which the critic can say,
“How much that was intolerable was accepted!” and the eulogist, “How
much that was intolerable was softened!”
Both critic and eulogist are right. For if religious opinion acquiesced in
much, it also claimed much, and the habit of mind which made the
medieval Church almost impotent when dealing with the serried abuses of
the medieval land system was precisely that which made it strong, at least

in theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the individual. In the
earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the protection of peaceful labor, for the
care of the poor, the unfortunate and the oppressed—for the ideal, at least,
of social solidarity against the naked force of violence and oppression. With
the growing complexity of economic civilization, it was confronted with
problems not easily handled by its traditional categories. But, if applied
capriciously, they were not renounced, and the world of economic morality,
which baffles us today, was in its turn converted by it into a new, though
embarrassing, opportunity. Whatever emphasis may be laid—and emphasis
can hardly be too strong—upon the gulf between theory and practice, the
qualifications stultifying principles, and the casuistry by which the work of
canonists, not less than of other lawyers, was disfigured, the endeavor to
draw the most commonplace of human activities and the least tractable of
human appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal system still
glows through it all with a certain tarnished splendor. When the distinction
between that which is permissible in private life and that which is
permissible in business offers so plausible an escape from the judgment
pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted that the law of
charity is binding on the second not less than on the first. When the
austerity of principles can be 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. To a generation disillusioned with free
competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency
more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical
suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the
Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of
the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in
society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be
described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and
combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its

attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and
textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon.
The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization
appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the
uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, than it has with
the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible
operations of the invisible hand.
The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to over-
emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in
medieval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of its
contribution consists, not in its particular theories as to prices and interest,
which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic
environment expose consumer and borrower to extortion, but in its
insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine,
and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast
and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to
the moral ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the
tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire
of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper
sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be
regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in
any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today as it seemed a
century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the criterion of
economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass,
for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and
temporary exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by
“natural law.”
When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the
problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The
experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was
discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who
preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something
of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd
than to idealize its practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the
attempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the
persistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the Pope was

anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination and the horror of decent men
when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be
contested.

CHAPTER II
THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth,
ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek
it to the hurt of their neighbours.”
Bucer, De Regno Christi.

Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural Lecture on
the Study of History, has said that “after many ages persuaded of the
headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by
usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth
century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with
hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.”[1] His reference was to the
new world revealed by learning, by science, and by discovery. But his
words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the
conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which
took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the
emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new
conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought.
The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which
associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no
complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a
preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was
static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined
by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic
movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the
strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical
jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical
discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of

antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the effect of the Reformation to say
that the principal causes making the age a watershed, from which new
streams of social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does not
reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled
to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency. The sixteenth
century was an age of social speculation for the same reason as the early
nineteenth—because it was an age of social dislocation. The retort of
conservative religious teachers to a spirit which seems to them the triumph
of Mammon produces the last great literary expression of the appeal to the
average conscience which had been made by an older social order. The
practical implications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are stated
more clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith, because they
are stated with the emphasis of a creed which is menaced.

I. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

The religious revolution of the age came on a world heaving with the
vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced since the fall of Rome.
Art and scientific curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship,
the scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic vision which
pierced the future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous shrine
of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and wisdom who were
its architects there moved a murky, but indispensable, figure. It was the
demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the
Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later, tanned
with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His
uncouth labors quarried the stones which Michael Angelo was to raise, and
sank deep in the Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by
Raphael.
For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded
the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic
energies that this mastery was proved and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal
society, the economic efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favored
spots, had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered raiders
were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed and irregular skirmishes
were to be merged in a grand struggle, on a front which stretched from the

Baltic to the Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought
the news of fresh triumphs. The general who marshaled the host and
launched the attack was economic power.
Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking through a
thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe, for a century before, with
the climax of the great Discoveries, the flood came on breast-high.
Whatever its truth as a judgment on the politics of the fifteenth century, the
conventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its economic
significance. It was in an age of political anarchy that the forces destined to
dominate the future tried their wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama
was prepared by the patient labor of Italian cartographers and Portuguese
seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and Watt by the obscure
experiments of nameless predecessors.
The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age were to
solve was material necessity. The Europe of the earlier Middle Ages, like
the world of the twentieth century, had been a closed circle. But it had been
closed, not by the growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of
ignorance; and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a single
economic system, has no space left for fresh expansion, for the former, with
the Mediterranean as its immemorial pivot, expansion had hardly begun.
Tapping the wealth of the East by way of the narrow apertures in the
Levant, it resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its commercial
strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.
As was the general scheme, so were the details; inelastic in its
external, Europe was hardly more flexible in its internal, relations. Its
primary unit had been the village; and the village, a community of agrarian
shareholders fortified by custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous
unanimity the disorderly appetites which menaced its traditional routine
with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay the greater,
more privileged, village called the borough, and the brethren of borough
and gild had turned on the foreign devil from upland and valley a face of
flint. Above both were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an
economic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a sound
reason for harrying a competitor that he was a Florentine or a man of the
Emperor. The privileged colony with its depôt, the Steel-yard of the
Hanseatic League, the Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory

of the English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a wall of
economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey or China, was carried
on under capitulations.
This narrow framework had been a home. In the fifteenth century it
was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed against the walls;
restless appetites gnawed and fretted wherever a crack in the surface offered
room for erosion. Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last
of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly was felt to be
intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico and the silver of Potosi
flooded Europe with treasure, the mines of Germany and the Tyrol were
yielding increasing, if still slender, streams of bullion, which stimulated
rather than allayed its thirst.[2] It was not the lords of great estates, but
eager and prosperous peasants, who in England first nibbled at commons
and undermined the manorial custom, behind which, as behind a dyke, their
small savings had been accumulated. It was not great capitalists, but
enterprising gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity the
basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who fled, precocious
individualists, from the fellowship of borough and craft, that they might
grow to what stature they pleased in rural isolation. It was not even the
Discoveries which first began the enormous tilt of economic power from
south and east to north and west. The records of German and English trade
suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a century before the
Discoveries been growing in wealth and civilization,[3] and for a century
after them English economic development was to be as closely wedded to
its continental connections as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape, nor
Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores of Zayton and
Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise to the Italian monopolist, then
pressed home with ever greater eagerness to turn the flank of the Turk, as
his strangle-hold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Discoveries were
neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the disinterested curiosity of
science. They were the climax of almost a century of patient economic
effort. They were as practical in their motive as the steam-engine.
The result was not the less sensational because it had been long
prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less profound than that
of three centuries later, the new world of the sixteenth century took its
character from the outburst of economic energy in which it had been born.

Like the nineteenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an
impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of financial power on a scale
unknown before, the rise, amid fierce social convulsions, of new classes
and the depression of old, the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas
amid struggles not less bitter.
It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensations, which
were recorded in the letter-books[4] of business men as well as in the state
papers of Governments. The decline of Venice and of the south German
cities which had distributed the products that Venice imported, and which
henceforward must either be marooned far from the new trade routes or
break out to the sea, as some of them did, by way of the Low Countries; the
new economic imperialism of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist
enterprise in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no
longer local but international, and based, not merely on exclusive
privileges, but on the power of massed capital to drive from the field all
feebler competitors; a revolution in prices which shattered all customary
relationships; the collapse of medieval rural society in a nightmare of
peasants’ wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the
Middle Ages to a new money-power; the triumph of the State and its
conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the Church—all were crowded into
less than two generations. A man who was born when the Council of Basel
was sitting saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the
English monasteries. At the first date Portuguese explorers had hardly
passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had been the master of an
Indian Empire for almost a generation. In the intervening three-quarters of a
century the whole framework of European civilization had been
transformed.
Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Germany, or the
Low Countries, English life was an economic back-water. But even its
stagnant shallows were stirred by the eddy and rush of the continental
whirlpool. When Henry VII came to the throne, the economic organization
of the country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif. When Henry
VIII died, full of years and sin, some of the main characteristics which were
to distinguish it till the advent of steam-power and machinery could already,
though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be unlocked was

colonial expansion, and forty years later the first experiments in colonial
expansion had begun.
The phenomenon which dazzled contemporaries was the swift start
into apparent opulence, first of Portugal and then of Spain. The nemesis of
parasitic wealth was not discerned, and it was left for the cynical
rationalism of an ambassador of that commercial republic, in comparison
with whose hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddlesome
children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish Empire lay, not in
America, but in the sodden clay of the water-logged Netherlands.[5] The
justice of the criticism was revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the
back of the most liberal and progressive community of the age, completed
her own ruin by sacking the treasury from which, far more than from
Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings of that long agony,
in which the powerhouse of European enterprise was to be struck with
paralysis, lay still in the future, and later generations of Spaniards looked
back with pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V as a
golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole, however lacerated
by political and religious struggles, seemed to have solved the most
pressing of the economic problems which had haunted her in the later
Middle Ages. During a thousand years of unresting struggle with marsh and
forest and moor she had colonized her own waste places. That tremendous
achievement almost accomplished, she now turned to the task of colonizing
the world. No longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic
expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred years, and which
only in the twentieth century was to show signs of drawing towards its
close. Once a year she was irrigated with the bullion of America, once a
year she was enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of
mere experiment over, and the new connections firmly established, she
appeared to be in sight of an economic stability based on broader
foundations than ever before.
Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure-house of East and
West. But it was not Portugal, with her tiny population, and her empire that
was little more than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor
Spain, for centuries an army on the march, and now staggering beneath the
responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and
with an incapacity for economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, who

reaped the material harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the
one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not
retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through their fingers, they were
little more than the political agents of minds more astute and characters
better versed in the arts of peace. Every period and society has some
particular center, or institution, or social class, in which the characteristic
qualities of its genius seem to be fixed and embodied. In the Europe of the
early Renaissance the heart of the movement had been Italy. In the Europe
of the Reformation it was the Low Countries. The economic capital of the
new civilization was Antwerp. The institution which best symbolized its
eager economic energies was the international money-market and produce-
exchange. Its typical figure, the paymaster of princes, was the international
financier.
Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and war, the spirit of
the Netherlands found its purest incarnation in Erasmus, a prophet without
sackcloth and a reformer untouched by heat or fury, to the universal
internationalism of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a
pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of that
cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the international idea
when outlawed by every other power in Europe, Antwerp, “a home
common to all nations,” was the most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a
center of learning by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a country
where painting was almost a national industry, it was at once the shrine to
which masters like Cranach, Dürer and Holbein made their pilgrimage of
devotion, and an asylum which offered to the refugees of less happy
countries a haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to stamp
out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life, as in the glitter of its
material prosperity, the thinker and the reformer found a spiritual home,
where the energies of the new age seemed gathered for a bound into that
land of happiness and dreams, for the scene of which More, who knew his
Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the garden of his lodgings at
Antwerp.
The economic preëminence of Antwerp owed much to the industrial
region behind it, from which the woollen and worsteds of Valenciennes and
Tournai, the tapestries of Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and
the munitions of the Black Country round Liége, poured in an unceasing

stream on to its quays.[6] But Antwerp was a European, rather than a
Flemish, metropolis. Long the competitor of Bruges for the reception of the
two great currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic, which
met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the fifteenth century she
had crushed her rival. The Hanse League maintained a depôt at Antwerp;
Italian banking firms in increasing numbers opened businesses there; the
English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepôt through which English
cloth, long its principal import, was distributed to northern Europe; the
copper market moved from Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came
the great Discoveries, and Antwerp, the first city to tap the wealth, not of an
inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position of unchallenged
preëminence almost unique in European history. The long sea-roads which
ran east and west met and ended in its harbors. The Portuguese Government
made it in 1503 the depôt of the Eastern spice trade. From the accession of
Charles V it was the commercial capital of the Spanish Empire, and, in spite
of protests that the precious metals were leaving Spain, the market for
American silver. Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit,
brought finance in its train. The commercial companies and banking-houses
of south Germany turned from the dwindling trade across the Alps, to make
Antwerp the base for financial operations of unexampled magnitude and
complexity.[7]
In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of society, like
new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Professor Pirenne has
contrasted the outlook of the medieval middle class, intent on the
conservation of corporate and local privileges, with that of the new
plutocracy of the sixteenth century, with its international ramifications, its
independence of merely local interests, its triumphant vindication of the
power of the capitalist to dispense with the artificial protection of gild and
borough and carve his own career.[8] “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign
merchants at Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to interfere
with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the cause of the prosperity
of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade there.”[9] Swept into
wealth on the crest of a wave of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a
century before would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal
bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all precedents, a policy of
practical individualism, which would have been met in any other city by
rebellion, making terms with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian

monarchy, which were fought by their more conservative neighbors,
lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls, welcoming the technical
improvements which elsewhere were resisted, taming the turbulent
independence of the gilds, and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the
new Exchange, with its significant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum
cuiusque gentis ac linguae.
For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of
commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which
made financial capitalism as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as
industrial capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in
the mere expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A steady flow of
capital was needed to finance the movement of the produce handled on the
world-market, such as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the
impecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the
water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious metals, and the
cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of
bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the
growth of an international banking system mobilized immense resources at
the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the European
money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of
international currency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great
financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines
in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from
Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings
invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and,
in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London, had
developed by the middle of the century a considerable class of financial
specialists, and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of
the present day. They formed together the departments of an international
clearing-house, where bills could be readily discounted, drafts on any
important city could be obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost
every nationality changed hands.[10]
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.
Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe
during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to
exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material
fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and
ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were
ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reëstablished them by
political art.
The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of
superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the
age, “the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not
beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to
all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing
them in its desire of doing it.”[11] The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517,
were only too prophetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the
sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In
the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation
alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bravos as malicious and
mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and
posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of
Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English
Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of
financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands
including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including the financial
capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the
seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end
of it the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from
which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The
victors compared their position with that of the vanquished, and
congratulated themselves on their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask
what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, but
only peace.
It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole,
done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the
mobilization of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the

fierce nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder
and cannon. The centralized States which were rising in the age of the
Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial situation. It
sprang from the combination of modern administrative and military
methods with medieval systems of finance. They entrusted to bureaucracies
work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure,
or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were constantly at
war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of masses of
professional infantry and artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by
the inspiration of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of printing
inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized
industry. Government after Government, undeterred, with rare exceptions,
by the disasters of its neighbors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of
which was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see
the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a
Henry VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade.
They sold offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the taxpayer
beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent
gorgeously as income property which should have been treated as capital.
They parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their
successors.
These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits. What remained,
when they were exhausted, was the money-market, and to the rulers of the
money-market sooner or later all States came. Their dependence on the
financier was that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less
disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great Powers of
Europe. Publicists might write that the new Messiah was the Prince, and
reformers that the Prince was Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike,
financing impartially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis,
Charles and Philip, stood 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.
The Welsers had invested in the Portuguese voyage of 1505 to the East
Indies, financed an expedition, half commercial, half military, to Venezuela
in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between Lisbon, Antwerp and
south Germany, were partners in silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and
Hungary, and had establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in
the principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The careers of the
Hochstetters, Haugs, Meutings and Imhofs were much the same. The
Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans to Maximilian, had acquired enormous
concessions of mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn
by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and quicksilver mines in
Spain, and controlled banking and commercial businesses in Italy, and,
above all, at Antwerp. They advanced the money which made Albrecht of
Brandenburg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending their
agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise money by indulgences
and taking half the proceeds; provided the funds with which Charles V
bought the imperial crown, after an election conducted with the publicity of
an auction and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the debt
was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a necessitous client; 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 per cent. for the preceding sixteen years.[12]

II. LUTHER

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. Mercantilist
thinkers resharpened an old economic weapon for the armory of princes.
Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy, received a new impetus

from the controversies of practical men on the rise in prices, on currency,
and on the foreign exchanges.
The question of the attitude which religious opinion would assume
towards these new forces was momentous. It might hail the outburst of
economic enterprise as an instrument of wealth and luxury, like the Popes
who revelled in the rediscovery of classical culture. It might denounce it as
a relapse into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned with a
shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It might attempt to harness
the expanding energies to its own conception of man’s spiritual end, like the
Schoolmen who had stretched old formulæ to cover the new forces of
capital and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of
Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate itself from the
stiff ecclesiastical framework of the Middle Ages. The most systematic
treatment of economic questions was still that contained in the work of
canonists, and divines continued to pronounce judgment on problems of
property and contract with the same assurance as on problems of theology.
Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and defy its
conclusions. But it was rarely, as yet, that they attacked the assumption that
questions of economic conduct belonged to the province of the
ecclesiastical jurist. Bellarmin complained with some asperity of the
intolerable complexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious
merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish dealers on the
Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone to conscientious scruples, were
sufficiently deferential to ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to
Paris in order to consult the theologians of the University as to the
compatibility of speculative exchange business with the canon law.[13]
When Eck, later famous as the champion who crossed swords with Luther,
travelled to Italy, in order to seek from the University of Bologna
authoritative confirmation of his daring argument that interest could
lawfully be charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group of
capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it worth while to finance
an expedition undertaken in quest of so profitable a truth.[14]
Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense expansion
of commerce and finance, rather than of industry, and offering opportunities
of speculative gain on a scale unknown before, the new economic
civilization inevitably gave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably,

since both the friends and the enemies of the Reformation identified it with
social change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the protagonists in
the debate. In Germany, where social revolution had been fermenting for
half a century, it seemed at last to have come. The rise in prices, an enigma
which baffled contemporaries till Bodin published his celebrated tract in
1569,[15] produced a storm of indignation against monopolists. Since the
rising led by Hans Böheim in 1476, hardly a decade had passed without a
peasants’ revolt. Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and peasant, had
become a battle-cry. From city after city municipal authorities, terrified by
popular demands for the repression of the extortioner, consulted universities
and divines as to the legitimacy of interest, and universities and divines
gave, as is their wont, a loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon
expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending and prices.[16]
Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and delivered sermons on the same
subject.[17] Bucer sketched a scheme of social reconstruction for a
Christian prince.[18] Bullinger produced a classical exposition of social
ethics in the Decades which he dedicated to Edward VI.[19] Luther
preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,[20] and said that it was
time “to put a bit in the mouth of the holy company of the Fuggers.”[21]
Zwingli and Œcolampadius devised plans for the reorganization of poor
relief.[22] Above all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the
Gospel and its frightful catastrophe, not only terrified Luther into his
outburst: “Whoso can, strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly ...
such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with
bloodshed than another with prayer”;[23] it also helped to stamp on
Lutheranism an almost servile reliance on the secular authorities. In
England there was less violence, but hardly less agitation, and a similar
flood of writing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet, Crowley, Lever, Becon,
Sandys and Jewel—to mention but the best-known names—all contributed
to the debate.[24] 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. But differences of social theory did not coincide

with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of
teaching, alike in Germany and in England, is its conservatism. Where
questions of social morality were involved, men whose names are a symbol
of religious revolution stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways,
appealed to medieval authorities, and reproduced in popular language the
doctrines of the Schoolmen.
A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which has found
acceptance in certain quarters has represented the Reformation as the
triumph of the commercial spirit over the traditional social ethics of
Christendom. Something like it is of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540
Cranmer wrote to Oziander protesting against the embarrassment caused to
reformers in England by the indulgence to moral laxity, in the matter alike
of economic transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given by reformers
in Germany.[25] By the seventeenth century the hints had become a theory
and an argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the first
theologians to defend extortion,[26] and it only remained for a pamphleteer
to adapt the indictment to popular consumption, by writing bluntly that “it
grew to a proverb that usury was the brat of heresy.”[27] That the revolt
from Rome synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a period
of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long argument needed to
show that, like other revolutions, it had its seamy side. What is sometimes
suggested, however, is not merely a coincidence of religious and economic
movements, but a logical connection between changes in economic
organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied that the bad
social practice of the age was the inevitable expression of its religious
innovations, and that, if the reformers did not explicitly teach a
conscienceless individualism, individualism was, at least, the natural
corollary of their teaching. In the eighteenth century, which had as little
love for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish superstition as
for their political theory, that view was advanced as eulogy. In our own day,
the wheel seems almost to have come full circle. What was then a matter for
congratulation is now often an occasion for criticism. There are writers by
whom the Reformation is attacked, as inaugurating a period of
unscrupulous commercialism, which had previously been held in check, it
is suggested, by the teaching of the Church.

These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the grand religious
struggles of the age have their significance. But the obiter dicta of an
acrimonious controversy throw more light on the temper of the combatants
than on the substance of their contentions, and the issues were too complex
to be adequately expressed in the simple antitheses which appealed to
partisans. If capitalism means the direction of industry by the owners of
capital for their own pecuniary gain, and the social relationships which
establish themselves between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom
they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale both in medieval
Italy and in medieval Flanders. If by the capitalist spirit is meant the temper
which is prepared to sacrifice all moral scruples to the pursuit of profit, it
had been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle Ages. It
was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal and Spain, not the less
imposing, if more solid, achievements of the Protestant powers, which
impressed contemporaries down to the Armada. It was predominantly
Catholic cities which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic
bankers who were its leading financiers.
Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with indulgence
on the temper which attacked restraints on economic enterprise better
founded. If it is true that the Reformation released forces which were to act
as a solvent of the traditional attitude of religious thought to social and
economic issues, it did so without design, and against the intention of most
reformers. In reality, however sensational the innovations in economic
practice which accompanied the expansion of financial capitalism in the
sixteenth century, the development of doctrine on the subject of economic
ethics was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the less
foundation does there seem to be for the view that the stream plunged into
vacancy over the precipice of the religious revolution. To think of the
abdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economic activity
and social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from Rome, is to
antedate a movement which was not finally accomplished for another
century and a half, and which owed as much to changes in economic and
political organization, as it did to developments in the sphere of religious
thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all shades of opinion
still searched the Bible, the Fathers and the Corpus Juris Canonici for light
on practical questions of social morality, and, as far as the first generation
of reformers was concerned, there was no intention, among either

Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules of good
conscience, which were supposed to control economic transactions and
social relations. If anything, indeed, their tendency was to interpret them
with a more rigorous severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the
Renaissance, and, in particular, against the avarice which was thought to be
peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the passion for regeneration and
purification, which was one element in the Reformation, was directed
against the corruptions of society as well as of the Church. Princes and
nobles and business men conducted themselves after their kind, and fished
eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious leaders was to
reconstruct, not merely doctrine and ecclesiastical government, but conduct
and institutions, on a pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive
Christianity.
The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden age of pristine
innocence found at once its most vehement, and its most artless, expression
in the writings of the German reformers. Like the return to nature in the
eighteenth century, it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society
disillusioned with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization. The
prosperity of Augsburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Ulm and Frankfurt, and
even of lesser cities like Rotenburg and Freiburg, had long been the
admiration of all observers. Commanding the great trade routes across the
Alps and down the Rhine, they had held a central position, which they were
to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and Lisbon, and were not to
recover till the creation of a railway system in the nineteenth century made
Germany again the entrepôt between western Europe and Russia, Austria,
Italy and the near East. But the expansion of commerce, which brought
affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accompanied by the growth of
an acute social malaise, which left its mark on literature and popular
agitation, even before the Discoveries turned Germany from a highway into
a back-water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise to a
position of overwhelming preëminence of the new interests based on the
control of capital and credit. In the earlier Middle Ages capital had been the
adjunct and ally of the personal labor of craftsman and artisan. In the
Germany of the fifteenth century, as long before in Italy, it had ceased to be
a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent
vitality, it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dictate economic
organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements.

Under the impact of these new forces, while the institutions of earlier
ages survived in form, their spirit and operation were transformed. In the
larger cities the gild organization, once a barrier to the encroachments of the
capitalist, became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate his
power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the brethren into a
plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind barriers which none but the
wealthy craftsman could scale, and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent
for their livelihood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and
alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding morass of
hopeless pauperism.[28] The peasantry suffered equally from the spread of
a commercial civilization into the rural districts and from the survival of
ancient agrarian servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches of the
towns invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up rents and
fines by their competition. But, while in England the customary tenant was
shaking off the onerous obligations of villeinage, and appealing, not without
success, to the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south Germany,
where serfdom was to last till the middle of the nineteenth century, found
corvées redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights
curtailed, for the benefit of an impoverished noblesse, which saw in the
exploitation of the peasant the only means of maintaining its social position
in face of the rapidly growing wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized
on the now fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal sanction
to its harshest exactions.[29]
On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came the
commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries. Their effect was to
open a seemingly limitless field to economic enterprise, and to sharpen the
edge of every social problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice
the wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south Germany
either withdrew from the trade across the Alps, to specialize, like the
Fuggers, in banking and finance, or organized themselves into companies,
which handled at Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive
to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their own resources.
The modern world has seen in America the swift rise of combinations
controlling output and prices by the power of massed capital. A somewhat
similar movement took place on the narrower stage of European commerce
in the generation before the Reformation. Its center was Germany, and it
was defended and attacked by arguments almost identical with those which

are familiar today. The exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in
bulk, drove weaker competitors out of the field, “as a great pike swallows
up a lot of little fishes,” and plundered the consumer, were the
commonplaces of the social reformer.[30] The advantages of large-scale
organization and the danger of interfering with freedom of enterprise were
urged by the companies. The problem was on several occasions brought
before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who observed that it
is not possible to unscramble eggs had already been made, and its decrees,
passed in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do
not seem to have been more effective than modern legislation on the same
subject.
The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such conditions produced
found expression in numerous schemes of social reconstruction, from the
so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the
fifteenth century, to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.[31] In the
age of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his Divine
Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants’ companies, such as
those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and Welsers, should be abolished; by
Hutten, who classed merchants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as
public robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the monopolists
were more detestable than Jews, and should be exterminated like wolves;
and, above all, by Luther.[32]
Luther’s utterances on social morality are the occasional explosions of
a capricious volcano, with only a rare flash of light amid the torrent of
smoke and flame, and it is idle to scan them for a coherent and consistent
doctrine. Compared with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like
St. Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions make an
impression of naïveté, as of an impetuous but ill-informed genius,
dispensing with the cumbrous embarrassments of law and logic, to evolve a
system of social ethics from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated
consciousness.
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. But
there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from ignorance, for he was
versed in scholastic philosophy, but from a conception which made the
learning of the schools appear trivial or mischievous.
“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism, “constitutes
treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the
means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the
enjoyment of Paradise.”[33] It was this doctrine that all things have their
price—future salvation as much as present felicity—which scandalized men
who could not be suspected of disloyalty to the Church, and which gave
their most powerful argument to the reformers. Their outlook on society had
this in common with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both was
the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the majestic bar of an
uncorrupted past. Of that revolutionary conservatism Luther, who hated the
economic individualism of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the
supreme example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the merchant
and financier is the same as his attitude towards the commercialization of
religion. When he looks at the Church in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by
the tribute which flows to the new Babylon. When he looks at German
social life, he finds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which
incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the Fuggers, to the
avarice and corruption of Rome. The exploitation of the Church by the
Papacy, and the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by the
capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both
are essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the same. It is
the religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be an empire, and
become a congregation of believers. 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. Luther,
who has earned eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would

have been horrified, could he have anticipated the remoter deductions to be
derived from his argument. Wamba said that to forgive as a Christian is not
to forgive at all, and a cynic who urged that the Christian freedom
expounded by Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed would
have more affinity with the thought of Luther himself, than the libertarian
who saw in his teaching a plea for treating questions of economic conduct
and social organization as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s revolt against
authority was an attack, not on its rigor, but on its laxity and its corruption.
His individualism was not the greed of the plutocrat, eager to snatch from
the weakness of public authority an opportunity for personal gain. It was the
ingenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers for a society in which
order and fraternity will reign without “the tedious, stale, forbidding ways
of custom, law and statute,” because they well up in all their native purity
from the heart.
Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not less than
Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church-civilization, in which all
departments of life, the State and society, education and science, law,
commerce and industry, were to be regulated in accordance with the law of
God.[34] That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on social
issues. So far from accepting the view which was afterwards to prevail, that
the world of business is a closed compartment with laws of its own, and that
the religious teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for
the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves for that plausible heresy
denunciations hardly less bitter than those directed against Rome. The text
of his admonitions is always, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of
the Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a formal, legalistic,
calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which does not need to be
organized by law, because it is the spontaneous expression of a habit of
love. To restore is to destroy. The comment on Luther’s enthusiasm for the
simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the artificial chicaneries of
ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came in the thunder of revolution. It
was the declaration of the peasants, that “the message of Christ, the
promised Messiah, the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and
concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées, and enclosures.[35]
The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a theory of
society more medieval than that held by many thinkers in the Middle Ages,

since it dismissed the commercial developments of the last two centuries as
a relapse into paganism. The foundation of it was partly the Bible, partly a
vague conception of a state of nature in which men had not yet been
corrupted by riches, partly the popular protests against a commercial
civilization which were everywhere in the air, and which Luther, a man of
the people, absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naïveté, even while
he denounced the practical measures proposed to give effect to them. Like
some elements in the Catholic reaction of the twentieth century, the
Protestant reaction of the sixteenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant
prosperity. The social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and
capitalism, has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of Mr.
Belloc and Mr. Chesterton.
For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for the anxious
provision which accumulates for the future, Luther had all the distrust of a
peasant and a monk. Christians should earn their living in the sweat of their
brow, take no thought for the morrow, marry young and trust Heaven to
provide for its own. Like Melanchthon, Luther thought that the most
admirable life was that of the peasant, for it was least touched by the
corroding spirit of commercial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive
home the lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.[36] The
labor of the craftsman is honorable, for he serves the community in his
calling; the honest smith or shoemaker is a priest. Trade is permissible,
provided that it is confined to the exchange of necessaries, and that the
seller demands no more than will compensate him for his labor and risk.
The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for they destroy the
unity of the body of which Christians are members. The grand author and
maintainer of both is Rome. For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St.
Peter, who lives in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has
fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders, mischievous
alike in their practice and by their example, cover the land with a horde of
beggars. Pilgrimages, saints’ days and monasteries are an excuse for
idleness and must be suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or
compelled to labor, and each town must organize charity for the support of
the honest poor.[37]
Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of status and
subordination, though he knocked away the ecclesiastical rungs in the

ladder. The combination of religious radicalism and economic conservatism
is not uncommon, and in the traditional conception of society, as an
organism of unequal classes with different rights and functions, the father of
all later revolutions found an arsenal of arguments against change, which he
launched with almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasping
monopolists. His vindication of the spiritual freedom of common men, and
his outspoken abuse of the German princes, had naturally been taken at
their face value by serfs groaning under an odious tyranny, and, when the
inevitable rising came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another age,
was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to him a hideous parody
of truths which were both sacred and his own. As fully convinced as any
medieval writer that serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his
alarm at the attempt to abolish it was intensified by a political theory which
exalted the absolutism of secular authorities, and a religious doctrine which
drew a sharp antithesis between the external order and the life of the spirit.
The demand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because “Christ has
delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well as the great, without
exception, by the shedding of His precious blood,”[38] horrified him, partly
as portending an orgy of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be
confused with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation movement,
partly because (as he thought) it degraded the Gospel by turning a spiritual
message into a program of social reconstruction. “This article would make
all men equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an external
worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom cannot exist without
inequality of persons. Some must be free, others serfs, some rulers, others
subjects. As St. Paul says, ‘Before Christ both master and slave are
one.’”[39] 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. No contrast could be more striking than that
between his social theory and the outlook of Calvin. Calvin, with all his
rigor, accepted the main institutions of a commercial civilization, and
supplied a creed to the classes which were to dominate the future. The eyes
of Luther were on the past. He saw no room in a Christian society for those

middle classes whom an English statesman once described as the natural
representatives of the human race. International trade, banking and credit,
capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic forces, which, next to
his own revolution, were to be the mightiest solvent of the medieval world,
seem to him to belong in their very essence to the kingdom of darkness
which the Christian will shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law,
only to reaffirm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it had been
used to enforce. When he discusses economic questions at length, as in his
Long Sermon on Usury in 1520, or his tract On Trade and Usury in 1524,
his doctrines are drawn from the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical
jurisprudence, unsoftened by the qualifications with which canonists
themselves had attempted to adapt its rigors to the exigencies of practical
life.
In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional doctrines. “A
man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I
will sell my wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a
work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as
though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because thy selling is a
work that thou performest to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within
such law and conscience that thou mayest practice it without harm or injury
to him.”[40] If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it.
If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation. If he has to
determine it himself, he must consider the income needed to maintain him
in his station in life, his labor, and his risk, and must settle it accordingly.
He must not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner the
market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred
payments.
On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the orthodox
teaching. He denounces the concessions to practical necessities made by the
canonists. “The greatest misfortune of the German nation is easily the
traffic in interest.... The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his
sanction to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.”[41] Not content
with insisting that lending ought to be free, he denounces the payment of
interest as compensation for loss and the practice of investing in rent-
charges, both of which the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse
usurers the sacrament, absolution, and Christian burial. With such a code of

ethics, Luther naturally finds the characteristic developments of his
generation—the luxury trade with the East, international finance,
speculation on the exchanges, combinations and monopolies—shocking
beyond measure. “Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and
India and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels and spices
... and drain the land and people of their money, should not be permitted....
Of combinations I ought really to say much, but the matter is endless and
bottomless, full of mere greed and wrong.... Who is so stupid as not to see
that combinations are mere outright monopolies, which even heathen civil
laws—I will say nothing of divine right and Christian law—condemn as a
plainly harmful thing in all the world?”[42]
So resolute an enemy of license might have been expected to be the
champion of law. It might have been supposed that Luther, with his hatred
of the economic appetites, would have hailed as an ally the restraints by
which, at least in theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of
course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical jurisprudence
and discipline was the opposite. It was one, not merely of indifference, but
of repugnance. The prophet who scourged with whips the cupidity of the
individual chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by
society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned a shattering
dialectic on the corporate organization of the Christian Church. In most
ages, so tragic a parody of human hopes are human institutions, there have
been some who have loved mankind, while hating almost everything that
men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived at a time when
the contrast between a sublime theory and a hideous reality had long been
intolerable, is the supreme example. He preaches a selfless charity, but he
recoils with horror from every institution by which an attempt had been
made to give it a concrete expression. He reiterates the content of medieval
economic teaching with a literalness rarely to be found in the thinkers of the
later Middle Ages, but for the rules and ordinances in which it had received
a positive, if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but abhorrence. God
speaks to the soul, not through the mediation of the priesthood or of social
institutions built up by man, but solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and
in the heart alone. Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of
sense are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men, that it
may enter into communion with its Maker. The grace that is freely
bestowed upon it may overflow in its social relations; but those relations

can supply no particle of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception
of grace. Like the primeval confusion into which the fallen Angel plunged
on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of brute matter, a wilderness of dry
bones, a desert unsanctified and incapable of contributing to sanctification.
“It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever
name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian
righteousness or liberty.... One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life,
justification and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God,
the Gospel of Christ.”[43]
The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and
learning to love God through a growing love for men, may not, at first sight,
appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It
was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it
was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only
good works, but sacraments and the Church itself unnecessary. The question
of the religious significance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity
of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his conclusions, is
one for theologians. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since
salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that
alone, the whole fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between
the individual soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned hierarchy,
systematized activities, corporate institutions—drops away, as the
blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The medieval conception of
the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of
members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was
shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity
were now set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer
completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of
society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were
its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess, even remotely, a religious
significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it.
Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or
objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and in his
own conscience. In one sense, the distinction between the secular and the
religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularized; all men
stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance,
which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions, was so enormous

that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became
more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was
their inner life alone which could partake of sanctification. The world was
divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The
division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.
The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be stated by
subsequent generations. Luther himself was not consistent. He believed that
it was possible to maintain the content of medieval social teaching, while
rejecting its sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the fruit of
salvation as vehemently as he denied that they could contribute to its
attainment. In his writings on social questions emphasis on the traditional
Christian morality is combined with a repudiation of its visible and
institutional framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between
spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his intention, at least, is
not to jettison the rules of good conscience in economic matters, but to
purify them by an immense effort of simplification. His denunciation of
medieval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals and pilgrimages,
while it drew its point from practical abuses, sprang inevitably from his
repudiation of the idea that merit could be acquired by the operation of
some special machinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the ordinary
duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of the canon law was the
natural corollary of his belief that the Bible was an all-sufficient guide to
action. While not rejecting ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is
impatient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to
teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has the Scriptures
and his own conscience; let him listen to them. “There can be no better
instructions in ... all transactions in temporal goods than that every man
who is to deal with his neighbor present to himself these commandments:
‘What ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto them,’ and
‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ If these were followed out, then everything
would instruct and arrange itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial
actions would be required; all things would quietly and simply be set to
rights, for every one’s heart and conscience would guide him.”[44]
“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it. But how if it
does not? Is emotion really an adequate substitute for reason, and rhetoric
for law? Is it possible to solve the problem which social duties present to

the individual by informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the
inner life is the sphere of religion, does it necessarily follow that the
external order is simply irrelevant to it? To wave aside the world of
institutions and law as alien to that of the spirit—is not this to abandon,
instead of facing, the task of making Christian morality prevail, for which
medieval writers, with their conception of a hierarchy of values related to a
common end, had attempted, however inadequately, to discover a formula?
A Catholic rationalist had answered by anticipation Luther’s contemptuous
dismissal of law and learning, when he urged that it was useless for the
Church to prohibit extortion, unless it was prepared to undertake the
intellectual labor of defining the transactions to which the prohibition
applied.[45] It was a pity that Pecock’s douche of common sense was not of
a kind which could be appreciated by Luther. He denounced covetousness
in general terms, with a surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted
with a request for advice on the specific question whether the authorities of
Dantzig shall put down usury, he retreats into the clouds. “The preacher
shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to each man to follow his
own conscience. 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.”[46]
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. But the remedy for bad law is good law, not lawlessness; and
casuistry is merely the application of general principles to particular cases,
which is involved in any living system of jurisprudence, whether
ecclesiastical or secular. If the principles are not to be applied, on the
ground that they are too sublime to be soiled by contact with the gross
world of business and politics, what remains of them? 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.... Therefore the first care of

every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and to
strengthen his faith alone more and more.”[47] The logic of Luther’s
religious premises was more potent for posterity than his attachment to the
social ethics of the past, and evolved its own inexorable conclusions in spite
of them. 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.
Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many.
He himself was conscious that he had left the world of secular
activities perilously divorced from spiritual restraints. He met the difficulty,
partly with an admission that it was insuperable, as one who should exult in
the majestic unreasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees
might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, be obeyed; partly with an
appeal to the State to occupy the province of social ethics, for which his
philosophy could find no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked, ‘Who
then can be saved, and where shall we find Christians? For in this fashion
no merchandising would remain on earth.’... You see it is as I said, that
Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is
necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and
commerce and common interests be destroyed.... No one need think that the
world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and
bloody.”[48]
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.

III. CALVIN

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. Unlike the Lutheranism from
which it sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in different countries,
became an international movement, which brought, not peace, but a sword,
and the path of which was strewn with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had
been socially conservative, deferential to established political authorities,
the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic, piety, Calvinism was an
active and radical force. It was a creed which sought, not merely to purify
the individual, but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society by
penetrating every department of life, public as well as private, with the
influence of religion.
Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism, this is not the
place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of society, it possessed from
the beginning one characteristic which was both novel and important. It
assumed an economic organization which was relatively advanced, and
expounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect the teaching of
the Puritan moralists who derive most directly from Calvin is in marked
contrast with that both of medieval theologians and of Luther. The
difference is not merely one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on
which the discussion is conducted. The background, not only of most
medieval social theory, but also of Luther and his English contemporaries,
is the traditional stratification of rural society. It is a natural, rather than a
money, economy, consisting of the petty dealings of peasants and craftsmen
in the small market-town, where industry is carried on for the subsistence of
the household and the consumption of wealth follows hard upon the
production of it, and where commerce and finance are occasional incidents,
rather than the forces which keep the whole system in motion. When they
criticize economic abuses, it is precisely against departures from that
natural state of things—against the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless
competition, which disturb the stability of the existing order with clamorous
economic appetites—that their criticism is directed.
These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of unscrupulous
commercialism, and they left some trace on the writings of the Swiss
reformers. Zwingli, for example, who, in his outlook on society, stood
midway between Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that

private property originates in sin; warns the rich that they can hardly enter
the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the Councils of Constance and Basel
—“assembled, forsooth, at the bidding of the Holy Ghost”—for showing
indulgence to the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while
emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State sanctions it,
condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of God.[49] Of the attempts
made at Zürich and Geneva to repress extortion something is said below.
But these full-blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by
their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was the duty of the
individual to comply with the secular legislation by which interest was
permitted, and already, when they were uttered, they had ceased to represent
the conclusion of the left wing of the Reformed Churches.
For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began their voyage
lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who saw economic life with the eyes
of a peasant and a mystic, they approached it as men of affairs, disposed
neither to idealize the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community, nor to
regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist enterprise in commerce and
finance. Like early Christianity and modern socialism, Calvinism was
largely an urban movement; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried
from country to country partly by emigrant traders and workmen; and its
stronghold was precisely in those social groups to which the traditional
scheme of social ethics, with its treatment of economic interests as a quite
minor aspect of human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or artificial. As
was to be expected in the exponents of a faith which had its headquarters at
Geneva, and later its most influential adherents in great business centers,
like Antwerp with its industrial hinterland, London, and Amsterdam, its
leaders addressed their teaching, not of course exclusively, but none the less
primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and industry, who formed the most
modern and progressive elements in the life of the age.
In doing so they naturally started from a frank recognition of the
necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-scale commerce and finance,
and the other practical facts of business life. They thus broke with the
tradition which, regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond
what is necessary for subsistence” as reprehensible, had stigmatized the
middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a thief. They set the profits of
trade and finance, which to the medieval writer, as to Luther, only with

difficulty escaped censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of
respectability as the earnings of the laborer and the rents of the landlord.
“What reason is there,” wrote Calvin to a correspondent, “why the income
from business should not be larger than that from land-owning? Whence do
the merchant’s profits come, except from his own diligence and
industry?”[50] It was quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that
Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of merchants, should
urge the English Government to undertake the development of the woollen
industry on mercantilist lines.[51]
Since it is the environment of the industrial and commercial classes
which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin and his followers, they have to
make terms with its practical necessities. It is not that they abandon the
claim of religion to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are
concerned to moralize is one in which the main features of a commercial
civilization are taken for granted, and that it is for application to such
conditions that their teaching is designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see,
has its own rule, and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of economic affairs.
But it no longer suspects the whole world of economic motives as alien to
the life of the spirit, or distrusts the capitalist as one who has necessarily
grown rich on the misfortunes of his neighbor, or regards poverty as in itself
meritorious, and it is perhaps the first systematic body of religious teaching
which can be said to recognize and applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy
is not the accumulation of riches, but their misuse for purposes of self-
indulgence or ostentation. Its ideal is a society which seeks wealth with the
sober gravity of men who are conscious at once of disciplining their own
characters by patient labor, and of devoting themselves to a service
acceptable to God.
It is in the light of that change of social perspective that the doctrine of
usury associated with the name of Calvin is to be interpreted. Its
significance consisted, not in the phase which it marked in the technique of
economic analysis, but in its admission to a new position of respectability
of a powerful and growing body of social interests, which, however
irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded by religious theory as,
at best, of dubious propriety, and, at worst, as frankly immoral. 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.”[52] The apologetic was just, for neither his letter to
Œcolampadius, nor his sermon on the same subject, reveal any excessive
tolerance for the trade of the financier. That interest is lawful, provided that
it does not exceed an official maximum, that, even when a maximum is
fixed, loans must be made gratis to the poor, that the borrower must reap as
much advantage as the lender, that excessive security must not be exacted,
that what is venial as an occasional expedient is reprehensible when carried
on as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch economic gain for
himself to the injury of his neighbor—a condonation of usury protected by
such embarrassing entanglements can have offered but tepid consolation to
the devout money-lender.
Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the debtor might
properly be asked to concede some small part of his profits to the creditor
with whose capital they had been earned, but that the exaction of interest
was wrong if it meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the
debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his labor.” There have
been ages in which such doctrines would have been regarded as an attack
on financial enterprise rather than as a defense of it. Nor were Calvin’s
specific contributions to the theory of usury strikingly original. As a hard-
headed lawyer, he was free both from the incoherence and from the
idealism of Luther, and his doctrine was probably regarded by himself
merely as one additional step in the long series of developments through
which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on the subject had already gone. In
emphasizing the difference between the interest wrung from the necessities
of the poor and the interest which a prosperous merchant could earn with
borrowed capital, he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a
moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same as that already
assumed, though with some hesitation, by Melanchthon. 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. What he did was to change the

plane on which the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of
money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal to a special body
of doctrine on the subject of usury, but as a particular case of the general
problem of the social relations of a Christian community, which must be
solved in the light of existing circumstances. The significant feature in his
discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a normal and
inevitable incident in the life of society. He therefore dismisses the oft-
quoted passages from the Old Testament and the Fathers as irrelevant,
because designed for conditions which no longer exist, argues that the
payment of interest for capital is as reasonable as the payment of rent for
land, and throws on the conscience of the individual the obligation of seeing
that it does not exceed the amount dictated by natural justice and the golden
rule. He makes, in short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not
the rule “non fœnerabis,” but “l’équité et la droiture,” and appeals from
Christian tradition to commercial common sense, which he is sanguine
enough to hope will be Christian. On such a view all extortion is to be
avoided by Christians. But capital and credit are indispensable; the financier
is not a pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at interest,
provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans are made freely to the
poor, is not per se more extortionate than any other of the economic
transactions without which human affairs cannot be carried on. That
acceptance of the realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of
momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its off-shoots took
their stand on the side of the activities which were to be most characteristic
of the future, and insisted that it was not by renouncing them, but by
untiring concentration on the task of using for the glory of God the
opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life could and must be
lived.
It was on this practical basis of urban industry and commercial
enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social ethics was erected. Upon
their theological background it would be audacious to enter. But even an
amateur may be pardoned, if he feels that there have been few systems in
which the practical conclusions flow by so inevitable a logic from the
theological premises. “God not only foresaw,” Calvin wrote, “the fall of the
first man, ... but also arranged all by the determination of his own will.”[53]
Certain individuals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from
eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of human merit”; the

remainder have been consigned to eternal damnation, “by a just and
irreprehensible, but incomprehensible, judgment.”[54] Deliverance, in
short, is the work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing to it, but
of an objective Power. Human effort, social institutions, the world of
culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mischievous. They
distract man from the true aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon
broken reeds.
That aim is not personal salvation, but the glorification of God, to be
sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the sanctification of the world by
strife and labor. For Calvinism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is
intensely practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation, but
they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained. The
central paradox of religious ethics—that only those are nerved with the
courage needed to turn the world upside down, who are convinced that
already, in a higher sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which
they are the humble instruments—finds in it a special exemplification. For
the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth the majesty of God, and
the duty of the Christian is to live for that end. His task is at once to
discipline his individual life, and to create a sanctified society. The Church,
the State, the community in which he lives, must not merely be a means of
personal salvation, or minister to his temporal needs. It must be a
“Kingdom of Christ,” in which individual duties are performed by men
conscious that they are “ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye,” and the
whole fabric is preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing
discipline.
The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age from the
realization of the contrast between the external order of society and the
moral standards recognized as valid by the conscience or reason of the
individual. And naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast is most acutely
felt. The men who made the Reformation had seen the Middle Ages close in
the golden autumn which, amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time,
still glows in the pictures of Nürnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Æneas
Silvius and in the woodcuts of Dürer. And already a new dawn of economic
prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was splendid, but it had been
accompanied by a cynical materialism which seemed a denial of all that had

been meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more horrifying
because it was in the capital of the Christian Church that it reached its
height. Shocked by the gulf between theory and practice, men turned this
way and that to find some solution of the tension which racked them. The
German reformers followed one road and preached a return to primitive
simplicity. But who could obliterate the achievements of two centuries, or
blot out the new worlds which science had revealed? The Humanists took
another, which should lead to the gradual regeneration of mankind by the
victory of reason over superstition and brutality and avarice. But who could
wait for so distant a consummation? Might there not be a third? Was it not
possible that, purified and disciplined, the very qualities which economic
success demanded—thrift, diligence, sobriety, frugality—were themselves,
after all, the foundation, at least, of the Christian virtues? Was it not
conceivable that the gulf which yawned between a luxurious world and the
life of the spirit could be bridged, not by eschewing material interests as the
kingdom of darkness, but by dedicating them to the service of God?
It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical values which
the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was that new type of Christian
character that they labored to create. Not as part of any scheme of social
reform, but as elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the
aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs, stamped on them a
new sanctification, and used them as the warp of a society in which a more
than Roman discipline should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of
that fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was held,
through the example of its rulers, had encouraged luxury and ostentation:
the members of the Reformed Church must be economical and modest. It
had sanctioned the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true
Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues of industry and
thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe that they could atone for a life of
worldliness by the savorless formality of individual good works reduced to
a commercial system, as though man could keep a profit and loss account
with his Creator: the true Christian must organize his life as a whole for the
service of his Master. It had rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the
life of religion, even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with
success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high seriousness, as
in itself a kind of religion.

Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects, was
admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and to weld into a
disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie, conscious of the contrast
between its own standards and those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation
as the standard-bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate
an open road for its own way of life by the use of every weapon, including
political revolution and war, because the issue which was at stake was not
merely convenience or self-interest, but the will of God. 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 spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly fanciful
to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less formidable weapons,
Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for
the proletariat of the nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination
satisfied the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the universe are
on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in a different age by the
theory of historical materialism. He 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. It was not surprising that they made several revolutions, and imprinted
their conceptions of political and social expediency on the public life of half
a dozen different States in the Old World and in the New.
The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence on personal
responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the call to fashion for the
Christian character an objective embodiment in social institutions. Though
logically connected, they were often in practical discord. The influence of

Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far beyond the circle
of Churches which could properly be called Calvinist. Calvinist theology
was accepted where Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle
between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not prevent men, to
whom the whole idea of religious uniformity was fundamentally abhorrent,
from drawing inspiration from the conception of a visible Christian society,
in which, as one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially to be
fulfilled.”[55] Both an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian
Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which of them
predominated depended on differences of political environment and of
social class. It depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists
were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could stamp their
ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a minority, living on the
defensive beneath the suspicious eyes of a hostile Government.
In the version of Calvinism which found favor with the English upper
classes in the seventeenth century, individualism in social affairs was, on
the whole, the prevalent philosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator
who drew inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem descending on
England’s green and pleasant land, and the troopers of Fairfax soon taught
them reason. But, if the theology of Puritanism was that of Calvin, its
conception of society, diluted by the practical necessities of a commercial
age, and softened to suit the conventions of a territorial aristocracy, was
poles apart from that of the master who founded a discipline, compared
with which that of Laud, as Laud himself dryly observed,[56] was a thing of
shreds and patches. As both the teaching of Calvin himself, and the practice
of some Calvinist communities, suggest, the social ethics of the heroic age
of Calvinism savored more of a collectivist dictatorship than of
individualism. The expression of a revolt against the medieval ecclesiastical
system, it stood itself, where circumstances favored it, for a discipline far
more stringent and comprehensive than that of the Middle Ages. If, as some
historians have argued, the philosophy of laissez faire emerged as a result of
the spread of Calvinism among the middle classes, it did so, like tolerance,
by a route which was indirect. It was accepted, less because it was esteemed
for its own sake, than as a compromise forced upon Calvinism at a
comparatively late stage in its history, as a result of its modification by the
pressure of commercial interests, or of a balance of power between
conflicting authorities.

The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the burning
question of Pauperism. The reform of traditional methods of poor relief was
in the air—Vives had written his celebrated book in 1526[57]—and,
prompted both by Humanists and by men of religion, the secular authorities
all over Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to cope with what was,
at best, a menace to social order, and, at worst, a moral scandal. The
question was naturally one which appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of
the Reformation. The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much
concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like the statesman, as
a problem of police, nor, like the more intelligent Humanists, as a problem
of social organization, but as a question of character. Calvin quoted with
approval the words of St. Paul, “If a man will not work, neither shall he
eat,” condemned indiscriminate almsgiving as vehemently as any
Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical authorities should regularly visit
every family to ascertain whether its members were idle, or drunken, or
otherwise undesirable.[58] Œcolampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of
the poor.[59] Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced by monastic
charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a dissolved abbey for the
maintenance of a school and the assistance of the destitute.[60] In the plan
for the reorganization of poor relief at Zürich, which was drafted by
Zwingli in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers were to
be relieved on condition that they left the town next day; provision was to
be made for the sick and aged in special institutions; no inhabitant was to be
entitled to relief who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to
attend church, or who played cards or was otherwise disreputable. The basis
of his whole scheme was the duty of industry and the danger of relaxing the
incentive to work. “With labor,” he wrote, “will no man now support
himself.... And yet labor is a thing so good and godlike ... that makes the
body hale and strong and cures the sicknesses produced by idleness.... In
the things of this life, the laborer is most like to God.”[61]
In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives were not
distinguished. The idleness of the mendicant was both a sin against God and
a social evil; the enterprise of the thriving tradesman was at once a
Christian virtue and a benefit to the community. The same combination of
religious zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks on gambling,
swearing, excess in apparel and self-indulgence in eating and drinking. 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.”[62] Manners and morals were regulated,
because it is through the minutiæ of conduct that the enemy of mankind
finds his way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be revealed by
pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793 those guilty of another kind of
incivisme were betrayed by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant
legislation, and, still more, administration. The word in which both were
summarized was Discipline.
Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of religion,[63] and
the common observation that he assigned to it the same primacy as Luther
had given to faith is just. As organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was
designed primarily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a censorship
of morals, and thus differed in scope and purpose from the canon law of the
Church of Rome, as the rules of a private society may differ from the code
of a State. Its establishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in the
last half of the sixteenth century, was the result of nearly twenty years of
struggle between the Council of the city and the Consistory, composed of
ministers and laymen. It was only in 1555 that the latter finally vindicated
its right to excommunicate, and only in the edition of the Institutes which
appeared in 1559 that a scheme of church organization and discipline was
set out. But, while the answer to the question of the constitution of the
authority by whom discipline was to be exercised depended on political
conditions, and thus differed in different places and periods, the necessity of
enforcing a rule of life, which was the practical aspect of discipline, was
from the start of the very essence of Calvinism. Its importance was the
theme of a characteristic letter addressed by Calvin to Somerset in October
1548, the moment of social convulsion for which Bucer wrote his book, De
Regno Christi. The Protector is reminded that it is not from lack of
preaching, but from failure to enforce compliance with it, that the troubles
of England have sprung. Though crimes of violence are punished, the
licentious are spared, and the licentious have no part in the Kingdom of
God. He is urged to make sure that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et

honneste discipline,” and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de
l’Evangile s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de vie.”[64]
“Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life”—the words might be
taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers, and their projects of social
reconstruction are a commentary on the sense in which “holiness of life”
was understood. It was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in
forming at Zürich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of the clergy,
the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the importance of
excommunicating offenders against Christian morals; and drew up a list of
sins to be punished by excommunication, which included, in addition to
murder and theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it discovers
itself in usury and fraud.”[65] It was in that spirit that Calvin composed in
the Institutes a Protestant Summa and manual of moral casuistry, in which
the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a universal
rule. It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a comprehensive
scheme of municipal government, covering the whole range of civic
administration, from the regulations to be made for markets, crafts,
buildings and fairs to the control of prices, interest and rents.[66] It was in
that spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household
lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a
generation Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the former
excommunicating drunkards, dancers and contemners of religion, the latter
punishing the dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with
death. “Having considered,” ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576,
which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, “that it is a thing worthy
of commendation above all others, that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of
our Lord Jesus Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian
Church duly maintained by good government and policy, and also that
youth in the future be well and faithfully instructed, and the Hospital well-
ordered for the support of the poor: Which things can only be if there be
established a certain rule and order of living, by which each man may be
able to understand the duties of his position....”[67] The object of it all was
so simple. “Each man to understand the duties of his position”—what could
be more desirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? 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.[68] Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere by Governments
which affected no excessive zeal for righteousness. The characteristic which
was distinctive of Geneva—“the most perfect school of Christ that ever was
on earth since the days of the Apostles”[69]—was not its merciless
intolerance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was possible. It was the
attempt to make the law of God prevail even in those matters of pecuniary
gain and loss which mankind, to judge by its history, is disposed to regard
more seriously than wounds and deaths. “No member [of the Christian
body],” wrote Calvin in his Institutes, “holds his gifts to himself, or for his
private use, but shares them among his fellow members, nor does he derive
benefit save from those things which proceed from the common profit of
the body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his brethren all that it is in
his power to give.”[70] It was natural that so remorseless an attempt to
claim the totality of human interests for religion should not hesitate to
engage even the economic appetites, before which the Churches of a later
generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism welcomed the world of
business to its fold with an eagerness unknown before, it did so in the spirit
of a conqueror organizing a new province, not of a suppliant arranging a
compromise with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code of law
lay ready to its hand in the Old Testament. Samuel and Agag, King of the
Amalekites, Jonah and Nineveh, Ahab and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets
of Baal, Micaiah the son of Imlah, the only true prophet of the Lord, and
Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, worked on the tense
imagination of the Calvinist as did Brutus and Cassius on the men of 1793.
The first half-century of the Reformed Church at Geneva saw a prolonged
effort to organize an economic order worthy of the Kingdom of Christ, in
which the ministers played the part of Old Testament prophets to an Israel
not wholly weaned from the fleshpots of Egypt.
Apart from its qualified indulgence to interest, Calvinism made few
innovations in the details of social policy, and the contents of the program
were thoroughly medieval. The novelty consisted in the religious zeal
which was thrown into its application. The organ of administration before
which offenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed body of laymen
and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, punishes usurers, engrossers and
monopolists, reprimands or fines the merchant who defrauds his clients, the
cloth-maker whose stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who provides
short measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat above the rates fixed by

authority, the tailor who charges strangers excessive prices, the surgeon
who demands an excessive fee for an operation.[71] In the Consistory the
ministers appear to have carried all before them, and they are constantly
pressing for greater stringency. From the election of Beza in place of Calvin
in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes without a new demand for
legislation from the clergy, a new censure on economic unrighteousness, a
new protest against one form or another of the ancient sin of avarice. At one
moment, it is excessive indulgence to debtors which rouses their
indignation; at another, the advance of prices and rents caused by the influx
of distressed brethren from the persecutions in France; at a third, the
multiplication of taverns and the excessive charges demanded by the sellers
of wine. Throughout there is a prolonged warfare against the twin evils of
extortionate interest and extortionate prices.
Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for the same
reasons which made it a burning question everywhere to the small producer
of the sixteenth century, but because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in
the French wars of religion, the city was a financial center of some
importance. It might be involved in war at any moment. In order to secure
command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed heavily from Basle and
Berne, and the Council used the capital to do exchange business and make
advances, the rate of interest being fixed at 10, and later at 12, per cent. To
the establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been consulted, agreed;
against the profitable business of advancing money at high rates of interest
to private persons they protested, especially when the loans were made to
spendthrifts who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in
1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some company
promoters of establishing a second bank in the city, the ministers led the
opposition to it, pointed to the danger of covetousness as revealed by the
moral corruption of financial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and
succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally, however, the
commoner issue was a more simple one. The capitalist who borrowed in
order to invest and make a profit could take care of himself, and the
ministers explained that they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur
argent aux marchands pour emploier en marchandise.” The crucial issue
was that of the money-lender who makes advances “simplement à un qui
aura besoin,” and who thereby exploits the necessities of his poorer
neighbors.[72]

Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without ceasing. They
denounce them from the pulpit in the name of the New Testament, in
language drawn principally from the less temperate portions of the Old, as
larrons, brigands, loups et tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and
stoned to death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but what they
are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of God.... One has cried in the
market-place, ‘a curse on those who bring us dearth.’... The Lord has heard
that cry ... and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence!... A cut-purse
shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet Amos ... ‘Famine is
come upon my people of Israel, O ye who devour the poor.’ The threats
there uttered have been executed against his people.”[73] They demand that
for his second offense the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that, if such a
punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least be required to testify his
repentance publicly in church, before being admitted to the sacrament. They
remind their fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momentarily
despairing of controlling the money-lender directly, they propose to deprive
him of his victims by removing the causes which create them. Pour tarir les
ruisseaux il faut escouper la source. Men borrow because of “idleness,
foolish extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be established
at Geneva, as in Republican Rome, to inquire, among rich as well as among
poor, how each household earns its livelihood, to see that all children of ten
to twelve are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and litigation,
and to “bridle the insatiable avarice of those who are such wretches that
they seek to enrich themselves by the necessities of their poor
neighbors.”[74]
The Venerable Company advanced their program, but they were not
sanguine that it would be carried out, and they concluded it by expressing to
the City Fathers the pious hope, not wholly free from irony, that “none of
your honorable fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their
apprehensions were justified. The Council of Geneva endured many things
at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death of Beza, it brought them to
heel. But there were limits to its patience, and it was in the field of business
ethics that they were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question
the right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and finance. The
pulpit was press and platform in one; ministers had the public behind them,
and, conscious of their power, would in the last resort compel submission
by threatening to resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its

strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism spend themselves
on the yielding down of official procrastination, and its first reply was
normally qu’on y pense un peu. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof
of complicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare their
indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a sermon in which he
accused members of the Council of having intelligence with speculators
who had made a corner in wheat. Throughout 1577 the ministers were
reproaching the Council with laxity in administration, and they finally
denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of bread and wine. In
1579 they addressed to it a memorandum, setting out a new scheme of
moral discipline and social reform.
The prosperous bourgeoisie who governed Geneva had no objection to
discouraging extravagance in dress, or to exhorting the public to attend
sermons and to send their children to catechism. But they heard
denunciations of covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they
were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers concerned to lower
prices had demanded, the export of wine, on the ground that it was needed
in order to purchase imports of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-
to-do creditors, they would make no concession to the complaint that
debtors were subjected to a “double usury,” since they were compelled to
repay loans in an appreciating currency. Money fell as well as rose, they
replied, and even the late M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized
had been approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths.
Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions. They informed the
Council that large sums were being spent by speculators in holding up
supplies of corn, and launched a campaign of sermons against avarice, with
appropriate topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted by
accusing Beza of stirring up class hatred against the rich.[75]
The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal. One of the
magistrates, who 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 per cent. 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. They declined to express regret for having
cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extortionate prices, and
for refusing the sacrament to one of them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is
he who keeps his corn in time of scarcity”? To the charge of intemperate
language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin by burning the
books of the Prophets, for he had done no more than follow the example set
by Hosea. “If we should be silent,” said Beza, “what would the people say?
That they are dumb dogs.... As to the question of causing scandals, for the
last two years there has been unceasing talk of usury, and, for all that, no
more than three or four usurers have been punished.... It is notorious
everywhere that the city is full of usurers, and that the ordinary rate is 10
per cent. or more.”[76] The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They
had seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be hanged, and had
mercifully commuted his sentence to scourging through the town, followed
by ten years’ imprisonment in chains.[77] But at the godly proposal to make
capitalists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched. Besides, the
punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous. In Geneva, “most men are
debtors.” If they are allowed to taste blood, who can say where their fury
will end? Yet, such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did not
venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scripture. They informed
the ministers that they proposed to follow the example of David, who, when
rebuked by Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied in the
language of Nathan, we are not informed.
Recent political theory has been prolific in criticisms of the
omnicompetent State. The principle on which the collectivism of Geneva
rested may be described as that of the omnicompetent Church.[78] The
religious community formed a closely organized society, which, while using
the secular authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not only
instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was itself a kind of State,

prescribing by its own legislation the standard of conduct to be observed by
its members, putting down offences against public order and public morals,
providing for the education of youth and for the relief of the poor. The
peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, which
for a short time made the system possible at Geneva, could not exist to the
same degree when Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a
minority in a national State organized on principles quite different from its
own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion, civil war or the
abandonment of the pretension to control society was the inevitable
consequence. But the last result was long delayed. In the sixteenth century,
whatever the political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is
everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the moral conduct of
their members in all the various relations of life, and to do so, not least, in
the sphere of economic transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious
temptations to a lapse into immorality.
The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the Reformed
Churches of France. At their first Synod, held in 1559 at Paris, where a
scheme of discipline was adopted, certain difficult matters of economic
casuistry were discussed, and similar questions continued to receive
attention at subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the
historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to lax the reins,
yielding too much to the iniquity of the time.”[79] Once it is admitted that
membership of the Church involves compliance with a standard of
economic morality which the Church must enforce, the problems of
interpretation which arise are innumerable, and the religious community
finds itself committed to developing something like a system of case law,
by the application of its general principles to a succession of varying
situations. The elaboration of such a system was undertaken; but it was
limited in the sixteenth century both by the comparative simplicity of the
economic structure, and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva,
being concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress the grosser
kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on which specific guidance was
demanded by the Churches.
Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were not a few. What is to
be the attitude of the Churches towards those who have grown rich on ill-
gotten wealth? May pirates and fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the

Lord’s Supper? May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share
their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows moderate
interest: what is to be the attitude of the Church? What is to be done to
prevent craftsmen cheating the consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen
oppressing him with extortionate profits? Are lotteries permissible? Is it
legitimate to invest at interest monies bequeathed for the benefit of the
poor? The answers which the French Synods made to such questions show
the persistence of the idea that the transactions of business are the province
of the Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an impracticable
rigor. All persons who have wrung wealth unjustly from others must make
restitution before they be admitted to communion, but their goods may be
bought by the faithful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the
civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be censured, and
tradesmen are to seek only “indifferent gain.” On the question of usury, the
same division of opinion is visible in the French Reformed Church as
existed at the same time in England and Holland, and Calvin’s advice on the
subject was requested. The stricter school would not hear of confining the
prohibition of usury to “excessive and scandalous” exactions, or of raising
money for the poor by interest on capital. In France, however, as elsewhere,
the day for these heroic rigors had passed, and the common-sense view
prevailed. The brethren were required to demand no more than the law
allowed and than was consistent with charity. Within these limits interest
was not to be condemned.[80]
Of the treatment of questions of this order by English Puritanism
something is said in a subsequent chapter. In Scotland the views of the
reformers as to economic ethics did not differ in substance from those of the
Church before the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline
denounced covetousness with the same vehemence as did the “accursed
Popery” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen are exhorted to be content
with their rents, and the Churches are required to make provision for the
poor. “Oppression of the poor by exactions,” it is declared, “[and] deceiving
of them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure ... do properly
appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same as God’s word
commandeth.”[81] The interpretation given to these offences is shown by
the punishment of a usurer and of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk
Sessions of St. Andrews.[82] The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the
statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven years after it

had in England been finally transferred to the State. The arrangement under
which in rural districts it reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of
ministers, elders and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real
State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament or Council, but
by the Church of Knox.
Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social discipline
of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the furthest extreme was the
Puritan theocracy of New England. Its practice had more affinity with the
iron rule of Calvin’s Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of
contemporary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden, where
men desired only to worship God “according to the simplicitie of the gospel
and to be ruled by the laws of God’s word,”[83] not only were “tobacco and
immodest fashions and costly apparel,” and “that vain custom of drinking
one to another,” forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers adopted
towards that “notorious evil ... whereby most men walked in all their
commerce—to buy as cheap and sell as dear as they can,”[84] an attitude
which possibly would not be wholly congenial to their more business-like
descendants. At an early date in the history of Massachusetts a minister had
called attention to the recrudescence of the old Adam—“profit being the
chief aim and not the propagation of religion”—and Governor Bradford,
observing uneasily how men grew “in their outward estates,” remarked that
the increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New England, at least
of the Churches of God there.”[85] Sometimes Providence smote the
exploiter. The immigrant who organized the first American Trust—he
owned the only milch cow on board and sold the milk at 2d. a quart
—“being after at a sermon wherein oppression was complained of ... fell
distracted.”[86] Those who escaped the judgment of Heaven had to face the
civil authorities and the Church, which, in the infancy of the colony, were
the same thing.
Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate of interest,
fixed a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible idlers; for these things
had been done even in the house of bondage from which they fled. What
was more distinctive of the children of light was their attempt to apply the
same wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business profits. The
price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities decreed, was to be determined,
not by the needs of the buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable

return to the seller.[87] Against those who charged more, their wrath was
that of Moses descending to find the chosen people worshipping a golden
calf. What little emotion they had to spare from their rage against religious
freedom, they turned against economic license. Roger Williams touched a
real affinity when, in his moving plea for tolerance, he argued that, though
extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of which should be left to
the discretion of the civil authorities.[88]
Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by general
consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in which he took “in some ...
above 6d. in the shilling profit; in some above 8d.; and in some small things
above two for one”; and this, though he was “an ancient professor of the
gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one child, having
come over for conscience’ sake and for the advancement of the gospel.” The
scandal was terrible. Profiteers were unpopular—“the cry of the country
was great against oppression”—and the grave elders reflected that a
reputation for greed would injure the infant community, lying as it did
“under the curious observation of all Churches and civil States in the
world.” In spite of all, the magistrates were disposed to be lenient. There
was no positive law in force limiting profits; it was not easy to determine
what profits were fair; the sin of charging what the market could stand was
not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law of God required no more
than double restitution. So they treated him mercifully, and fined him only
£200.
Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the matter drop.
But, like some others in a similar position, he damned himself irretrievably
by his excuses. Summoned before the church of Boston, he first of all “did
with tears acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,” and
then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in which he argued that
the tradesman must live, and how could he live, if he might not make up for
a loss on one article by additional profit on another? Here was a text on
which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The minister of
Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took occasion “in his public
exercise the next lecture day to lay open the error of such false principles,
and to give some rules of direction in the case. Some false principles were
these:— “1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he
can. “2. If a man lose by casualty of sea, etc., in some of his commodities,

he may raise the price of the rest. “3. That he may sell as he bought, though
he paid too dear, and though the commodity be fallen, etc. “4. That, as a
man may take the advantage of his own skill or ability, so he may of
another’s ignorance or necessity. “5. Where one gives time for payment, he
is to take like recompence of one as of another.”
The rules for trading were not less explicit:— “1. A man may not sell
above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place,
and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it if
he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money which every man
will take, etc. “2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill,
etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay
it upon another. “3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss
cast upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it by
casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all
providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of
the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God
upon the commodity, and not the person. “4. A man may not ask any more
for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham: the land is
worth thus much.”
It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not remembered in
the case of transactions affecting the lands of Indians, to which it might
have appeared peculiarly appropriate. In negotiating with these children of
the devil, however, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with
Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.
The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It
was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be
excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous
person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had
recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The question was only
whether he had erred through ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted
“against his conscience or the very light of nature”—whether, in short, his
sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with his fine and
admonition.[89]
If the only Christian documents which survived were the New
Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the

Reformation, to suggest a connection between them more intimate than a
coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring
extravagance. 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 tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been
regarded by its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty
and authority, Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with
enthusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching back to
Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its
leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of
stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient
is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to
the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to the men
of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If
it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was accepted without
Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with
which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even the savage superstition
of New England, that result was only to be expected.
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.[90]

CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the
common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and
happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the
body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.”
Laud, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621.

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the
sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial
interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture
of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was
their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the
Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the
social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion
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. After the first outburst of
curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of
treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the
silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected
that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at

Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in
earnest.
In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life
was in process of swift transformation. Foreign trade increased largely in
the first half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth
displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went
the growth of the financial organization on which commerce depends, and
English capital poured into the growing London money-market, which had
previously been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion
of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, opportunities of
speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen arose to exploit
them. In industry, the rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist,
bent on securing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and produce
by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive machinery of the
gilds, with their corporate discipline, their organized torpor restricting
individual enterprise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly
evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within
which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be made effective,
or he accepted the gild organization, captured its government, and by means
of it developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a
master, was in effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture, the
customary organization of the village was being sapped from below and
battered down from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had commuted
the labor services that were still the rule in France and Germany, were
rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer
petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their demesnes to
capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing,
and eager to clear away the network of communal restrictions which
impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry and agriculture alike, the
revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the century, but after 1540
a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a
stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary
relationships.
It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions and
haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their
meaning. Except in the turbulent north, the aim of the great landowner was

no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as
a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once content to win a
position of dignity and power in fraternity or town, now flung himself into
the task of carving his way to solitary preëminence, unaided by the artificial
protection of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and
craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine, their pigmy
forces against an implacable nature, was added the haunting insecurity of a
growing, though still small, proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in
village or borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither
understand, nor arrest, nor control.

I. THE LAND QUESTION

The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source
of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries
a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the
material on which agitation fed had been accumulating for three
generations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the
century, with the exception of the depreciation of the currency, there was
not one—neither enclosures and pasture farming, nor usury, nor the
malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen
by merchants, nor the extortions of the engrosser—which had not evoked
popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced legislation
and administrative action, long before the Reformation Parliament met. The
floods were already running high, when the religious revolution swelled
them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the social
situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution of
wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of
violence, intimidation and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested
misgovernment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every
problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant
and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing on questions not only of
religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the
changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head in a sweeping
indictment of the new economic forces and an eloquent restatement of the
traditional theory of social obligations. The center of both was the land
question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity

of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground
of social agitation.
The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a
century before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had
been written by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.[1] Then
had come the legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal
Commission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.[2] Throughout, a steady
stream of criticism had flowed from men of the Renaissance, like More,
Starkey and a host of less well-known writers, dismayed at the advance of
social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince
who would take counsel of philosophers.
If, however, the problem was acute long before the confiscation of the
monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry
and Cromwell is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to
see the last days of monasticism through rose-colored spectacles. The
monks, after all, were business men, and the lay agents whom they often
employed to manage their property naturally conformed to the agricultural
practice of the world around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more
frequent or more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical landowners.[3]
In England a glance at the proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and
Requests is enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned
copyholders into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted arable
land to pasture.[4]
In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part of the monks,
or of more than ordinary harshness on the part of the new proprietors, is not
needed in order to explain the part which the rapid transference of great
masses of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side of
all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that the individual is more
or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of
flesh. Estates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of
£15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed hands.[5] To the abbey lands which
came into the market after 1536 were added those of the gilds and chantries
in 1547. The financial necessities of the Crown were too pressing to allow
of its retaining them in its own possession and drawing the rents; nor, in any
case, would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a
Government which required a party to carry through a revolution. What it

did, therefore, was to alienate most of the land almost immediately, and to
spend the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of land
speculation. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers, at a
ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business men, who
brought to bear on its management the methods learned in the financial
school of the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham.
Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land,
held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got a
good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen—cloth-workers, leather-sellers,
merchant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual syndicates to
exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversions of arable to
pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each
transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction
would not pay.[6]
Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown?
“Do ye not know,” said the grantee of one of the Sussex manors of the
monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure
of their commons, “that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of
monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen
will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.”[7] Such
arguments, if inconsequent, were too convenient not to be common. The
protests of contemporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter
struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and some of the new
landlords—the Herberts, who enclosed a whole village to make the park at
Washerne, in which, according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write
his Arcadia, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, third in the
line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Abbey, whose tenants found their
rents raised from £29 to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were
besieging the Government with petitions for redress.[8] 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 of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but

aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal
radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most
scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old
religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw
in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and license
which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by
reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less
than to its government and doctrine. The touching words[9] in which the
leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the
dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the
denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon
and Ponet.
Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw
in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was
sharpened by the bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so
different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not
with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which
looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the
regeneration of religion.[10] In England, as in Germany and Switzerland,
men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and
society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but
of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the
relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments,
a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the
Gospel—such, not without judicious encouragement from a Government
alert to play on public opinion, was the vision which had floated before the
eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.
It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic
crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, and Professor of Divinity at
Cambridge, stated the social program of a Christian renaissance in the
manual of Christian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil
how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its
outlines were sharpened, and its details elaborated, with all the remorseless
precision of a disciple of Calvin. Willful idlers are to be excommunicated
by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious
mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen

industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plow. It is to take a high
line with the commercial classes. For, though trade in itself is honorable,
most traders are rogues—indeed “next to the sham priests, no class of men
is more pestilential to the Commonwealth”; their works are usury,
monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to overlook both. Fortunately,
the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices—“a very necessary
but an easy matter.” Only “pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth
more than to their own interests,” are to be allowed to engage in trade at all.
In every village and town a school is to be established under a master
eminent for piety and wisdom. “Christian princes must above all things
strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God....
Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to
tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt
of their neighbors.”[11]
The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail.
The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political
success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it
should be a social disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their
teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped
off by a sermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor
Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute
Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons
of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for
them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to
distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more
schools in proportion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century
than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These endowments were
confiscated by the State, and many still line the pockets of the descendants
of the statesmen of the day.”[12] “King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools” are
the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.
The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers
should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social
righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly
reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges,
six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal
subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual—side by side

with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of
much education, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property
which provoked protests even in the House of Commons,[13] and for ten
years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with
favorable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on
the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was
still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the
revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights
of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nouveaux riches.[14]
The men whose religion was not money said what they thought of the
business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable congregations
spluttering with fury.
Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick
begged in the street because rich men had seized the endowments of
hospitals, and did not conceal his sympathy with the peasants who rose
under Ket.[15] Becon told the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-
lubbers, that the only difference between them and the monks was that they
were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing the last penny
from the tenants, more selfish in spending the whole income on themselves,
more pitiless to the poor.[16] “In suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges
and chantries,” preached Lever in St. Paul’s, “the intent of the King’s
Majesty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very godly, and the
purpose, or else the pretence, of other wondrous goodly: that thereby such
abundance of goods as was superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or
voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to bear his
great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth, or partly unto
other men’s hands, for the better relief of the poor, the maintenance of
learning, and the setting forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers
have so used this matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief
of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary
hospitality in the common wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly,
wicked, covetous ambition.... You which have gotten these goods into your
own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other goods more from
good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have offended God, beguiled
the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the poor, and brought a common wealth
into a common misery.”[17]

This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies as the
“Commonwealth men” from their advocacy of social reconstruction, the
group of which Latimer was the prophet and Hales the man of action
naturally incurred the charge of stirring up class hatred, which is normally
brought against all who call attention to its causes. The result of their
activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into
offences against the Acts forbidding the conversion of arable to pasture, the
introduction of legislation requiring the maintenance of tillage and
rebuilding of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had
taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The gentry
were furious. Paget, the secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a
reign of terror, provided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily
that the German Peasants’ War was to be reënacted in England; the Council,
most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the
personification of the predatory property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely
for carrying out, as chairman of the Midland committee of the Depopulation
Commission, the duties laid upon him by the Government. “Sir,” wrote a
plaintiff gentleman to Cecil, “be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the
pretense of simplicity and poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So
do I fear there doth in these men called Common Wealths and their
adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well
the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they are in such doubt, that almost
they dare touch none of them [i.e., the peasants], not for that they are afraid
of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away
without punishment, and that Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten
the pardon of others.”[18]
The “Common Wealth called Latimer” was unrepentant. Combining
gifts of humor and invective which are not very common among bishops,
his fury at oppression did not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a
burst of uproarious laughter, as of a satyrical gargoyle carved to make the
sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next. So he was
delighted when he provoked one of his audience into the exclamation,
“Mary, a seditious fellow!” used the episode as comic relief in his next
sermon,[19] and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his denunciations of
step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been
pronounced by Christ Himself?

You thoughte that I woulde not requyre
The bloode of all suche at your hande,
But be you sure, eternall fyre
Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande.
Both for the housynge and the lande
That you have taken from the pore
Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.[20]

On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the authors of such
outbursts spoke without authority, and, thanks to Mr. Leadam and Professor
Gay, modern research has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective
of their story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large impersonal
causes which were hurrying forward the reorganization of agriculture on a
commercial basis, what shocked them was not only the material misery of
their age, but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed,
human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not
merely the Northumberlands or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the
attack, less of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of
both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and,
within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his
pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own
profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give account of his actions to
a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to
be accepted by all civilized communities.
The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant had never, at
least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute a form, for, as long as the
customary tenants were part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to
the interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been
changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the expansion of the
woollen industry and the devaluation of money. Chevage and merchet had
gone; forced labor, if it had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of
landowning had been revolutionized, and for two generations the sharp
landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to fine or arrest run-aways
from the villein nest, had been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up
admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning
copyholds into leases. The official opposition to depopulation, which had
begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640, infuriated him, as an

intolerable interference with the rights of property. In their attacks on the
restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the Crown from
above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation, and
in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore
the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian revolution were
watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which
was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it
denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was not easy
for any religion less pliant than that of the eighteenth century to make a
truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties save
that of submission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on its
obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a flattering, but
innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected,
the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.
A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all
doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic
self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to
the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations
imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a
divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is
harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than
with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual
purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress
of knowledge as being sought for “the glory of the Creator and the relief of
man’s estate.” To a temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian régime,
with its sacrifice of the village—a fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of
service and protection, “a little commonwealth”—to the pecuniary interests
of a great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked and prayed,
seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. It was the work of “men
that live as thoughe there were no God at all, men that would have all in
their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that
would be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied.”[21] Its essence
was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repudiating legal and quasi-
legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of irresponsible
ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the
Reformation called down fire from heaven.

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which
the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and
which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted
that its use was limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the
obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of
the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more business-
like and impersonal forms of landownership, and which, once an engine of
exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the
downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties.
Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is
not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its
raison d’être is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such
means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those
duties, whether labor on the land, or labor in government, which are
involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks
more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both. He who exploits his
property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its
very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has “every man’s
living and does no man’s duty.”[22]
The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function
which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by
his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants
against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which
he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the
village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips
open after harvest to his neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by
custom and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods
of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not
raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant,
though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a
rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he
sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain. “We
heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess
the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they,
remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the
rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and
incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings ... but so behave

themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this
life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[23] Thus, while
the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their
liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in the Book of
Private Prayer issued in 1553.

II. RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY

If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and
realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude
which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized
appeal to traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too
obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and
eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of
agriculture, medieval social theory, to which the most representative minds
of the English Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the
middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in
which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The
issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the
age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most
definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader
might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit, money-
lending and prices. The center of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity
in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately,
epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries described by the word
usury.
“Treasure doth then advance greatness,” wrote Bacon, in words
characteristic of the social ideal of the age, “when the wealth of the subject
be rather in many hands than few.”[24] In spite of the growing
concentration of property, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient
modern phase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the
ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not
the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical
worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world
of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosperity English
publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed beggars” of France and

Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of
village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants,
with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the
chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-à-vis
their employers. The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the
obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile
industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which
evoked programs of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and
administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning
proletariat by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the
landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and
the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into
debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to
finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy
raw materials on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The
young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up
shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly
ask the seller to “give day.” Almost every one, therefore, at one time or
another, has need of the money-lender. And the lender is often a monopolist
—“a money master,” a malster or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is the
solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is
apt to become their master.[25]
In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a
popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found
an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as
to the ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval
Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the
English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional
tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the
swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened,
but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed.
Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous money-lender
that the preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence of the
medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in
bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when both parties gain
from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its
doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only species,

but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most
conspicuous species, of extortion.
In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the
word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the
modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most
unpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical
man almost any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be
classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word by those who
expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was equally elastic. Not only the
taking of interest for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the
beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a
landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent higher than he himself
paid, the cutting of wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of
discount to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for
a loan, the excessive profits of a middleman—all these had been denounced
as usury in the very practical thirteenth-century manual of St. Raymond;
[26] all these were among the “unlawful chaffer,” the “sublety and sleight,”
which was what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to sermons in
parish churches meant by usury three centuries later. If he had been asked
why usury was wrong, he would probably have answered with a quotation
from Scripture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he would
have been puzzled, and would have replied in the words of a member of
Parliament who spoke on the bill introduced in 1571: “It standeth doubtful
what usury is; we have no true definition of it.”[27] The truth is, indeed,
that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more advantage than
the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded as usurious. The
description which best sums up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical
teaching is contained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his
parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling—the
cry of all poor men since the world began—Dr. Bennet “is a great taker of
advantages.”[28]
It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of the
sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical
ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social
philosophy, which gave its poignancy to the controversy of which it became
the center. The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned by the

conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a legal technicality. It was
the fate of the whole scheme of medieval thought, which had attempted to
treat economic affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all
interests and activities, of which the apex was religion.
If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution which left
almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiastical organization and the
traditional scheme of social thought. The villager who, resisting the
temptations of the alehouse, morris dancing or cards, attended his parish
church from 1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession of
changes in the appearance of the building and the form of the services. But
there was little to make him conscious of any alteration in the social system
of which the church was the center, or in the duties which that system
imposed upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish
continued to be a community in which religious and social obligations were
inextricably intertwined, and it was as a parishioner, rather than as a subject
of the secular authority, that he bore his share of public burdens and
performed such public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he
saw most in the routine of his daily life were the churchwardens. The place
where most public business was transacted, and where news of the doings
of the great world came to him, was the parish church. The contributions
levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such education
as was available for his children was often given by the curate or parish
schoolmaster. Such training in coöperation with his fellows as he received
sprang from common undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned
property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made
large profits by church ales, and occasionally engaged in trade.[29]
Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally
compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the
parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political and
economic aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular.
The pulpit was the channel through which official information was
conveyed to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the
clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned in coping with
pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for the poor were chosen by the
churchwardens in conjunction with the parson.

Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the religious thought
of the age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization.
Both in their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their
theory of the particular social obligations which religion involved, the most
representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of
breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic
motives which caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit
of economic enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their
insistence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social order
were to be sought, not in practical expediency, but in truths of which the
Church was the guardian and the exponent, the utterances of men of
religion in the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had
intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the Schoolmen than with
those which were to be fashionable after the Restoration.
The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic
power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant
denunciation down to the Civil War. The exactions of middlemen
—“merchants of mischief ... [who] do make all things dear to the buyers,
and yet wonderful vile and of small price to many that must needs set or sell
that which is their own honestly come by”—were pilloried by Lever.[30]
Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on The Lawful Use of Riches became
something like a standard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price,
and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded freedom of
contract as an excuse for covetousness: “Cloake the same by what title you
liste, your synne is excedyng greate.... He which hurteth but one man is in a
damnable case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest whole
householdes to their graves, or at the leaste art a meanes of their extreame
miserie? Thou maiest finde shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but
assuredly thou shalte not escape the judgemente of God.”[31] Men eminent
among Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the
controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salisbury gave his blessing
to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp
Arraignment to be dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the
seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bishops and ten doctors of
divinity—not to mention numberless humbler clergy—who had written in
the course of the last hundred years on different aspects of the sin of
extortion in all its manifold varieties.[32] The subject was still a favorite of

the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher was untrammeled
by the convention which in a more fastidious age was to preclude as an
impropriety the discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market-place.
“As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote Heming, “so it is the
parte of the preachers to reprove usurie.... First, they should earnestly
inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked contractes.... Let them ... amend
all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline.... Then, if
they cannot reforme all abuses which they shall finde in bargaines, let them
take heede that they trouble not the Churche overmuche, but commende the
cause unto God ... Last of all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche
men, that they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of
ritches.”[33]
“This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ecclesiastical
condemnation of usury, “hath been the generall judgment of the Church for
above this fifteene hundred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor
sillie Church of Christ, that could never finde a lawfull usurie before this
golden age wherein we live.”[34] The first fact which strikes the modern
student of this body of teaching is its continuity with the past. In its
insistence that buying and selling, letting and hiring, lending and
borrowing, are to be controlled by a moral law, of which the Church is the
guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did not differ from
religious opinion before it. The reformers themselves were conscious,
neither of the emancipation from the economic follies of the age of
medieval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth century, nor of the
repudiation of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which
some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The
relation in which they conceived themselves to stand to the social theory of
the medieval Church is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed.
“Therefore I would not,” wrote Dr. Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and
for a short time Secretary of State, “have men altogether to be enemies to
the canon lawe, and to condempne every thinge there written, because the
Popes were aucthours of them, as though no good lawe coulde bee made by
them.... Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are some suche lawes made by
the Popes as be righte godly, saye others what they list.”[35] From the lips
of a Tudor official, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain piquancy.
But, in their appeal to the traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson’s

words represented the starting-point from which the discussions of social
questions still commonly set out.
The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, church
councils, and commentators on the canon law—all these, and not only the
first, continued to be quoted as decisive on questions of economic ethics by
men to whom the theology and government of the medieval Church were an
abomination. What use Wilson made of them, a glance at his book will
show. The writer who, after him, produced the most elaborate discussion of
usury in the latter part of the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-
Reformation authorities running into several pages.[36] The author of a
practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with regard to money-
lending—a memorandum which appears to have had some effect upon
policy—thought it necessary to drag into a paper concerned with the
chicanery of financiers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative
exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and Hostiensis.[37]
Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever to “the decrees of the Pope”
did so only the more strongly to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable
dealing contained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie
Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.”[38] Objective economic science
was developing in the hands of the experts who wrote on agriculture, trade,
and, above all, on currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if
they read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intrusion of
Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their obstinate
obscurantism helped to prepare an intellectual nemesis, which was to
discredit their fervent rhetoric as the voice of a musty superstition. For one
who examined present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted
quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon was piled upon
sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The assumption of all is that the
traditional teaching of the Church as to social ethics is as binding on men’s
consciences after the Reformation as it had been before it.
Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which no one
commits or with sins that every one commits, and the literary evidence is
not to be dismissed merely as pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not,
however, stand alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation
in the political and social position of the Church it is not necessary to
enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the State; excommunication, long

discredited by abuse, was fast losing what little terrors it still retained; a
clergy three-quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous transference of
ecclesiastical property, were henceforward presented by lay patrons, were
not likely to display any excessive independence. But the canon law was
nationalized, not abolished; the assumption of most churchmen throughout
the sixteenth century was that it was to be administered; and the canon law
included the whole body of legislation as to equity in contracts which had
been inherited from the Middle Ages. True, it was administered no longer
by the clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under the
authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the study of canon law
—after the estimable Dr. Layton had “set Dunce in Bocardo” at Oxford—it
languished at the universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 to 1552,
and again, and on this occasion for good, after 1571, parliamentary
legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided that it did not
exceed a statutory maximum. But the convulsion which changed the source
of canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope.
Its validity was not the less because it was now enforced in the name, not of
the Pope, but of the King.
As Maitland has pointed out,[39] there was a moment towards the
middle of the century when the civil law was pressing the common law
hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister,
offered a promising career, since it was practiced in the ecclesiastical
courts.[40] Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say about it;
it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate
treatise on the subject was compiled.[41] By an argument made familiar by
a modern controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have
diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not excuse the
consciences of men who are the subjects, not only of the State, but of the
Church. “The permission of the Prince,” it was urged, “is no absolution
from the authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull ... yet the
civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case the Canons are to
be preferred.... By the laws no man is compelled to be an usurer; and
therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due
to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their souls.”[42]
It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical
writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view

was that, in the words of a pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of
England ... usury is simply and generally prohibited.”[43] When the lower
House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of
their privileges, they urged, among other matters, that “usurers may be
punished by the canon lawes as in tymes past has been used.”[44] In the
abortive scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction
drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offenses
with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of
judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was
added, explaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived
from objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth.[45]
Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to the laity of the Province of York (1571)
expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend
and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which
the transaction may be concealed.[46] Bishops’ articles of visitation down
to the Civil War required the presentation of uncharitable persons and
usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.[47] The
rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promulgated in
1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish
Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected
to ecclesiastical discipline.[48]
The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the
Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to
play an important, if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local
government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of
charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the poor men’s box,”
or who was “detected for being an uncharitable person and for not giving to
the poor and impotent,”[49] they dealt also, at least in theory, with those
who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The
jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by
legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments
of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic
misdemeanors as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of
opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation
were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests
against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the
occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be

brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed,
to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. “Thomas
Wilkoxe,” complained his fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and
disquieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer,
taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed
by his own father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not
received the Holy Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready
to go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving of
his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in the
year.”[50] Whether the archdeacon corrected a scandal so obviously
suitable for ecclesiastical discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of
clerical usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.[51] Twenty-
two years later, a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion of
the visitation of some Yorkshire parishes.[52] Even in 1619 two instances
occur in which money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary
of the Bishop of London, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an
excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of.” One is
excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both are admonished to amend
their ways.[53]
There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other
than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever
more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical
application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought.
Ecclesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence
of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the
Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty
proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to
which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by
the common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records which show
how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal
bodies and by the Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct
was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary
confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it
was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to
practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the

law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two
generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample
certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armor of
theologians

made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.

In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not
yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion,
from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being
saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the
latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of
business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the
economic ethics of Elizabethan England.
As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment
of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded
by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry
all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising
financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the
peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social
expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and
who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same
jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the
enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-
protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence
of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The
path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be
strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime
of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been
merged in a propertyless proletariat, and “the riches of the city of London,
and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men
having unmerciful hearts.”[54]
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to
pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by
the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it

mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market
regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him
before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the
municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by
establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make
loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and
extortioners.” The commonest charity of the age, which was the
establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen,
was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or
shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the
indispensable “stock,” without which he could not set up in business.[55]
The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more
complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of
commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous
financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out
of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so,
the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition, a natural
conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or
by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as
the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the
control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial
pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the
threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.
In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations
of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable
from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a
result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the
Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages
the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions
of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which
enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church became the
ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral
sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not
destroyed the conception of a single society, of which Church and State
were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the King’s
ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to

merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself, the Crown had its
own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional
standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called “the license
grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public
officers—under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the
peace—and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious
conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society
in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely
disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote
Hooker, “that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the
matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only
reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs
besides.”[56]
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years
of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology
of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with
that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous
expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are
constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of
enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive
generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance,
for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is,
not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in
this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy
and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted by financial
interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for
promoting economic development, their ideal was, not progress, but
stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which,
since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to
provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state as
heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to
crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to the pressure, at
once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect
all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress
them.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!...
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
And, last, eat up himself.
In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part of the century,
the words of Ulysses continued for long to express the official attitude.
The practical application of such conceptions was an elaborate system
of what might be called, to use a modern analogy, “controls.” Wages, the
movement of labor, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool,
methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business,
rates of interest—all are controlled, partly by Statute, but still more by the
administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too
great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take
advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the law to
enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that
it does not intend to hinder him from asserting his rights at common law,
will intervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from
being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to settle
disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind the aggressor that
he is bound “rather to consider what is agreeable ... to the use of this State
and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost
advantage that a landlord for his particular profit maie take amonge his
tenaunts.”[57] Have prices been raised by a bad harvest? The Council will
issue a solemn denunciation of the covetousness of speculators, “in
conditions more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural men,”[58] who
take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessities; will instruct the
Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and will order
justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus
stocks at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental market threaten
distress in the textile districts? The Council will put pressure on clothiers to
find work for the operatives, “this being the rule by which the wool-grower,

the clothier and merchant must be governed, that whosoever had a part of
the gaine in profitable times ... must now, in the decay of trade ... beare a
part of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of the publicke
and the maintenance of the generall trade.”[59] Has the value of sterling
fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the
exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business
by prohibiting private transactions altogether.[60] Are local authorities
negligent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists
on regular reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the
impotent, and the steps taken to provide materials on which to employ the
able-bodied, inundates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with
threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difficulties? The
Council, which keeps sufficiently in touch with business conditions to know
when the difficulties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a
moderating influence by making an example of persons guilty of flagrant
extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a compromise. A mortgagee
accused of “hard and unchristianly dealing” is ordered to restore the land
which he has seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has
been similarly “hard and unconscionable” is committed to the Fleet. The
justices of Norfolk are instructed to put pressure on a money-lender who
has taken “very unjust and immoderate advantage by way of usury.” The
bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show “a more
Christian and charitable consideration of these his neighbors.” A nobleman
has released two offenders imprisoned by the High Commission for the
Province of York for having “taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of
the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government can
face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of respectable
tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual depression,
the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to
the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like an
informal moratorium.[61]
The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the first two Stuarts,
were masters of the art of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid,
motives beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles. In spite of its
lofty declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the
social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it
was grandiose in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures

disastrous to its ostensible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional
interests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its
fundamental conception, however—the philosophy of the thinkers and of
the few statesmen who rose above immediate exigencies to consider the
significance of the system in its totality—had a natural affinity with the
doctrines which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of an
ordered and graded society, in which each class performed its allotted
function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a
livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,” wrote
one who had labored much, amid grave personal dangers, for the welfare of
his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge we have, but to doe
services therfore amonge our neighbours abroade.”[62] The divines who
fulminated against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate
middleman, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw in
the measures by which the Government endeavored to suppress the greed of
individuals or the collision of classes a much needed cement of social
solidarity, and appealed to Cæsar to redouble his penalties upon an
economic license which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to
prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order, and the antidote
for the cupidity or ambition which threatened to destroy it, and reënforced
the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would not have been
out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned with
something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties
and the spiritual manifestation of the corporate life of a complex, yet united,
society. To both the State is something more than an institution created by
material necessities or political convenience. It is the temporal expression
of spiritual obligations. It is a link between the individual soul and that
supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It
rests not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.
Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic,
the most reasonable and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it
meant to one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet
not without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an
idea, however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in the
sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud’s intellectual limitations and
practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to
the most powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a kind to

commend him to those of its successor, and history has been hardly more
merciful to him than were his political opponents. But an intense conviction
of the fundamental solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great
community, a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate
hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities and sectional
interests—these qualities are not among the weaknesses against which the
human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its guard, and these
qualities Laud possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess. His worship
of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a superstition. Church
and State are one Jerusalem: “Both Commonwealth and Church are
collective bodies, made up of many into one; and both so near allied that the
one, the Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Commonwealth; nay,
so near, that the same men, which in a temporal respect make the
Commonwealth, do in a spiritual make the Church.”[63] Private and public
interests are inextricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The
foundation of unity is justice: “God will not bless the State, if kings and
magistrates do not execute judgment, if the widow and the fatherless have
cause to cry out against the ‘thrones of justice.’”[64]
To a temper so permeated with the conception that society is an
organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is
to maintain their coöperation, every social movement or personal motive
which sets group against group, or individual against individual, appears,
not the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The first
demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments must “entertain no private
business,” and “parties are ever private ends.”[65] The second is the self-
interest which leads the individual to struggle for riches and advancement.
“There is no private end, but in something or other it will be led to run cross
the public; and, if gain come in, though it be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’
it is no matter with them though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.”[66] For
Laud, the political virtues, by which he understands subordination,
obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the
community, are as much part of the Christian’s religion as are the duties of
private life; and, unlike some of those who sigh for social unity today, he is
as ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attainment of that
ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and to practice
injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a member of a society and is

dedicated by religion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the
obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism.
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common,
state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to
himself in vain. For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
Commonwealth, and in the body of the Church.”[67] To one holding such a
creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious
nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious duty; for both
seemed incompatible with the stability of a society in which
Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud’s
utterances and activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a
strong bias in favor of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian
State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal government.
It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of
protecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less
reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active
in harrying the depopulating landlord. The Council gave sympathetic
consideration to petitions from peasants begging for protection or redress,
and in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland counties
to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the ground that they
resulted in depopulation and were particularly harmful in times of dearth. In
1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed and special
instructions against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In parts
of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid down to grass was
plowed up in obedience to the Government’s orders. In the four years from
1635 to 1638 a list of some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and
about £50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.[68] With this policy Laud
was whole-heartedly in sympathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in
which he expresses his detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper which
evoked Clarendon’s gentle complaint that the archbishop made himself
unpopular by his inclination “a little too much to countenance the
Commission for Depopulation.”[69] Laud was himself an active member of
the Commission, and dismissed with impatient contempt the squirearchy’s
appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin he was reminded by his
enemies of the needlessly sharp censures with which he barbed the fine
imposed upon an enclosing landlord.[70]

The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element
in a general policy, by which a benevolent Government, unhampered by
what Laud had called “that noise” of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor
by even-handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small,
and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an unconscionable
appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the Council with the
problem of securing adequate food supplies and reasonable prices, with
poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been
described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against
exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Unwin.[71] In 1630-1 it
issued in an amended form the Elizabethan Book of Orders, instructing
justices as to their duty to see that markets were served and prices
controlled, appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as
Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a
Book of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629,
1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile
workers in East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the
Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council
of the North, Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested interests
were threatened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavored to insist
on the stricter administration of the code regulating the woollen industry.
[72]
Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious interest of the
Government, which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing
popular discontent, was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference
to the opinion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the divine
mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people “to lay down the
private for the public sake.” It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star
Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion
with the remark that the defendant has been “guilty of a most foule offence,
which the Prophet hath [called] in a very energeticall phrase grynding the
faces of the poore,” and that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by
“cruell men”;[73] or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a
time when it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to compel
the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or
serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Relief
of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631.[74]

“A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of Lord Saye and
Sele, “may preach the Gospel more publicly and to far greater edification in
a court of judicature, or at a Council-table, where great men are met
together to draw things to an issue, than many preachers in their several
charges can.”[75] The Church, which had abandoned the pretension itself to
control society, found some compensation in the reflection that its doctrines
were not wholly without influence in impressing the principles which were
applied by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty—to use a
question-begging phrase—in economic affairs follows somewhat the same
course as does its growth in the more important sphere of religion, and is
not unconnected with it. The conception of religion as a thing private and
individual does not emerge until after a century in which religious freedom
normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe religion, not the
freedom of the individual to worship God as he pleases. The assertion of
economic liberty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in which,
while a religious phraseology was retained and a religious interpretation of
social institutions was often sincerely held, the supernatural sanction had
been increasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and public
expediency. “Jerusalem ... stands not for the City and the State only ... nor
for the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both.”[76] In identifying
the maintenance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an
incompetent Government, the Church had built its house upon the sand. It
did not require prophetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be
followed by the destruction of the Temple.

III. THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM

Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be
made by one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long
Parliament, it was increasingly the voice of the past appealing to an alien
generation. The expression of a theory of society which had made religion
supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had
been an element, and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age to whose
increasing individualism the idea of corporate morality was as objectionable
as that of ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was
becoming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent practice, and
what still purported to be the teaching of the Church, is almost the

commonest theme of the economic literature of the period from 1550 to
1640; of much of it, indeed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might
say, men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices the market
would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But then, except in the
great commercial centers and in the high finance of the Papacy and of
secular Governments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an
occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an opportunity. The new
thing in the England of the sixteenth century was that devices that had
formerly been occasional were now woven into the very texture of the
industrial and commercial civilization which was developing in the later
years of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion was to give
English society its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty years later,
Harrington, in a famous passage, described how the ruin of the feudal
nobility by the Tudors, by democratizing the ownership of land, had
prepared the way for the bourgeois republic.[77] His hint of the economic
changes which preceded the Civil War might be given a wider application.
The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of capitalism in textiles and
mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock
enterprise in connection with it, the beginnings of something like deposit
banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of
Antwerp and the Government’s own financial necessities, of a money-
market with an almost modern technique—speculation, futures and
arbitrage transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes who
sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later
years of the century, and whose religious and political aspirations were, two
generations later, to overthrow the monarchy.
An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a
school of social ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being
essentially impersonal, a matter of opportunities, security and risks, acted
among other causes as a solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the
teaching of the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among
neighbors, which regarded keen bargaining as “sharp practice.” In the half-
century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the collapse of sterling
on the international market, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a
foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges
was the obsession of publicists and politicians. Problems of currency and
credit lend themselves more readily than most economic questions to

discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long debate
provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges, that the
psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by
economists as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered
out.
“We see,” wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or enforceth another,
like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred
driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the
instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait,
where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him
that followeth him.”[78] The spirit of modern business could hardly be
more aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a
soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as
futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of
the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker
who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the
warning that “the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.”
To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas
Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp, such
sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad
morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were
made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbor, but
as a profitable investment on the part of not too scrupulous business men,
who looked after themselves and expected others to do the same, they had
scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not
unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the ordinary village
or borough in rural England.
It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal
enunciation of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw
their weight against the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by
preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and “good
conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large-scale transactions, and
seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic
practice. The opposition to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the
self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of
Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last

Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid down to
pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest.[79] From at any rate the middle
of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the
Government was regarded with skepticism by the more advanced economic
theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that,
since it weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the
precise opposite of those intended.[80] As markets widened, the control of
the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in
theory, showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham
attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers
who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified
against legal proceedings.[81] Nor could he well have done otherwise, for
the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue:
“What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession
for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he
can?”[82] With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from
the days of complete freedom of contract.
Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to
the political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to
prove that the State which interferes with property and business destroys its
own title to exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House of
Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free
exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and
whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all
other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the
natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the
hands of some few.”[83] The process by which natural justice, imperfectly
embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by
positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice,
had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of the whole conception of
an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been
invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-
interest. By the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken
place. “Nature” had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human
appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as
a reason why self-interest should be given free play.

The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was
seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552,
which had prohibited all interest as “a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as
in dyvers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had been
repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain
man against the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his
determination that the law should not impose on business a utopian
morality.[84] The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence,
provided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent., though it still remained
open to a debtor, in the improbable event of his thinking it expedient to
jeopardize his chance of future advances, to take civil proceedings to
recover any payment made in excess of the principal. This qualified
condonation of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon
religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church of Christ,
and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more fastidious than its head.
Moderate interest, if without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful,
and it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the degrees have
been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament. Objective
economic science was beginning its disillusioning career, in the form of
discussions on the rise in prices, the mechanism of the money-market, and
the balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to
analyze forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation.
Since Calvin’s indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could
argue that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice.
Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which the
discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the divines, and even
before the end of the sixteenth century, though they did not dream of
abandoning the denunciation of unconscionable bargains, they were
surrounding it with qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which three
English translations were made in the ten years following his death, and
which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained and studied by all the
inferior clergy, indicated a via media. As uncompromising as any medieval
writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the old
fervor oppressive contracts which grind the poor. But he is less intolerant of
economic motives than most of his predecessors, and concedes, with
Calvin, that, before interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to
consider both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower and lender.

The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the
traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conservative divines took
advantage of the section in the Act of 1571 declaring that “all usurie being
forbydden by the lawe of God is synne and detestable,” to argue that the
Statute had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the Church
to prevent bargains which, for reasons of practical expediency, it did not
think fit to prohibit, but which it did not encourage and declined to enforce.
It is in obedience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure
until he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes from the
rent of land, not from interest on capital.[85] But, even so, there are
difficulties. The parson of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford,
which is “set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year,” the money
being used for their assistance. But the arrangement has its inconveniences.
Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is “very like to have perished
through casualty and ill-keeping.”[86] Will not the poor be surer of their
money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is sold to the man who
previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury?
Is it usury to invest money in business in order to provide an income for
those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If it
is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits, what is the
particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor,
who may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into
the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool
crop or to speculate on the exchanges?
To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point
was not the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but
the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions.
Their opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church,
argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments
which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that
they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be
interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the principal.” The
literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before
it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all
interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the
assumption implied in their very disagreement had been that economic
relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was

master. That economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct,
and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever
concessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a certain
standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian
Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they
might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social
obligations—such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of
religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a social theory
based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While rival
authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the
flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion,
which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in
which the whole controversy over “good conscience” in bargaining came to
a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense
problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a
Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the
Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from
Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of
them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether,
even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is
that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of
business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical
ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the
conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England
in the seventeenth century.
The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that
which turns on the difference between public and private morality. The
problem which it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace.
But, since its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard
to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only
individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere
of economic life, as soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is
no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of
Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life,
is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind

recoils. To argue that there is no difference at all is to lay down a principle
which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to
endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to expose the idea of
morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain.
The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards
the baser kinds of Realpolitik.
With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth
century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should
love my neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions
of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my
neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in
practice? To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no
answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to
moralize economic relations by treating every transaction as a case of
personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of impersonal
finance, world-markets and a capitalist organization of industry, its
traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely
repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out
again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had
endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the oppression
of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a
wage-earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless
iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant
to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to
it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was
beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English
merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or
the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian
craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices.
Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of
applying its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for
the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the
problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the
grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the future, the social
doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little
guidance. 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. 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. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating
activities and piety imprisoned in a shriveled mass of desiccated formulæ, it
will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence
narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous
interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic
speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political
Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from
the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors
been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have
been formulated. 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. But in England
there were all three, and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce
traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which denied their right to
exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all, any jurisdiction interfering with
economic matters. It was not merely that there was the familiar objection of
the plain man that parsons know nothing of business—that “it is not in
simple divines to show what contract is lawful and what is not.”[87] More
important, there was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least,
of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained
to the Privy Council that the judges were endeavoring to confine the
jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and matrimonial
cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to
stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth,
not more than one in twenty could be sustained.[88] “As things are,” wrote
two years later the author of a treatise on the civil and ecclesiastical law,
“neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the
other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two kingdomes.”[89]
The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commission suffered in the same way.

In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to
the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century down to
the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to
time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by
prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for
example, they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed by
the High Commission on a charge of usury.[90]
Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the
Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by
bishops and archdeacons. The acquiescence of the laity in the moral
jurisdiction of the clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for
two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a
vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold among the trading
and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable
proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was
based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in
matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result that, with
the disparagement of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical
discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It was not that
Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its
earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of
the individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as
anti-Christian the organs through which such discipline had in fact been
exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House
of Commons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest that the
rules of the canon law on the matter were abolished, and that “they should
be no more remembered than they are followed.”[91] Feeling against the
system rose steadily during the next two generations; excommunications,
when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disregarded;[92] and by
the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud’s régime,
the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long
Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of
the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the Court of High
Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal
jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them
away altogether.

“Not many good days,” wrote Penn, “since ministers meddled so much
in laymen’s business.”[93] That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the
Restoration, both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably
reacted, not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case
had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of religion which
regarded it as involving the control of economic self-interest by what Laud
had called “the body of the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of
Jeremy Taylor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and
eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life
which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works of mercy to his
neighbors.[94] But the conception that the Church possessed, of its own
authority, an independent standard of social values, which it could apply as
a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world, grew steadily
weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the
tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in
the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of religion to
advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became itself
the most tyrannical and paralyzing of theories. It may be called
Indifferentism.
The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the
Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century
it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England
as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a
few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral
authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions,
has been abandoned.
An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably
accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social
thought in the eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic,
which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be
expected in the first great age of English natural science—the age of
Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society—drew its inspiration, not from
religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the
political theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized and
debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with
varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from

their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an
organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They
enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable
laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural
sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in
so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their
unfettered exercise.
The most important of such rights are property rights, and property
rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders
of men, who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do
not subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits,
though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the
curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and
freeholders as “the poor”—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds,
“the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who
work for themselves. Hence the unending discussions as to whether “the
laboring poor” are to be classed among the “productive” or “unproductive”
classes—whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the
indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of
their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. “It would be easier,
where property was well secured, to live without money than without poor,
... who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive
nothing worth saving”; the poor “have nothing to stir them up to be
serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to
cure”; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be
wretched as well as poor.”[95] Such sentences from a work printed in 1714
are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable,
and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an
error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence.
It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir
of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic
society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities,
and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean
subservience to wealth and social position, which, after more than half a
century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of

Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups
and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and
adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the
mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no
longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like
Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies
a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on The Use of
Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the
conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be
described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a
rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of
a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the
analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys
of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an
organism composed of different classes united by their common
subordination to a spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of
apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The
materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena
of early commercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial
immorality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which might have
been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience of the
eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced
by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered
the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious
opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional scheme of
social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial
England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and
was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was
quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal
charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,[96] first
published in 1658, and widely read during the following century, extortion
and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is
frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves
with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer
in the words, “trade is one thing and religion is another,” they imply a not
very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions

between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little
room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated
the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the
invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a
providential plan. “National commerce, good morals and good
government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that
religion was his trade, and trade his religion, “are but part of one general
scheme, in the designs of Providence.”
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist
on commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial
wisdom. The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments
of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order
established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated
men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy
expressed in the lines of Pope:

Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of
institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of
life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell
outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings
of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. It was,
therefore, in the sphere of providing succor for the non-combatants and for
the wounded, not in inspiring the main army, that the social work of the
Church was conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eighteenth
century were the relief of the poor, the care of the sick, and the
establishment of schools. In spite of the genuine, if somewhat unctuous,
solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the poorer classes, which inspired the
Evangelical revival, religion abandoned the fundamental brain-work of
criticism and construction to the rationalist and the humanitarian.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church should not
have been more effective in giving inspiration and guidance during the
immense economic reorganization to which tradition has assigned the not
very felicitous name of the “Industrial Revolution.” It did not give it,

because it did not possess it. There were, no doubt, special conditions to
account for its silence—mere ignorance and inefficiency, the supposed
teachings of political economy, and, after 1790, the terror of all
humanitarian movements inspired by France. But the explanation of its
attitude is to be sought, less in the peculiar circumstances of the moment,
than in the prevalence of a temper which accepted the established order of
class relations as needing no vindication before any higher tribunal, and
which made religion, not its critic or its accuser, but its anodyne, its
apologist, and its drudge. 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.

CHAPTER IV
THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
“And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”
Genesis xxxix. 2 (Tyndale’s translation).

By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between religious
theory and economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime,
within the bosom of religious theory itself, a new system of ideas was being
matured, which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to
turn on the whole field of social obligations a new and penetrating light. On
a world heaving with expanding energies, and on a Church uncertain of
itself, rose, after two generations of premonitory mutterings, the
tremendous storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks
snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither all of winter nor
all of spring, but violent and life-giving, pitiless and tender, sounding
strange notes of yearning and contrition, as of voices wrung from a people
dwelling in Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signifies
Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the
rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to God and haughty to
man, the soldier-saints swept over battlefield and scaffold their garments
rolled in blood.
In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned to dust, in
the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a voice was heard to observe
that religious liberty was a considerable advantage, regarded “merely in a
commercial view.”[1] A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this new
world, born of the vision of the mystic, the passion of the prophet, the sweat
and agony of heroes famous and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions
and commonplace cupidities, was one in which, since “Thorough” was no
more, since property was secure, and contracts inviolable, and the executive

tamed, the judicious investments of business men were likely to yield a
profitable return. So the epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called
success, mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, but
for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint.

I. PURITANISM AND SOCIETY

The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching
of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and a doctrine
of the nature of God and man, which, if common to both, was more widely
diffused, more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three off-
shoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which had made some stir
under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped, with judicious watering from the
Scotch, might grow into a State Church, was to produce a credal statement
carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, but slender
roots. The second, with its insistence on the right of every Church to
organize itself, and on the freedom of all Churches from the interference of
the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an
imperishable legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was Puritanism.
Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican Church hardly,
if at all, less fully than in those which afterwards separated from it, it
determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but
political aspirations, business relations, family life and the minutiæ of
personal behavior.
The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan spirit was the
most fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the
Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is
from its struggle against the old order that an England which is
unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its accomplishments
on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of
which politics are but the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an
iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only because
sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which
Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked
in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of
Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights,

when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before
he fled.

We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence.

In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and
glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton,
“unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,” amid a world of self-seekers and
apostates, there are depths of light and darkness which posterity can
observe with reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line
cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and
brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated
light. If the inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its
outward and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-
place and counting-house and camp than in the student’s chamber and the
gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain
shows of sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament.
Like a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting demon,
the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in
heaven above or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding
spirit, he remakes, not only his own character and habits and way of life,
but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social
order. Conscious that he is but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this
transitory life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror from
the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the
borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God,
the soul, salvation and damnation. “It made the world seem to me,” said a
Puritan of his conversion, “as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness.
And it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the
sin of my childhood.... It set me upon that method of my studies which
since then I have found the benefit of.... It caused me first to seek God’s
Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful,
and to determine first of my Ultimate End.”[2]

Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puritan cannot
rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which
the greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a
blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but
glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness.
“The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty
fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town,
must needs go out of the world.”[3] For that awful journey, girt with
precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms
himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with
friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal
life halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He
scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the
word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but
instruction, exhortation and warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing
episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for
enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect; and it was
because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes
devotion”[4] that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to
stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes,
systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century before
the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail of
the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing
God than all the world,”[5] he is a natural republican, for there is none on
earth that he can own as master. If powers and principalities will hear and
obey, well; if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect
may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these—prayer, and
toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and
death—may be too little for the salvation of a single soul. “Then I saw that
there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the
City of Destruction”[6]—those dreadful words haunt him as he nears his
end. Sometimes they break his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to
the chief of sinners, they nerve his will. For 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.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every social grade had
felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen
to weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or
edifie one another.”[7] But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm are not
straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income, experience proves,
nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn
more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so
different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of
different social and economic milieux. To contemporaries the chosen seat of
the Puritan spirit seemed to be those classes in society which combined
economic independence, education and a certain decent pride in their status,
revealed at once in a determination to live their own lives, without truckling
to earthly superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who,
either through weakness of character or through economic helplessness,
were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such,
where the feudal spirit had been weakened by contact with town life and
new intellectual currents, were some of the gentry. Such, conspicuously,
were the yeomen, “mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,”[8]
especially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such, above all, were the
trading classes of the towns, and of those rural districts which had been
partially industrialized by the decentralization of the textile and iron
industries.
“The King’s cause and party,” wrote one who described the situation in
Bristol in 1645, “were favored by two extremes in that city; the one, the
wealthy and powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but
disgusted by the middle rank, the true and best citizens.”[9] That it was
everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism is
suggested by Professor Usher’s statistical estimate of the distribution of
Puritan ministers in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which
shows that, of 281 ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to
London and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of Norfolk,
Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to Lancashire, and only 104

to the whole of the rest of the country.[10] The phenomenon was so striking
as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of
profounder spiritual import than sociological generalization. “Most of the
tenants of these gentlemen,” wrote Baxter, “and also most of the poorest of
the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and
were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the
smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and
freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations
and counties which depend on cloathing and such manufactures.” He
explained the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with
the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was
“the merchants and middle sort of men that were Protestants.”[11]
The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had
financed the Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the
Revolution to be par excellence “the rebellious city,” returning four
Dissenters to the Royalist Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and
aldermen to accompany Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill
from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian ministers long
after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing the Whig Party, which stood
for tolerance, and sheltering the Whig leaders against the storm which broke
in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed. The
growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by meanes of the City of
London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its
universall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying
and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and corporations, and
thereby poysoning whole counties.”[12] In Lancashire, the clothing towns
—“the Genevas of Lancashire”—rose like Puritan islands from the
surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and
Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the west,
Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile
industry, were all centers of Puritanism.
The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with
religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and
Royalists, who found in the vices of each an additional reason for
distrusting both. Clarendon commented bitterly on the “factious humor
which possessed most corporations, and the pride of their wealth”;[13] and,

after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the boroughs were
suspect for a generation. The bishop of Oxford warned Charles II’s
Government against showing them any favor, on the ground that “trading
combinations” were “so many nests of faction and sedition,” and that “our
late miserable distractions” were “chiefly hatched in the shops of
tradesmen.”[14] Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the
Anglican clergy as they returned to their City churches. It was even alleged
that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a providential
instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.[15]
When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fashion, its
practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by
the example of Holland—the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-
century Europe—to inquire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into
the relations between economic progress and other aspects of the national
genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they
confirmed, not without some notes of gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop
and presbyterian, but deduced from it different conclusions. The question
which gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of religious
tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual significance, they found a
practical reason for applauding it in the fact that the classes who were in the
van of the Puritan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its
most prominent victims, were also those who led commercial and industrial
enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple. A society of peasants
could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the
simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business
community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it were
free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if
each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in that
age the same thing—to practice its own religion.
Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented
nothing, and English economic organization had long been elastic enough
to swallow Flemish weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from
France. But the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally
accommodating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-bred
sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Elizabethan Privy
Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of trades more

important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of foreign
artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury,[16] and the problem
recurred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. “The gaols
were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen and inhabitants, the
clothiers were forced from their houses, and thousands of workmen and
women whom they employed set to starving.”[17] The Whig indictment of
the disastrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by French
intendants of the widespread distress which followed the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes.[18]
When the collision between economic interests and the policy of
compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not surprising that the
economists of the age should have enunciated the healing principle that
persecution was incompatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers
of economic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every law of this
nature,” wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject, is not only
“expressly against the very principles and rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but
is also “destructive to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing
and driving away the most industrious working hands, and depopulating,
and thereby impoverishes our country, which is capable of employing ten
times the number of people we now have.”[19]
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, found
one reason of their success in the fact that, Roman Catholicism excepted,
every man might practise what religion he pleased.[20] De la Court, whose
striking book passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same.[21]
Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving towns were those
where there was most nonconformity, cited the evidence, not only of
Europe, but of India and the Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while
economic progress is compatible with any religion, the class which is its
vehicle will always consist of the heterodox minority, who “profess
opinions different from what are publicly established.”[22] “There is a kind
of natural unaptness,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1671, “in the Popish religion
to business, whereas on the contrary among the Reformed, the greater their
zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and industry, as holding idleness
unlawful.... The domestic interest of England lieth in the advancement of
trade by removing all obstructions both in city and country, and providing
such laws as may help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving liberty

of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and denying it to
Papists.”[23]
If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good for trade,
the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was aggravated by the fact that
it was they who were most vocal in the demand for tolerance. Swift
denounced, as part of the same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought
to make no distinction between Protestants” and the policy “of preferring,
on all occasions, the monied interests before the landed.”[24] Even later in
the eighteenth century, the stale gibe of “the Presbyterians, the Bank and the
other corporations” still figured in the pamphlets of the statesman whom
Lord Morley describes as the prince of political charlatans, Bolingbroke.
[25]
“The middle ranks,” “the middle class of men,” “the middle sort”—
such social strata included, of course, the widest variety of economic
interest and personal position. But in the formative period of Puritanism,
before the Civil War, two causes prevented the phrase from being merely
the vapid substitute for thought which it is today. In the first place, outside
certain exceptional industries and districts, there was little large-scale
production and no massed proletariat of propertyless wage-earners. As a
result, the typical workman was still normally a small master, who
continued himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and whose position
was that described in Baxter’s Kidderminster, where “there were none of
the tradesmen very rich ... the magistrates of the town were few of them
worth £40 per annum, and most not half so much; three or four of the
richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to £600 in twenty
years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by an ill debtor.”[26] Differing
in wealth from the prosperous merchant or clothier, such men resembled
them in economic and social habits, and the distinction between them was
one of degree, not of kind. In the world of industry vertical divisions
between district and district still cut deeper than horizontal fissures between
class and class. The number of those who could reasonably be described as
independent, since they owned their own tools and controlled their own
businesses, formed a far larger proportion of the population than is the case
in capitalist societies.
The second fact was even more decisive. The business classes, as a
power in the State, were still sufficiently young to be conscious of

themselves as something like a separate order, with an outlook on religion
and politics peculiarly their own, distinguished, not merely by birth and
breeding, but by their social habits, their business discipline, the whole
bracing atmosphere of their moral life, from a Court which they believed to
be godless and an aristocracy which they knew to be spendthrift. The
estrangement—for it was no more—was of shorter duration in England than
in any other European country, except Switzerland and Holland. By the
latter part of the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the common
struggles which made the Revolution, still more perhaps through the
redistribution of wealth by commerce and finance, the former rivals were
on the way to be compounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy embracing
both. The landed gentry were increasingly sending their sons into business;
“the tradesman meek and much a liar” looked forward, as a matter of
course, to buying an estate from a bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to
astonish foreign observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the Paradise
of the bourgeoisie, in which the prosperous merchant shouldered easily
aside the impoverished bearers of aristocratic names.[27]
That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great divide of
the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer glories of the Revolution. In
the germinating period of Puritanism, the commercial classes, though
powerful, were not yet the dominant force which a century later they were
to become. They could look back on a not distant past, in which their swift
rise to prosperity had been regarded with suspicion, as the emergence of an
alien interest, which applied sordid means to the pursuit of anti-social ends
—an interest for which in a well-ordered commonwealth there was little
room, and which had been rapped on the knuckles by conservative
statesmen. They lived in a present, where a Government, at once
interfering, inefficient and extravagant, cultivated, with an intolerable
iteration of grandiloquent principles, every shift and artifice most repugnant
to the sober prudence of plain-dealing men. The less reputable courtiers and
the more feather-pated provincial gentry, while courting them to raise a
mortgage or renew a loan, reviled them as parvenus, usurers and blood-
suckers. Even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the influence of
the rentier and of the financier still continued to cause apprehension and
jealousy, both for political and for economic reasons. “By this single
stratagem,” wrote an indignant pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who
specialized in money-lending, “they avoyd all contributions of tithes and

taxes to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to tender consciences);
they decline all services and offices of burthen incident to visible estates;
they escape all oaths and ties of publick allegiance or private fealty.... They
enjoy both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and withal the spiritual
comfort of thriving easily and devoutly ... leaving their adversaries the
censures of improvidence, together with the misery of decay. They keep
many of the nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor
copyholders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice and oft-times
protects them in their boldest conceptions. By engrossing cash and credit,
they in effect give the price to land and law to markets. By commanding
ready money, they likewise command such offices as they widely affect ...
they feather and enlarge their own nests, the corporations.”[28]
Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity against equestrian
upstarts or of the noblesse against the roturier, were natural in a
conservative aristocracy, which for a century had felt authority and prestige
slipping from its grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them by
resigning itself, as ultimately it did, to sharing them with its rival. In return,
the business world, which had its own religious and political ideology,
steadily gathered the realities of power into its own hands; asked with a
sneer, “how would merchants thrive if gentlemen would not be unthriftes”;
[29] and vented the indignant contempt felt by an energetic, successful and,
according to its lights, not too unscrupulous, generation for a class of
fainéants, unversed in the new learning of the City and incompetent to the
verge of immorality in the management of business affairs. Their triumphs
in the past, their strength in the present, their confidence in the future, their
faith in themselves, and their difference from their feebler neighbours—a
difference as of an iron wedge in a lump of clay—made them, to use a
modern phrase, class-conscious. Like the modern proletarian, who feels
that, whatever his personal misery and his present disappointments, the
Cause is rolled forward to victory by the irresistible force of an inevitable
evolution, the Puritan bourgeoisie knew that against the chosen people the
gates of hell could not prevail. The Lord prospered their doings.
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as
the consciousness of its character and destiny dawns upon it, looks for a
moment, before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its
vision. In that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with

ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes
of mankind and of its own heart it would be. The feudal noblesse had
looked, and had caught a glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and
honor. The monarchy looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for it; they saw
a nation drinking the blessings of material prosperity and spiritual
edification from the cornucopia of a sage and paternal monarchy—a nation
“fortified and adorned ... the country rich ... the Church flourishing ... trade
increased to that degree that we were the exchange of Christendom ... all
foreign merchants looking upon nothing as their own but what they laid up
in the warehouses of this Kingdom.”[30] In a far-off day the craftsman and
laborer were to look, and see a band of comrades, where fellowship should
be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. For the middle classes of
the early seventeenth century, rising but not yet triumphant, that enchanted
mirror was Puritanism. What it showed was a picture grave to sternness, yet
not untouched with a sober exaltation—an earnest, zealous, godly
generation, scorning delights, punctual in labor, constant in prayer, thrifty
and thriving, filled with a decent pride in themselves and their calling,
assured that strenuous toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those
Dutch Calvinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their iron
Protestantism—“thinking, sober, and patient men, and such as believe that
labor and industry is their duty towards God.”[31] Then an air stirred and
the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.

II. A GODLY DISCIPLINE versus THE RELIGION OF
TRADE

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 figure could be added to the ledger. But it is a strange school
which does not teach more than one lesson, and the social reactions of
Puritanism, trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summarized in
the simple formula that it fostered individualism. Weber, in a celebrated
essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism, in its English version, was the
parent of capitalism, and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham

have lent to the same interpretation the weight of their considerable
authority.[32] 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; a collectivism which grasped at an iron discipline, and an
individualism which spurned the savorless mess of human ordinances; a
sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine
recklessness which would make all things new. For long nourished together,
their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil War they fell apart, and
Presbyterian and Independent, aristocrat and Leveller, politician and
merchant and utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange monsters
with whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendors and illusions
vanished; the force of common things prevailed; the metal cooled in the
mould; and the Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendors and its illusions, settled
finally into its decent bed of equable respectability. But each element in its
social philosophy had once been as vital as the other, and the battle was
fought, not between a Puritanism solid for one view and a State committed
to another, but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself. The
problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the reasons which
caused this to wax and that to wane.
“The triumph of Puritanism,” it has been said, “swept away all traces
of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.”[33] That it
swept away the restrictions imposed by the existing machinery is true;
neither ecclesiastical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber,
could function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of the Church of
Laud and the State of Strafford, it did so but as a step towards erecting a
more rigorous discipline of its own. It would have been scandalized by
economic individualism as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad
outlines of its scheme of organization favored unrestricted liberty in matters
of business as little as in the things of the spirit. To the Puritan of any period
in the century between the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the

suggestion that he was the friend of economic or social license would have
seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have appeared to most of his
critics, who taunted him, except in the single matter of usury, with an
intolerable meticulousness.
A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan covenant.
Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its vital necessity had been
the theme of the Joshuas of Scotland, England and France. Knox produced
a Scottish edition of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises
expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established ecclesiastical
order.[34] The word “discipline” implied essentially “a directory of Church
government,” established in order that “the wicked may be corrected with
ecclesiastical censures, according to the quality of the fault”;[35] and the
proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth century show that the
conception of a rule of life, to be enforced by the pressure of the common
conscience, and in the last resort by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of
their system. When, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the sectaries in
London described their objects as not merely the “free and pure” preaching
of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of the sacraments, but “to have, not
the fylthye cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to
the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus
Chryste,”[36] the antithesis suggests that something more than verbal
instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that it was the practice, when a sin
was committed by one of the faithful, for the elders to apply first
admonishment and then excommunication. The minute-book of one of the
few classes whose records survive confirms his statement.[37]
All this early movement had almost flickered out before the end of the
sixteenth century. But the conception lay at the very root of
Presbyterianism, and it reëmerged in the system of church government
which the supercilious Scotch Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly
steered to inconclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and
Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of High Commission,
of the temporal jurisdiction of all persons in Holy Orders, and finally, with
the abolition of episcopacy, of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a
vacuum. “Mr. Henderson,” wrote the insufferable Baillie, “has ready now a
short treatise, much called for, of our church discipline.”[38] In June 1646
an unenthusiastic Parliament accepted the ordinance which, after a three

years’ debate of intolerable tedium, emerged from the Assembly’s
Committee on the Discipline and Government of the Church, and which
provided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of scandalous
offences. Detested by the Independents and cold-shouldered by Parliament,
which had no intention of admitting the divine right of presbyteries, the
system never took deep root, and in London, at least, there appears to be no
evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or classes. In parts of
Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems to have been actively at work,
down, at any rate, to 1649. The change in the political situation, in
particular the triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from
functioning longer.[39]
“Discipline” included all questions of moral conduct, and of these, in
an age when a great mass of economic relations were not the almost
automatic reactions of an impersonal mechanism, but a matter of human
kindliness or meanness between neighbors in village or borough, economic
conduct was naturally part. Calvin and Beza, perpetuating with a new
intensity the medieval idea of a Church-civilization, had sought to make
Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal purity, but of social righteousness
and commercial morality. Those who had drunk from their spring
continued, in even less promising environments, the same tradition. Bucer,
who wrote when something more fundamental than a politician’s
reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with their eyes on Geneva, had
urged the reconstruction of every side of the economic life of a society
which was to be Church and State in one.[40] English Puritanism, while
accepting after some hesitation Calvin’s much qualified condonation of
moderate interest, did not intend in other respects to countenance a laxity
welcome only to worldlings. Knewstub appealed to the teaching of “that
worthy instrument of God, Mr. Calvin,” to prove that the habitual usurer
ought to be “thrust out of the society of men.” Smith embroidered the same
theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost him his professorship, denounced the
“usual practice amongst rich men, and some of the greater sort, who by
lending, or by giving out their money to usury, are wont to snare and
oppress the poor and needier sort.” Cartwright, the most famous leader of
Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as “a hainous offence against God
and his Church,” and laid down that the offender should be excluded from
the sacraments until he satisfied the congregation of his penitence.[41] The
ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be content with

a modest competence and to shun the allurements of riches. “Every
Christian man is bound in conscience before God,” wrote Stubbes, “to
provide for his household and family, but yet so as his immoderate care
surpasse not the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes.... So
farre from covetousnes and from immoderate care would the Lord have us,
that we ought not this day to care for tomorrow, for (saith he) sufficient to
the day is the travail of the same.”[42]
The most influential work on social ethics written in the first half of
the seventeenth century from the Puritan standpoint was Ames’ De
Conscientia, a manual of Christian conduct which was intended to supply
the brethren with the practical guidance which had been offered in the
Middle Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a standard
authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writers. Forbidden to
preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent more than twenty years in
Holland, where he held a chair of theology at the University of Franeker,
and his experience of social life in the country which was then the business
capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigor of his social doctrine the
more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was inevitable, the impossibility
of distinguishing between interest on capital invested in business, and
interest on capital invested in land, since men put money indifferently into
both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden in principle by
Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin, he surrounds his indulgence
with qualifications; he requires that no interest shall be charged on loans to
the needy, and describes as the ideal investment for Christians one in which
the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands only “a fair share of
the profits, according to the degree in which God has blessed him by whom
the money is used.” His teaching with regard to prices is not less
conservative. “To wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as
Augustine observes), but it is a common vice.” Men must not sell above the
maximum fixed by public authority, though they may sell below it, since it
is fixed to protect the buyer; when there is no legal maximum, they must
follow the market price and “the judgment of prudent and good men.” They
must not take advantage of the necessities of individual buyers, must not
overpraise their wares, must not sell them dearer merely because they have
cost them much to get.[43] Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing
were equally trenchant.[44]

Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the pulpit. It
found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some imprint on the conduct of
congregations. If D’Ewes was the unresisting victim of a more than
ordinarily aggressive conscience, he was also a man of the world who
played a not inconspicuous part in public affairs; and D’Ewes not only
ascribed the fire which destroyed his father’s house to the judgment of
Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly prescribed in his will that, in order
to avoid the taint of the accursed thing, provision should be made for his
daughters, not by investing his capital at a fixed—and therefore usurious—
rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or of annuities.[45] The
classis which met at Dedham in the eighties of the sixteenth century was
concerned partly with questions of ceremony, of church government, of the
right use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys of sixteen
might wear their hats in church, and by what marks one might detect a
witch. But it discussed also what provision could be made to check
vagrancy; advised the brethren to confine their dealings to “the godliest of
that trade” (of cloth making); recommended the establishment in the
township of a scheme of universal education, that of children of parents too
poor to meet the cost being defrayed from collections made in church; and
urged that each well-to-do householder should provide in his home for two
(or, if less able, one) of his impoverished neighbors who “walke christianly
and honestlie in their callinges.”[46] In the ever-lengthening list of
scandalous and notorious sins to be punished by exclusion from the
sacrament, which was elaborated by the Westminster Assembly, a place was
found, not only for drunkards, swearers, and blasphemers, worshippers and
makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges, persons dancing,
gaming, attending plays on the Lord’s day, or resorting to witches, wizards,
and fortune-tellers, but for the more vulgar vices of those who fell into
extortion, barratry and bribery.[47] The classis of Bury in Lancashire
(quantum mutatus!) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided in
1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a scandalous sin, deserving
suspention upon obstinacy.”[48]
It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the money-
changers from the temple and to make straight the way of the Lord. “God
hath honnored you in callinge you to a place of power and trust, and hee
expects that you should bee faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the
grave every day; you dwell uppon the borders of eternity; your breath is in

your nostrells; therfore duble and treble your resolutions to bee zealous in a
good thinge.... How dreadfull will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent
magistrate! What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee
punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence of the Lord?”[49]
Such, in that singular age, was the language in which the mayor of
Salisbury requested the justices of Wiltshire to close four public-houses.
Apparently they closed them.
The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective discipline was
possible only in a theocracy; and, still eloquent in speech, theocracy had
abdicated in fact, even before the sons of Belial returned to cut down its
groves and lay waste its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent
from the State Church was still not fully established, its defeat was
fortunate, for it was the victory of tolerance. It meant, however, that the
discipline of the Church gave place to the attempt to promote reform
through the action of the State, which reached its height in the Barebones
Parliament. Projects for law reform, marriage reform and financial reform,
the reform of prisons and the relief of debtors, jostled each other on its
committees; while outside it there were murmurs among radicals against
social and economic privilege, which were not to be heard again till the
days of the Chartists, and which to the conservative mind of Cromwell
seemed to portend mere anarchy. The transition from the idea of a moral
code enforced by the Church, which had been characteristic of early
Calvinism, to the economic individualism of the later Puritan movement
took place, in fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the Independents.
Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline and
compulsory conformity, they endeavored to achieve the same social and
ethical ends by political action.
The change was momentous. If the English Social Democratic
movement has any single source, that source is to be found in the New
Model Army. But the conception implied in the attempt to formulate a
scheme of economic ethics—the theory that every department of life falls
beneath the same all-encompassing arch of religion—was too deeply rooted
to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even by the more corroding
march of economic development. Expelled from the world of fact, where it
had always been a stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world of
ideas, and its champions in the last half of the century labored it the more,

precisely because they knew that it must be conveyed to their audiences by
teaching and preaching or not at all. Of those champions the most learned,
the most practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.
How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to his
congregation at Kidderminster, he himself has told us. “Every Thursday
evening my neighbours that were most desirous and had opportunity met at
my house, and there one of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they
proposed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or any other case
of conscience, and I resolved their doubts.”[50] Both in form and in matter,
his Christian Directory, or a Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of
Conscience[51] is a remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summa
Theologica and Summa Moralis in one; its method of treatment descends
directly from that of the medieval Summæ, and it is, perhaps, the last
important English specimen of a famous genus. Its object, as Baxter
explains in his introduction, is “the resolving of practical cases of
conscience, and the reducing of theoretical knowledge into serious
Christian practice.” Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics,
Ecclesiastics, and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the rules of a
Christian casuistry, which may be sufficiently detailed and precise to afford
practical guidance to the proper conduct of men in the different relations of
life, as lawyer, physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and servant, buyer
and seller, landlord and tenant, lender and borrower, ruler and subject. Part
of its material is derived from the treatment of similar questions by previous
writers, both before and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of
continuing a great tradition. But it is, above all things, realistic, and its
method lends plausibility to the suggestion that it originated in an attempt to
answer practical questions put to its author by members of his congregation.
Its aim is not to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal to the
enlightened common sense of the Christian reader. It does not overlook,
therefore, the practical facts of a world in which commerce is carried on by
the East India Company in distant markets, trade is universally conducted
on credit, the iron manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding
abundant supplies of capital and offering a profitable opening to the
judicious investor, and the relations of landlords and tenants have been
thrown into confusion by the fire of London. Nor does it ignore the moral
qualities for the cultivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of
business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial environment of the

Restoration, and its teaching is designed for “Rome or London, not Fools’
Paradise.”
Baxter’s acceptance of the realities of his age makes the content of his
teaching the more impressive. The attempt to formulate a casuistry of
economic conduct obviously implies that economic relations are to be
regarded merely as one department of human behavior, for which each man
is morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mechanism, to
which ethical judgments are irrelevant. Baxter declines, therefore, to admit
the convenient dualism, which exonerates the individual by representing his
actions as the outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists, is
committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain ethical standards, and
these standards are as obligatory in the sphere of economic transactions as
in any other province of human activity. To the conventional objection that
religion has nothing to do with business—that “every man will get as much
as he can have and that caveat emptor is the only security”—he answers
bluntly that this way of dealing does not hold among Christians. Whatever
the laxity of the law, the Christian is bound to consider first the golden rule
and the public good. Naturally, therefore, he is debarred from making
money at the expense of other persons, and certain profitable avenues of
commerce are closed to him at the outset. “It is not lawful to take up or
keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you by
the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.”
But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious extortion practiced
by the monopolist, the engrosser, the organizer of a corner or a combine. He
must carry on his business in the spirit of one who is conducting a public
service; he must order it for the advantage of his neighbor as much as, and,
if his neighbor be poor, more than, for his own. He must not desire “to get
another’s goods or labour for less than it is worth.” He must not secure a
good price for his own wares “by extortion working upon men’s ignorance,
error, or necessity.” When prices are fixed by law, he must strictly observe
the legal maximum; when they are not, he must follow the price fixed by
common estimation. If he finds a buyer who is willing to give more, he
“must not make too great an advantage of his convenience or desire, but be
glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal, fair, and honest terms,” for “it is
a false rule of them that think their commodity is worth as much as any one
will give.” If the seller foresees that in the future prices are likely to fall, he

must not make profit out of his neighbour’s ignorance, but must tell him so.
If he foresees that they will rise, he may hold his wares back, but only—a
somewhat embarrassing exception—if it be not “to the hurt of the
Commonwealth, as if ... keeping it in be the cause of the dearth, and ...
bringing it forth would help to prevent it.” If he is buying from the poor,
“charity must be exercised as well as justice”; the buyer must pay the full
price that the goods are worth to himself, and, rather than let the seller
suffer because he cannot stand out for his price, should offer him a loan or
persuade some one else to do so. In no case may a man doctor his wares in
order to get for them a higher price than they are really worth, and in no
case may he conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to have
bought an inferior article, he “may not repair [his] loss by doing as [he] was
done by, ... no more than [he] may cut another’s purse because [his] was
cut.” Rivalry in trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian must
not snatch a good bargain “out of greedy covetousness, nor to the injury of
the poor ... nor ... so as to disturb that due and civil order which should be
among moderate men in trading.” On the contrary, if “a covetous
oppressor” offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, “it may be a duty
to offer the poor man the worth of his commodity and save him from the
oppressor.”
The principles which should determine the contract between buyer and
seller are applied equally to all other economic relations. Usury, in the sense
of payment for a loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it
becomes so, when the lender does not allow the borrower “such a
proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth require, but ...
will live at ease upon his labours”; or when, in spite of the borrower’s
misfortune, he rigorously exacts his pound of flesh; or when interest is
demanded for a loan which charity would require to be free. Masters must
discipline their servants for their good; but it is “an odious oppression and
injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of his wages, yea, or to give him
less than he deserveth.” As the descendant of a family of yeomen, “free,” as
he says, “from the temptations of poverty and riches,”[52] Baxter had
naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning. Significantly enough,
he deals with them under the general rubric of “Cases of oppression,
especially of tenants,” oppression being defined as the “injuring of inferiors
who are unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is too common a sort of
oppression for the rich in all places to domineer too insolently over the

poor, and force them to follow their wills and to serve their interest, be it
right or wrong.... Especially unmerciful landlords are the common and sore
oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get money enough to
purchase all the land in a county, they think that they may do with their own
as they list, and set such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that they are all
but as their servants.... An oppressor is an Anti-Christ and an Anti-God ...
not only the agent of the Devil, but his image.” As in his discussion of
prices, the gist of Baxter’s analysis of the cases of conscience which arise in
the relations of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure pecuniary
gain for himself by injuring his neighbor. Except in unusual circumstances,
a landlord must not let his land at the full competitive rent which it would
fetch in the market: “Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in England
should have so much abated of the fullest worth that they may comfortably
live on it, and follow their labours with cheerfulness of mind and liberty to
serve God in their families, and to mind the matters of their salvation, and
not to be necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want as shall make
them liker slaves than free men.” He must not improve (i.e., enclose) his
land without considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants
without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation;
nor must a newcomer take a holding over the sitting tenant’s head by
offering “a greater rent than he can give or than the landlord hath just cause
to require of him.” The Christian, in short, while eschewing “causeless,
perplexing, melancholy scruples, which would stop a man in the course of
his duty,” must so manage his business as to “avoid sin rather than loss,”
and seek first to keep his conscience in peace.
The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all this teaching
is its conservatism. In spite of the economic and political revolutions of the
past two centuries, how small, after all, the change in the presentation of the
social ethics of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance of the
Christian Directory, the Stop of the Exchequer tore a hole in the already
intricate web of London finance, and sent a shiver through the money-
markets of Europe. But Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of
equity in bargaining, of just prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of usury,
in the same tone, if not with quite the same conclusions, as a medieval
Schoolman, and he differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino,
hardly more than St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven
years later Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Among

the vices which it pilloried were the sin of extortion, “most commonly
committed by men of trade, who without all conscience, when they have an
advantage, will make a prey of their neighbour,” the covetousness of
“hucksters, that buy up the poor man’s victual wholesale and sell it to him
again for unreasonable gains,” the avarice of usurers, who watch till “the
poor fall into their mouths,” and “of those vile wretches called
pawnbrokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who are by
necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or
another the interest of what they so lend amount to thirty and forty, yea,
sometimes fifty pounds by the year.” As Christian and Christiana watched
Mr. Badman thus bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, before
they took staff and scrip for their journey to a more distant City, they
remembered that the Lord himself will plead the cause of the afflicted
against them that oppress them, and reflected, taught by the dealings of
Ephron the son of Zohar, and of David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there
is a “wickedness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap.”[53]
Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the same four centuries before in
his racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of the idea that “business is
business,” and that the world of commercial transactions is a closed
compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed,
did not win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested. Puritan as well
as Catholic accepted without demur the view which set all human interests
and activities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as Catholics,
essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian casuistry of
economic conduct.
They essayed it. But they succeeded even less than the Popes and
Doctors whose teaching, not always unwittingly, they repeated. And their
failure had its roots, not merely in the obstacles offered by the ever more
recalcitrant opposition of a commercial environment, but, like all failures
which are significant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Virtues are often
conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by
other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial, and it is not
only tares which choke the ground where the good seed is sown. The
fundamental question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins, but
what type of character it esteems and cultivates. To the scheme of Christian
ethics which offered admonitions against the numberless disguises assumed
by the sin which sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puritan

character offered, not direct opposition, but a polished surface on which
these ghostly admonitions could find no enduring foothold. The rules of
Christian morality elaborated by Baxter were subtle and sincere. But they
were like seeds carried by birds from a distant and fertile plain, and dropped
upon a glacier. They were at once embalmed and sterilized in a river of ice.
“The capitalist spirit” is as old as history, and was not, as has
sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism. But it found in certain
aspects of later Puritanism a tonic which braced its energies and fortified its
already vigorous temper. At first sight, no contrast could be more violent
than that between the iron collectivism, the almost military discipline, the
remorseless and violent rigors practiced in Calvin’s Geneva, and preached
elsewhere, if in a milder form, by his disciples, and the impatient rejection
of all traditional restrictions on economic enterprise which was the temper
of the English business world after the Civil War. In reality, the same
ingredients were present throughout, but they were mixed in changing
proportions, and exposed to different temperatures at different times. Like
traits of individual character which are suppressed till the approach of
maturity releases them, the tendencies in Puritanism, which were to make it
later a potent ally of the movement against the control of economic
relations in the name either of social morality or of the public interest, did
not reveal themselves till political and economic changes had prepared a
congenial environment for their growth. Nor, once those conditions were
created, was it only England which witnessed the transformation. In all
countries alike, in Holland, in America, in Scotland, in Geneva itself, the
social theory of Calvinism went through the same process of development.
It had begun by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. It ended
by being the vehicle of an almost Utilitarian individualism. While social
reformers in the sixteenth century could praise 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.

III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES

“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.”[54] While the revelation of God to
the individual soul is the center of all religion, the essence of Puritan
theology was that it made it, not only the center, but the whole
circumference and substance, dismissing as dross and vanity all else but this
secret and solitary communion. Grace alone can save, and this grace is the
direct gift of God, unmediated by any earthly institution. The elect cannot
by any act of their own evoke it; but they can prepare their hearts to receive
it, and cherish it when received. They will prepare them best, if they empty
them of all that may disturb the intentness of their lonely vigil. Like an
engineer, who, to canalize the rush of the oncoming tide, dams all channels
save that through which it is to pour, like a painter who makes light visible
by plunging all that is not light in gloom, the Puritan attunes his heart to the
voice from Heaven by an immense effort of concentration and abnegation.
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 man, reveal
themselves in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns brightly on
the hearth; but through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or
a saint, looks on a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees
is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues
towards the grave—a wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath
solitary stars. Through it he must take his way, alone. No aid can avail him:
no preacher, for only the elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of
God; no Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates belong; no
sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to increase the glory of God, not to
minister spiritual nourishment to man; hardly God himself, for Christ died
for the elect, and it may well be that the majesty of the Creator is revealed
by the eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the created.[55]
His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suffers in spirit the
perils which the first settlers in America endured in body, the sea behind,

the untamed desert in front, a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand.
Where Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible,
hovering like a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching its
muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet familiar, beauty,
the Puritan mourned for a lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where
they had seen society as a mystical body, compact of members varying in
order and degree, but dignified by participation in the common life of
Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the spirit which quickeneth
and an alien, indifferent or hostile world. Where they had reverenced the
decent order whereby past was knit to present, and man to man, and man to
God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast, in the
prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with horror from the filthy
rags of human righteousness. Where they, in short, had found comfort in a
sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his soul.

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. 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? A servant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a
Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved less by compassion
for his erring brethren than by impatient indignation at the blindness of
vessels of wrath who “sinned their mercies.” A spiritual aristocrat, who
sacrificed fraternity to liberty, he drew from his idealization of personal
responsibility a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and
generalized, was to be among the most potent explosives that the world has
known. He drew from it also a scale of ethical values, in which the
traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed, and
which, since he was above all things practical, he carried as a dynamic into
the routine of business and political life.

For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to attain the
free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift has been accorded, what is
rejected as a means is resumed as a consequence, and the Puritan flings
himself into practical activities with the dæmonic energy of one who, all
doubts allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen vessel. Once
engaged in affairs, he brings to them both the qualities and limitations of his
creed in all their remorseless logic. Called by God to labor in his vineyard,
he has within himself a principle at once of energy and of order, which
makes him irresistible both in war and in the struggles of commerce.
Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, he sees in the
poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and
relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object
of suspicion—though like other gifts they may be abused—but the blessing
which rewards the triumph of energy and will. Tempered by self-
examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic, whose
victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the counting-
house, and in the market.
This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality and emphasis,
found its social organ in those middle and commercial classes who were the
citadel of the Puritan spirit, and whom, “ennobled by their own industry and
virtue,”[56] Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress and
enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think of England as par excellence
the pioneer of economic progress, that we are apt to forget how recently that
rôle has been assumed. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in the
sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the Spanish Empire, in the
seventeenth to the United Provinces and, above all, to the Dutch.
The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely medieval in
its economic organization and social outlook, more interested in
maintaining customary standards of consumption than in accumulating
capital for future production, with an aristocracy contemptuous of the
economic virtues, a peasantry farming for subsistence amid the organized
confusion of the open-field village, and a small, if growing, body of
jealously conservative craftsmen. In such a society Puritanism worked like
the yeast which sets the whole mass fermenting. It went through its slack
and loosely knit texture like a troop of Cromwell’s Ironsides through the
disorderly cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in Ireland, the elements were so

alien that assimilation was out of the question, the result was a wound that
festered for three centuries. In England the effect was that at once of an
irritant and of a tonic. Puritanism had its own standards of social conduct,
derived partly from the obvious interests of the commercial classes, partly
from its conception of the nature of God and the destiny of man. These
standards were in sharp antithesis, both to the considerable surviving
elements of feudalism in English society, and to the policy of the
authoritarian State, with its ideal of an ordered and graded society, whose
different members were to be maintained in their traditional status by the
pressure and protection of a paternal monarchy. Sapping the former by its
influence and overthrowing the latter by direct attack, Puritanism became a
potent force in preparing the way for the commercial civilization which
finally triumphed at the Revolution.
The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at upsetting the
government of the Church, went hand in hand with an economic radicalism,
which resented the restraints on individual self-interest imposed in the name
of religion or of social policy, was being made by the stricter school of
religious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth.[57] Seventeenth-
century writers repeated the charge that the Puritan conscience lost its
delicacy where matters of business were concerned, and some of them were
sufficiently struck by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explanation
of it. The example on which they usually seized—the symbol of a supposed
general disposition to laxity—was the indulgence shown by Puritan divines
in the particular matter of moderate interest. It was the effect, so the
picturesque story ran,[58] of the Marian persecution. The refugees who fled
to the Continent could not start business in a foreign country. If, driven by
necessity, they invested their capital and lived on the proceeds, who could
quarrel with so venial a lapse in so good a cause? Subsequent writers
embellished the picture. The redistribution of property at the time of the
Dissolution, and the expansion of trade in the middle of the century, had
led, one of them argued, to a great increase in the volume of credit
transactions. The opprobrium which attached to loans at interest—“a sly
and forbid practice”—not only among Romanists and Anglicans, but among
honest Puritans, played into the hands of the less scrupulous members of
“the faction.” Disappointed in politics, they took to money-lending, and,
without venturing to justify usury in theory, defended it in practice.
“Without the scandal of a recantation, they contrived an expedient, by

maintaining that, though usury for the name were stark naught, yet for
widows, orphans and other impotents (therein principally comprising the
saints under persecution) it was very tolerable, because profitable, and in a
manner necessary.” Naturally, Calvin’s doctrine as to the legitimacy of
moderate interest was hailed by these hypocrites with a shout of glee. “It
took with the brethren like polygamy with the Turks, recommended by the
example of divers zealous ministers, who themselves desired to pass for
orphans of the first rank.”[59] Nor was it only as the apologist of moderate
interest that Puritanism was alleged to reveal the cloven hoof. Puritans
themselves complained of a mercilessness in driving hard bargains, and of a
harshness to the poor, which contrasted unfavorably with the practice of
followers of the unreformed religion. “The Papists,” wrote a Puritan in
1653, “may rise up against many of this generation. It is a sad thing that
they should be more forward upon a bad principle than a Christian upon a
good one.”[60]
Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pamphleteer. The
real story was less dramatic, but more significant. From the very beginning,
Calvinism had comprised two elements, which Calvin himself had fused,
but which contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given a
whole-hearted imprimatur to the life of business enterprise, which most
earlier moralists had regarded with suspicion, and had laid upon it the
restraining hand of an inquisitorial discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism
was the creed of a small and homogeneous city, the second aspect had
predominated; in the many-sided life of England, where there were
numerous conflicting interests to balance it, and where it was long
politically weak, the first. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, had come the wave of commercial and financial expansion—
companies, colonies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining, capitalism
in finance—on the crest of which the English commercial classes, in
Calvin’s day still held in leading-strings by conservative statesmen, had
climbed to a position of dignity and affluence.
Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, these two
elements flew apart. The collectivist, half-communistic aspect, which had
never been acclimatized in England, quietly dropped out of notice, to crop
up once more, and for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant
and landowner, in the popular agitation under the Commonwealth. The

individualism congenial to the world of business became the distinctive
characteristic of a Puritanism which had arrived, and which, in becoming a
political force, was at once secularized and committed to a career of
compromise. 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.
[61] If the City Fathers of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the
seventeenth century the religious collectivism of Calvin’s régime, it was not
to be expected that the landowners and bourgeoisie of an aristocratic and
increasingly commercial nation, however much Calvinist theology might
appeal to them, would view with favor the social doctrines implied in
Calvinist discipline. In the reign of the first two Stuarts, both economic
interests and political theory pulled them hard in the opposite direction.
“Merchants’ doings,” the man of business in Wilson’s Discourse upon
Usury had observed, “must not thus be overthwarted by preachers and
others that cannot skill of their dealings.”[62] Behind the elaborate façade
of Tudor State control, which has attracted the attention of historians, an
individualist movement had been steadily developing, which found
expression in opposition to the traditional policy of stereotyping economic
relations by checking enclosure, controlling food supplies and prices,
interfering with the money-market, and regulating the conditions of the
wage contract and of apprenticeship. In the first forty years of the
seventeenth century, on grounds both of expediency and of principle, the
commercial and propertied classes were becoming increasingly restive
under the whole system, at once ambitious and inefficient, of economic
paternalism. It was in the same sections of the community that both
religious and economic dissatisfaction were most acute. Puritanism, with its
idealization of the spiritual energies which found expression in the activities
of business and industry, drew the isolated rivulets of discontent together,
and swept them forward with the dignity and momentum of a religious and
a social philosophy.

For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as to theology
and church government, but as the champion of interests and opinions
embracing every side of the life of society, that the Puritan movement came
into collision with the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic
ideologies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were not
disentangled; they presented themselves, both to supporters and opponents,
as different facets of a single scheme. “All that crossed the views of the
needy courtiers, the proud encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the
lewd nobility and gentry ... whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit
or conversation, or anything good—all these were Puritans.”[63] The clash
was not one of theories—a systematic and theoretical individualism did not
develop till after the Restoration—but of contradictory economic interests
and incompatible conceptions of social expediency.
The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Government of Charles
I bore some resemblance to the system of which a more uncompromising
version was developed between 1661 and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was
one which favored an artificial and State-promoted capitalism—a
capitalism resting on the grant of privileges and concessions to company
promoters who would pay for them, and accompanied by an elaborate
system of State control, which again, if partly inspired by a genuine
solicitude for the public interest, was too often smeared with an odious trail
of finance. It found its characteristic expression in the grant of patents, in
the revival of the royal monopoly of exchange business, against which the
City had fought under Elizabeth, in attempts to enforce by administrative
action compliance with the elaborate and impracticable code controlling the
textile trades and to put down speculation in foodstuffs, and in raids on
enclosing landlords, on employers who paid in truck or evaded the rates
fixed by assessment, and on justices who were negligent in the
administration of the Poor Laws. Such measures were combined with
occasional plunges into even more grandiose schemes for the establishment
of county granaries, for taking certain industries into the hands of the
Crown, and even for the virtual nationalization of the cloth manufacture.
[64]
“The very genius of that nation of people,” wrote Strafford to Laud of
the Puritans, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as
ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”[65] Against this

whole attempt to convert economic activity into an instrument of profit for
the Government and its hangers-on—against, no less, the spasmodic
attempts of the State to protect peasants against landlords, craftsmen against
merchants, and consumers against middlemen—the interests which it
thwarted and curbed revolted with increasing pertinacity. Questions of
taxation, on which attention has usually been concentrated, were in reality
merely one element in a quarrel which had its deeper cause in the collision
of incompatible social philosophies. The Puritan tradesman had seen his
business ruined by a monopoly granted to a needy courtier, and cursed Laud
and his Popish soap. The Puritan goldsmith or financier had found his trade
as a bullion-broker hampered by the reëstablishment of the ancient office of
Royal Exchanger, and secured a resolution from the House of Commons,
declaring that the patent vesting it in Lord Holland and the proclamation
forbidding the exchanging of gold and silver by unauthorized persons were
a grievance. The Puritan money-lender had been punished by the Court of
High Commission, and railed at the interference of bishops in temporal
affairs. The Puritan clothier, who had suffered many things at the hands of
interfering busy-bodies despatched from Whitehall to teach him his
business, averted discreet eyes when the Wiltshire workmen threw a more
than usually obnoxious Royal Commissioner into the Avon, and, when the
Civil War came, rallied to the Parliament. The Puritan country gentleman
had been harried by Depopulation Commissions, and took his revenge with
the meeting of the Long Parliament. The Puritan merchant had seen the
Crown both squeeze money out of his company, and threaten its monopoly
by encouraging courtly interlopers to infringe its charter. The Puritan
member of Parliament had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas as
to commercial policy which were not those of the Government. Confident
in their own energy and acumen, proud of their success, and regarding with
profound distrust the interference both of Church and of State with matters
of business and property rights, the commercial classes, in spite of their
attachment to a militant mercantilism in matters of trade, were, even before
the Civil War, more than half converted to the administrative nihilism which
was to be the rule of social policy in the century following it. Their demand
was the one which is usual in such circumstances. It was that business
affairs should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the
intrusions of an antiquated morality or by misconceived arguments of
public policy.[66]

The separation of economic from ethical interests, which was the note
of all this movement, was in sharp opposition to religious tradition, and it
did not establish itself without a struggle. Even in the very capital of
European commerce and finance, an embittered controversy was
occasioned by the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer
degrees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamphleteering, in which
the theological faculty of the University of Utrecht performed prodigies of
zeal and ingenuity, that the States of Holland and West Friesland closed the
agitation by declaring that the Church had no concern with questions of
banking.[67] In the French Calvinist Churches, the decline of discipline had
caused lamentations a generation earlier.[68] In America, the theocracy of
Massachusetts, merciless alike to religious liberty and to economic license,
was about to be undermined by the rise of new States like Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and utilitarian temper was
destined to find its greatest representative in the golden common sense of
Benjamin Franklin.[69] “The sin of our too great fondness for trade, to the
neglecting of our more valuable interests,” wrote a Scottish divine in 1709,
when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant outburst of commercial
enterprise, “I humbly think will be written upon our judgment.... I am sure
the Lord is remarkably frowning upon our trade ... since it was put in the
room of religion.”[70]
In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively economic
standards to social relations evoked from Puritan writers and divines
vigorous protests against usurious interest, extortionate prices and the
oppression of tenants by landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had
interpreted only too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by
works, but by faith. Usury, “in time of Popery an odious thing,”[71] had
become a scandal. Professors, by their covetousness, caused the enemies of
the reformed religion to blaspheme.[72] The exactions of the forestaller and
regrater were never so monstrous or so immune from interference. The
hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities of the poor so
neglected. “The poor able to work are suffered to beg; the impotent, aged
and sick are not sufficiently provided for, but almost starved with the
allowance of 3d. and 4d. a piece a week.... These are the last times indeed.
Men generally are all for themselves. And some would set up such, having a
form of religion, without the power of it.”[73]

These utterances came, however, from that part of the Puritan mind
which looked backward. That which looked forward found in the rapidly
growing spirit of economic enterprise something not uncongenial to its own
temper, and went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a
qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared in some of his later
followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of
God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of
economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of
medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical
sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral
creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their
long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen pointed
out, it is true, the peril to the soul involved in a single-minded concentration
on economic interests. The enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad
habits sometimes associated with them, and its warnings against an
excessive preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more and more the
air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching the main tendency and emphasis
of which were little affected by these incidental qualifications. It insisted, in
short, that money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a
danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for
the greater glory of God.
The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf sprang from the
very heart of Puritan theology. It was that expressed in the characteristic
and oft-used phrase, “a Calling.”[74] The rational order of the universe is
the work of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labor for
God’s glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a temporal calling. It is the first
duty of the Christian to know and believe in God; it is by faith that he will
be saved. But faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of
Prating Row, whose “religion is to make a noise.” The only genuine faith is
the faith which produces works. “At the day of Doom men shall be judged
according to their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were
you doers, or talkers only?”[75] The second duty of the Christian is to labor
in the affairs of practical life, and this second duty is subordinate only to the
first. “God,” wrote a Puritan divine, “doth call every man and woman ... to
serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own
and the common good.... The Great Governour of the world hath appointed
to every man his proper post and province, and let him be never so active

out of his sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own
vineyard and mind his own business.”[76]
From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as imposed by
the divine will, it follows that, not withdrawal from the world, but the
conscientious discharge of the duties of business, is among the loftiest of
religious and moral virtues. “The begging friars and such monks as live
only to themselves and to their formal devotion, but do employ themselves
in no one thing to further their own subsistence or the good of mankind ...
yet have the confidence to boast of this their course as a state of perfection;
which in very deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poorest
cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none.”[77] The idea was
not a new one. Luther had advanced it as a weapon against monasticism.
But for Luther, with his patriarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling
means normally that state of life in which the individual has been set by
Heaven, and against which it is impiety to rebel. On the lips of Puritan
divines, it is not an invitation to resignation, but the bugle-call which
summons the elect to the long battle which will end only with their death.
“The world is all before them.” They are to hammer out their salvation, not
merely in vocatione, but per vocationem. The calling is not a condition in
which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting enterprise, to be
undertaken, indeed, under the guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by
each man for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities.
“God hath given to man reason for this use, that he should first consider,
then choose, then put in execution; and it is a preposterous and brutish thing
to fix or fall upon any weighty business, such as a calling or condition of
life, without a careful pondering it in the balance of sound reason.”[78]
Laborare est orare. By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is
repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes
is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin
of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that
demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of
God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of
secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when
physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can
the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it
has ceased to be a material necessity. Work thus conceived stands at the

very opposite pole from “good works,” as they were understood, or
misunderstood, by Protestants. They, it was thought, had been a series of
single transactions, performed as compensation for particular sins, or out of
anxiety to acquire merit. What is required of the Puritan is not individual
meritorious acts, but a holy life—a system in which every element is
grouped round a central idea, the service of God, from which all disturbing
irrelevances have been pruned, and to which all minor interests are
subordinated.
His conception of that life was expressed in the words, “Be wholly
taken up in diligent business of your lawful callings, when you are not
exercised in the more immediate service of God.”[79] In order to deepen his
spiritual life, the Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He “is blind in no
man’s cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle
of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires.... He sees the
falseness of it [the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others
so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment.”[80] There must be no
idle leisure: “those that are prodigal of their time despise their own
souls.”[81] Religion must be active, not merely contemplative.
Contemplation is, indeed, a kind of self-indulgence. “To neglect this [i.e.,
bodily employment and mental labor] and say, ‘I will pray and meditate,’ is
as if your servant should refuse your greatest work, and tye himself to some
lesser, easie part.... God hath commanded you some way or other to labour
for your daily bread.”[82] The rich are no more excused from work than the
poor, though they may rightly use their riches to select some occupation
specially serviceable to others. Covetousness is a danger to the soul, but it is
not so grave a danger as sloth. “The standing pool is prone to putrefaction:
and it were better to beat down the body and to keep it in subjection by a
laborious calling, than through luxury to become a cast-away.”[83] So far
from poverty being meritorious, it is a duty to choose the more profitable
occupation. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more
than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you
refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of
your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.” Luxury, unrestrained
pleasure, personal extravagance, can have no place in a Christian’s conduct,
for “every penny which is laid out ... must be done as by God’s own
appointment.” Even excessive devotion to friends and relations is to be
avoided. “It is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational creature,

to love any one farther than reason will allow us.... It very often taketh up
men’s minds so as to hinder their love to God.”[84] The Christian life, in
short, must be systematic and organized, the work of an iron will and a cool
intelligence. Those who have read Mill’s account of his father must have
been struck by the extent to which Utilitarianism was not merely a political
doctrine, but a moral attitude. Some of the links in the Utilitarian coat of
mail were forged, it may be suggested, by the Puritan divines of the
seventeenth century.
The practical application of these generalities to business is set out in
the numerous works composed to expound the rules of Christian conduct in
the varied relations of life. If one may judge by their titles—Navigation
Spiritualized, Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver[85]—there
must have been a considerable demand for books conducive to professional
edification. A characteristic specimen is The Tradesman’s Calling,[86] by
Richard Steele. The author, after being deprived of a country living under
the Act of Uniformity, spent his declining years as minister of a
congregation at Armourers Hall in London, and may be presumed to have
understood the spiritual requirements of the City in his day, when the heroic
age of Puritanism was almost over and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue.
No one who was writing a treatise on economic ethics today would address
himself primarily to the independent shopkeeper, as the figure most
representative of the business community, and Steele’s book throws a flood
of light on the problems and outlook of the bourgeoisie, in an age before the
center of economic gravity had shifted from the substantial tradesman to the
exporting merchant, the industrial capitalist and the financier.
Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier authorities as
to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, however, of its practical utility.
Obvious frauds in matters of quality and weight are to be avoided; an
honest tradesman ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or
three callings merely to increase his riches,” or oppress the poor; nor should
he seek more than “a reasonable proportion of gain,” or “lie on the catch to
make [his] markets of others’ straits.” But Steele rejects as useless in
practice the various objective standards of a reasonable profit—cost of
production, standard of life, customary prices—which had been suggested
in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual must judge for himself.

“Here, as in many other cases, an upright conscience must be the clerk of
the market.”
In reality, however, the characteristic of The Tradesman’s Calling, as
of the age in which it was written, is not the relics of medieval doctrine
which linger embalmed in its guileless pages, but the robust common sense,
which carries the author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial,
if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a comfortable one—that there
is no necessary conflict between religion and business. “Prudence and Piety
were always very good friends.... You may gain enough of both worlds if
you would mind each in its place.” His object is to show how that agreeable
result may be produced by dedicating business—with due reservations—to
the service of God, and he has naturally little to say on the moral casuistry
of economic conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that trade itself is
a kind of religion. A tradesman’s first duty is to get a full insight into his
calling, and to use his brains to improve it. “He that hath lent you talents
hath also said, ‘Occupy till I come!’ Your strength is a talent, your parts are
talents, and so is your time. How is it that ye stand all the day idle?... Your
trade is your proper province.... Your own vineyard you should keep.... Your
fancies, your understandings, your memories ... are all to be laid out
therein.” So far from their being an inevitable collision between the
requirements of business and the claims of religion, they walk hand in hand.
By a fortunate dispensation, the virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence,
moderation, sobriety, thrift—are the very qualities most conducive to
commercial success. The foundation of all is prudence; and prudence is
merely another name for the “godly wisdom [which] comes in and puts due
bounds” to his expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to live rather
somewhat below than at all above his income.” Industry comes next, and
industry is at once expedient and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman
from “frequent and needless frequenting of taverns,” and pin him to his
shop, “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of
God.”
If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company, speculation,
gambling, politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in religion—it is these things
which are the ruin of tradesmen. Not, indeed, that religion is to be
neglected. On the contrary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy
ejaculations.” What is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike habit of

“neglecting a man’s necessary affairs upon pretence of religious worship.”
But these faults, common and uncommon alike, are precisely those to be
avoided by the sincere Christian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress
his neighbor, but need not fly to the other extreme, be righteous over-much,
or refuse to “take the advantage which the Providence of God puts into his
hands.” By a kind of happy, preëstablished harmony, such as a later age
discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the
individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace,
for it is a proof that a man has labored faithfully in his vocation, and that
“God has blessed his trade.” “Nothing will pass in any man’s account
except it be done in the way of his calling.... 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.[87] The inference was
illogical, but how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet
as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon against
usury on the text, “The Pharisees who were covetous heard all these things
and they derided Christ,” his career in London was brought to an abrupt
conclusion.[88]
The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely penetrated by
moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of theory on practice would be
paradoxical. But, if the circumstances which determine that certain kinds of
conduct shall be profitable are economic, those which decide that they shall
be the object of general approval are primarily moral and intellectual. For
conventions to be adopted with whole-hearted enthusiasm, to be not merely
tolerated, but applauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admiration
of its philosophers, the second condition must be present as well as the first.
The insistence among men of pecuniary motives, the strength of economic
egotism, the appetite for gain—these are the commonplaces of every age
and need no emphasis. What is significant is the change of standards which
converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue. After all, it appears, a
man can serve two masters, for—so happily is the world disposed—he may
be paid by one, while he works for the other. Between the old-fashioned
denunciation of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned applause

of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the argument which urges that
enterprise itself is the discharge of a duty imposed by God.
In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade, by
N. B., M.D.[89] Notable for its enlightened discussion of conventional
theories of the balance of trade, it is a good specimen of an indifferent
genus. But its authorship was more significant than its argument. For N. B.
was Dr. Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency expert,
pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks, was the son of that
Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of whose alluring surname a cynical
posterity recorded its verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints
over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan rigor to Restoration
license is the most familiar of platitudes. The reaction to a mundane
materialism was more gradual, more general, and ultimately of greater
significance. The profligacy of the courtier had its decorous counterpart in
the economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Votaries, not of
Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more profitable divinity, they
celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging
with redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing money.
The transition from the anabaptist to the company promoter was less
abrupt than might at first sight be supposed. It had been prepared, however
unintentionally, by Puritan moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of
untiring activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and
extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and self-discipline and
rational calculation, they had created an ideal of Christian conduct, which
canonized as an ethical principle the efficiency which economic theorists
were preaching as a specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as it
was novel. To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental
maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words
of St. Paul to Timothy: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith
content. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Now, while, as
always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the
citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading
host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency
to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the
goal of the Christian’s efforts. Not consumption, on which the eyes of
earlier sages had been turned, but production, became the pivot of his

argument. Not an easy-going and open-handed charity, but a systematic and
methodical accumulation, won the meed of praise that belongs to the good
and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all
human relations 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. In winning the
world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.
The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously sought,
while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most earlier generations of
Englishmen, in which the theme of moralists had been the danger of
unbridled cupidity, and the main aim of public policy had been the stability
of traditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the identification of
labor and enterprise with the service of God. The magnificent energy which
changed in a century the face of material civilization was to draw
nourishment from that temper. The worship of production and ever greater
production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his unhappy
servants—was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same compelling
creed.
Social development moves with a logic whose inferences are long
delayed, and the day of these remoter applications had not yet dawned. The
version of Christian ethics expounded by Puritanism in some of its later
phases was still only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a
flowing tide. It had an unconscious ally in the preoccupation with economic
interests which found expression in the enthusiasm of business politicians
for a commercial Machtpolitik. The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of
Holland “for the fairest mistress in the world—trade,”[90] was not two
years old when it made its own essay in economic imperialism. “A bare-
faced war” for commerce, got up by the Royal African Company, was
Clarendon’s verdict[91] on the Dutch war of 1665-7. Five years later,

Shaftesbury hounded the City against Holland with the cry of Delenda est
Carthago. The war finance of the Protectorate had made it necessary for
Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native, capitalists, and the
impecunious Government of the Restoration was in the hands of those
syndicates of goldsmiths whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the
age before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart plutocracy,
found not a little disgusting.[92]
The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified no less the
mood which glorified the economic virtues. Economic science developed in
England, not, as in Germany, as the handmaid of public administration, nor,
as in France, through the speculations of philosophers and men of letters,
but as the interpreter of the practical interests of the City. With the
exception of Petty and Locke, its most eminent practitioners were business
men, and the questions which excited them were those, neither of
production nor of social organization, but of commerce and finance—the
balance of trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The rise of Political
Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly influenced, as it was, by the
Cartesian philosophy and by the progress of natural science, stamped their
spontaneous and doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical
orthodoxy. “Knowledge,” wrote the author of the preface to a work by one
of the most eminent exponents of the new science, “in great measure is
become mechanical.”[93] The exact analysis of natural conditions, the
calculations of forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the
operation of simple, constant and measurable forces, was the natural bias of
an age interested primarily in mathematics and physics. Its object was “to
express itself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments
of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in
nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions,
appetites and passions of particular men to the consideration of others.”[94]
In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had occupied so
large a place in the earlier treatment of social and economic subjects,
seemed the voice of an antiquated superstition. Moreover, the main
economic dogma of the mercantilist had an affinity with the main ethical
dogma of the Puritan, which was the more striking because the coincidence
was undesigned. To the former, production, not consumption, was the pivot
of the economic system, and, by what seems to the modern reader a curious

perversion, consumption is applauded only because it offers a new market
for productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal virtues are precisely those
which find in the strenuous toils of industry and commerce their most
natural expression. The typical qualities of the successful business life, in
the days before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and
earnestness of labor, concentration, system and method, the initiative which
broke with routine and the foresight which postponed the present to the
future. Advice like that of the Reverend Mr. Steele to his City congregation
was admirably calculated to give these arduous excellences a heightened
status and justification. The lean goddess, Abstinence, whom Mr. Keynes,
in a passage of brilliant indiscretion, has revealed as the tutelary divinity of
Victorian England, was inducted to the austere splendors of her ascetic
shrine by the pious hands of Puritan moralists.
Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legislation from a
direct participation in public affairs, Dissenters of means and social position
threw themselves into the alternative career offered by commerce and
finance, and did so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their
choice. If they conformed, the character given them by their critics
—“opinionating, relying much upon their own judgment ... ungrateful, as
not holding themselves beholden to any man ... proud, as thinking
themselves the only favorites of God, and the only wise or virtuous among
men”[95]—disposed them to the left in questions of Church and State. The
names of the commercial magnates of the day lend some confirmation to
the suggestion of that affinity between religious radicalism and business
acumen which envious contemporaries expressed in their sneers at the
“Presbyterian old usurer,” “devout misers,” and “extorting Ishban.”[96] The
four London members elected in 1661 had not only filled the ordinary civic
offices, but had held between them the governorship of the East India
Company, the deputy-governorship of the Levant Company, and the
masterships of the Salters and Drapers Companies; two of them were said
to be Presbyterians, and two Independents.[97] Of the committee of leading
business men who advised Charles II’s Government on questions of
commercial policy, some, like Sir Patience Ward and Michael Godfrey,
represented the ultra-Protestantism of the City, while others, like Thomas
Papillon and the two Houblons, were members of the French Huguenot
church in London.[98] In spite of the bitter commercial rivalry with
Holland, both Dutch capital and Dutch ideas found an enthusiastic welcome

in London.[99] Sir George Downing, Charles II’s envoy at the Hague, who
endeavored to acclimatize Dutch banking methods in England, and who,
according to Clarendon, was one of the intriguers who prepared the war of
1665-7, had been reared in the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and
had been a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey.[100] Paterson, who
supplied the idea of a joint-stock banking corporation, which Michael
Godfrey popularized in the City and Montagu piloted through Parliament,
was, like the magnificent Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had
haunted the Hague in the days when it was the home of disconsolate Whigs.
[101] Yarranton, most ingenious of projectors, had been an officer in the
Parliamentary army, and his book was a long sermon on the virtues of the
Dutch.[102] Defoe, who wrote the idyll of the bourgeoisie in his Complete
English Tradesman, was born of nonconformist parents, and was intended
for the ministry before, having failed in trade, he took up politics and
literature.[103] In his admirable study of the iron industry, Mr. Ashton has
shown that the most eminent iron-masters of the eighteenth century
belonged as a rule to the Puritan connection.[104] They had their prototype
in the seventeenth century in Baxter’s friend, Thomas Foley, “who from
almost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum or more by iron
works.”[105]
To such a generation, a creed which transformed the acquisition of
wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of
lions. 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.

IV. THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY

To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits
and institutions which appear to conflict with them. The recognition
accorded by Puritan ethics to the economic virtues, in an age when such
virtues were rarer than they are today, gave a timely stimulus to economic
efficiency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modified the traditional
attitude towards social obligations. For the spontaneous, doctrineless

individualism, which became the rule of English public life a century before
the philosophy of it was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was
responsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious movements in the world
of affairs—the discrediting of the ideal of a paternal, authoritarian
Government, the breakdown of central control over local administration, the
dislocation caused by 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! To insist that the individual
is responsible, that no man can save his brother, that the essence of religion
is the contact of the soul with its Maker, how true and indispensable! But
how easy to slip from that truth into the suggestion that society is without
responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the social order and its
consequences are not even the scaffolding by which men 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 sober
satisfaction at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has commented
on the manner in which “the appeal of the Evangelicals to personal religion
corresponds with the appeal of Benthamite Liberals to individual
energy.”[106] The same affinity between religious and social interests
found an even clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the
seventeenth century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if not quite
logically, to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a
disparagement of the significance of the social fabric as compared with
personal character.

A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by the
treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of Pauperism. For a
century and a half the progress of enclosing had been a burning issue,
flaring up, from time to time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of
that period, from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in
the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of religious teachers had been
one of condemnation. Sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet—
not to mention Statutes and Royal Commissions—had been launched
against depopulation. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy, but
to religion. Peasant and lord, in their different degrees, are members of one
Christian commonwealth, within which the law of charity must bridle the
corroding appetite for economic gain. In such a mystical corporation, knit
together by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage to the full,
for no man may seek to live “outside the body of the Church.”
Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentlemen, who had
been the obstructive agents of local administration, the practical application
of such doctrines had always been intermittent, and, when the Long
Parliament struck the weapon of administrative law from the hands of the
Crown, it had ceased altogether. But the politics of Westminster were not
those of village and borough. The events which seemed to aristocratic
Parliamentarians to close the revolution seemed to the left wing of the
victorious army only to begin it. In that earliest and most turbulent of
English democracies, where buff-coat taught scripture politics to his
general, the talk was not merely of political, but of social, reconstruction.
The program of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to
express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand, not
only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution
of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the veto of the
House of Lords, but also that “you would have laid open all enclosures of
fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the
benefit of the poor.”[107] Theoretical communism, repudiated by the
leading Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, on
whose behalf Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common people of
England, by joynt consent of person and purse, have caste out Charles, our
Norman oppressour ... the land now is to returne into the joynt hands of
those who have conquered, that is the commonours,” and that the victory

over the King was incomplete, as long as “wee ... remayne slaves still to the
kingly power in the hands of lords of manors.”[108]
Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the pressure for
redress proceeded. When the shattering of traditional authority seemed for a
moment to make all things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries
of dull oppression, started to life, and in several Midland counties the
peasants rose to pull down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in 1649
there were rumors of a popular movement to throw down the enclosures of
the neighboring forest, the City Council took the matter up. A petition was
drafted, setting out the economic and social evils attending enclosure, and
proposing the establishment of machinery to check it, consisting of a
committee without whose assent enclosing was not to be permitted. A local
minister was instructed to submit the petition to Parliament, “which hath
still a watchful eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of the
nation.”[109] The agent selected to present the city’s case was the Rev. John
Moore, a prolific pamphleteer, who for several years attacked the
depopulating landlord with all the fervor of Latimer, though with even less
than Latimer’s success.
Half a century before, such commotions would have been followed by
the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue of a Royal Commission.
But, in the ten years since the meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole
attitude of public policy towards the movement had begun to change.
Confiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a revolution in
the distribution of property, similar, on a smaller scale, to that which had
taken place at the Reformation. As land changed hands, customary relations
were shaken and new interests were created. Enclosure, as Moore
complained,[110] was being pushed forward by means of law suits ending
in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that City merchants and
members of the Committee for Compounding, some of whom had found
land speculation a profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a
proposal to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State
interference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than a century.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers should have
found the open ear of Parliament impenetrably closed to agrarian
grievances. Nor was it only the political and economic environment which
had changed. The revolution in thought was equally profound. The

theoretical basis of the policy of protecting the peasant by preventing
enclosure had been a conception of landownership which regarded its rights
and its duties as inextricably interwoven. Property was not merely a source
of income, but a public function, and its use was limited by social
obligations and necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes who
had taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy could make no
truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared when the Restoration Parliament
swept away military tenures, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an
excise, the financial burden previously borne by themselves.
The theory which took its place, and which was to become in the
eighteenth century almost a religion, was that expressed by Locke, when he
described property as a right anterior to the existence of the State, and
argued that “the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his
property without his own consent.” But Locke merely poured into a
philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered out in the stress of
political struggles, and which were already the commonplace of landowner
and merchant. The view of society held by that part of the Puritan
movement which was socially and politically influential had been expressed
by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in the army. It was
that only the freeholders really constituted the body politic, and that they
could use their property as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to any
superior, or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere
tenants at will, with no fixed interest or share in the land of the kingdom.
[111] Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on agrarian
policy. Formerly a course commending itself to all public-spirited persons,
the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the program of a sect of
religious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656
introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons,
framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities of Leicester,
there was an instant outcry from members that it would “destroy property,”
and the bill was refused a second reading.[112] After the Restoration the
tide began to run more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had
already become the hobby of the country gentleman. Experts advocated it
on economic grounds, and legislation to facilitate it was introduced into
Parliament. Though its technique still remained to be elaborated, the
attitude which was to be decisive in the eighteenth century had already been
crystallized.

The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was not merely that
political conditions made the landed gentry omnipotent, and that the
Royalist squirearchy, who streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660,
were in no mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II,
of the administrative interference with the rights of property which had
infuriated them in the Government of Charles I. It was that opinion as to
social policy had changed, and changed not least among men of religion
themselves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the law of
nature, is already coming to be identified by the pious with the operation of
the providential plan, which is the law of God. Enclosures will increase the
output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is suited to
produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him free to
produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim that every one by the light of nature
and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage.... The
advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public.”[113]
It is significant that such considerations were adduced, not by an
economist, but by a minister. For the argument was ethical as well as
economic, and, when Moore appealed to the precepts of traditional morality
to bridle pecuniary interests, he provoked the retort that a judicious
attention to pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened
morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is—to use the favorite
catchword of the age—“regulation,” and regulation is possible only if they
work under the eye of an employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of
the Restoration, the first, and most neglected, virtue of the poor is industry.
Common rights encourage idleness by offering a precarious and
demoralizing livelihood to men who ought to be at work for a master. It is
not surprising, therefore, that the admonitions of religious teachers against
the wickedness of joining house to house and field to field should almost
entirely cease. Long the typical example of uncharitable covetousness,
enclosure is now considered, not merely economically expedient, but
morally beneficial. Baxter, with all his scrupulousness—partly, perhaps,
because of his scrupulousness—differs from most earlier divines in giving a
qualified approval to enclosure “done in moderation by a pious man,” for
the characteristic reason that a master can establish a moral discipline
among his employees, which they would miss if they worked for
themselves. What matters, in short, is not their circumstances, but their
character. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians.

Opportunities for spiritual edification are more important than the mere
material environment. If only the material environment were not itself
among the forces determining men’s capacity to be edified!
The temper which deplored that the open-field village was not a school
of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and poor relief an even more
shattering criticism. There is no province of social life in which the
fashioning of a new scale of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more
clearly revealed. In the little communities of peasants and craftsmen which
composed medieval England, all, when Heaven sent a bad harvest, had
starved together, and the misery of the sick, the orphan and the aged had
appeared as a personal calamity, not as a social problem. Apart from a few
precocious theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal and secular
system of provision for distress, the teaching most characteristic of
medieval writers had been that the relief of the needy was a primary
obligation on those who had means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is
typical, quotes with approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those
who cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that property is
stewardship, and concludes—a conclusion not always drawn from that
well-worn phrase—that to withhold alms when there is evident and urgent
necessity is mortal sin.[114] Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical
glamour both to poverty and to the compassion by which poverty was
relieved, for poor men were God’s friends. At best, the poor were thought to
represent our Lord in a peculiarly intimate way—“in that sect,” as Langland
said, “our Saviour saved all mankind”—and it was necessary for the author
of a religious manual to explain that the rich, as such, were not necessarily
hateful to God.[115] At worst, men reflected that the prayers of the poor
availed much, and that the sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a
loaf of bread to a beggar, even though a curse went with it. The alms
bestowed today would be repaid a thousandfold, when the soul took its
dreadful journey amid rending briars and scorching flames.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Everie nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on,
And Christe receive thy saule.

If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane,

Everie nighte and alle,
The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule.

If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,
Everie nighte and alle,
The fire shall never make thee shrinke,
And Christe receive thy saule.

If meate or drinke thou gavest nane,
Everie nighte and alle,
The fire will burne thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule.

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Everie nighte and alle,
Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.[116]
The social character of wealth, which had been the essence of the
medieval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in the sixteenth century
with redoubled emphasis, precisely because the growing individualism of
the age menaced the traditional conception. “The poor man,” preached
Latimer, “hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let
the poor man have part of his riches to help and to comfort him
withal.”[117] Nor had that sovereign indifference to the rigors of the
economic calculus disappeared, when, under the influence partly of
humanitarian representatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of
religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the threads of
social administration into their own hands, the statesmen of the sixteenth
century set themselves to organize a secular system of poor relief. In
England, after three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp
out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the momentous
admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely
personal idleness, and that the whip had no terrors for the man who must

either tramp or starve. The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a
compulsory poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on work.
The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove lethargic justices hard,
and down to the Civil War the system was administered with fair regularity.
But the Elizabethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with
disastrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic distress. While it
provided relief, it was but the last link in a chain of measures—the
prevention of evictions, the control of food supplies and prices, the attempt
to stabilize employment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—
intended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. Apart from the
Poor Law, the first forty years of the seventeenth century were prolific in
the private charity which founded alms-houses and hospitals, and
established funds to provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen.
The appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of reverence.

It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.[118]

“What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar on his death-
bed to one who commended his charities. “It would have been but a suitable
return for me to have given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs
of alms here and there.”[119]
It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, both private
charity and public relief should fall on evil days. In London, charitable
endowments seem to have suffered from more than ordinary malversation,
and there were complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the
Hospitals was seriously reduced.[120] In the country, the records of Quarter
Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in which the machinery of
presentment by constables to justices has broken down, and a long wail
arises, that thieves are multiplied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants
wander to and fro at their will.[121] The administrative collapse of the
Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and twenty-three
years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that the sections in it relating to
the provision of employment were a dead letter.[122] Always unpopular
with the local authorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and
expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pressure by the

Central Government, they should, except here and there, have been
neglected. What is more significant, however, than the practical deficiencies
in the administration of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion,
which regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory of which
both private charity and public relief had been the expression.
“The generall rule of all England,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1646, “is to
whip and punish the wandring beggars ... and so many justices execute one
branch of that good Statute (which is the point of justice), but as for the
point of charitie, they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses and
convenient places to set the poore to work.”[123] The House of Commons
appears to have been conscious that the complaint had some foundation; in
1649 it ordered that the county justices should be required to see that stocks
of material were provided as the law required,[124] and the question of
preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in distress should be found
employment was on several occasions referred to committees of the House.
[125] Nothing seems, however, to have come of these proposals, nor was
the Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on work” that which was most
congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the admission that distress was
the result, not of personal deficiencies, but of economic causes, with its
corollary that its victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the
growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid scepticism as was
later directed against the Speenhamland policy by the reformers of 1834.
Like the friends of Job, it saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love,
but the punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penalties on the
vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less emphasis on the
obligation of charity than upon the duty of work, and that the admonitions
which had formerly been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now
directed against improvidence and idleness. The characteristic sentiment
was that of Milton’s friend, Hartlib: “The law of God saith, ‘he that will not
work, let him not eat.’ This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle
persons if ... none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for
it.”[126]
The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of public activity
provoked by the growth of pauperism between 1640 and 1660. The idea of
dealing with it on sound business principles, by means of a corporation
which would combine profit with philanthropy, was being sedulously

preached by a small group of reformers.[127] Parliament took it up, and in
1649 passed an Act for the relief and employment of the poor and the
punishment of beggars, under which a company was to be established with
power to apprehend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and
whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other poor persons, including
children without means of maintenance.[128] Eight years later the
prevalence of vagrancy produced an Act of such extreme severity as almost
to recall the suggestion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that
vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since offenders
could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who failed to satisfy the
justices that he had a good reason for being on the roads should be arrested
and punished as a sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.[129]
The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the parade of a
spurious religion, which sacrificed character to a formal piety, was older
than the Reformation, but it had been given a new emphasis by the
reformers. Luther had denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and
the Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic charity, as a
bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness and demoralization. “I conclude
that all the large givings of the papists,” preached an English divine in the
reign of Elizabeth, “of which at this day many make so great brags, because
they be not done in a reverent regard of the commandment of the Lord, in
love, and of an inward being touched with the calamities of the needy, but
for to be well reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be prayed
for after they are dead ... are indeed no alms, but pharisaical
trumpets.”[130] The rise of a commercial civilization, the reaction against
the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism
among the middle classes, all combined in the next half-century to sharpen
the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which made the discipline
of character by industry and self-denial the center of its ethical scheme, the
Puritan moralist was undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even the seed
of the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to beg its bread, and
met the taunt that the repudiation of good works was the cloak for a
conscienceless egoism with the retort that the easy-going open-handedness
of the sentimentalist was not less selfish in its motives and was more
corrupting to its objects. “As for idle beggars,” wrote Steele, “happy for
them if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies, and if more
shewed some wise compassion upon their souls.”[131] That the greatest of

evils is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of
their own “idle, irregular and wicked courses,” that the truest charity is not
to enervate them 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
naïve 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. “No question,” argued a
Puritan pamphleteer, “but it [riches] should be the portion rather of the
godly than of the wicked, were it good for them; for godliness hath the
promises of this life as well as of the life to come.”[132] The demonstration
that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the
lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the
prosperous. 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. For, if the theme of
the moralist was that an easy-going indulgence undermined character, the
theme of the economist was that it was economically disastrous and
financially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, “men and
women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but lie upon the
parish wherein they dwell for maintenance.” It discourages thrift; “if shame
or fear of punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no more;
his children are the charge of the parish and his old age his recess from
labour or care.” It keeps up wages, since “it encourages wilful and evil-
disposed persons to impose what wages they please upon their labours; and

herein they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation that,
when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work for less wages than
when they were dear.”[133] To the landowner who cursed the poor-rates,
and the clothier who grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of
religious thought now brought the comforting assurance that morality itself
would be favored by a reduction of both.
As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century was to prove,
there is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the
true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it
regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way. Such
utterances on the subject of poverty were merely one example of a general
attitude, which appeared at times to consign to collective perdition almost
the whole of the wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age
which worshiped property as the foundation of the social order, the mere
laborer seemed something less than a full citizen. It was partly the result of
the greatly increased influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the
Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless
materialism, determined at all costs to conquer world-markets from France
and Holland, and prepared to sacrifice every other consideration to their
economic ambitions. It was partly that, in spite of a century of large-scale
production in textiles, the problems of capitalist industry and of a
propertyless proletariat were still too novel for their essential features to be
appreciated. Even those writers, like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to
insist on the wickedness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest,
rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject of wages. Their
social theory had been designed for an age of petty agriculture and industry,
in which personal relations had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus,
and the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in economic
status from the half-dozen journeymen or laborers whom he employed. In a
world increasingly dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mine-
owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of master and
servant, with the same obstinate indifference to economic realities as leads
the twentieth century to talk of employers and employed, long after the
individual employer has been converted into an impersonal corporation.
In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx observes that
“the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper hand, put an end to all feudal,

patriarchal, idyllic relations, pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties
that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other bond
between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash
payment.”[134] An interesting illustration of his thesis might be found in
the discussions of the economics of employment by English writers of the
period between 1660 and 1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards
the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in the first
half of the seventeenth century, and which has no modern parallel except in
the behavior of the less reputable of white colonists towards colored labor.
The denunciations of the “luxury, pride and sloth”[135] of the English
wage-earners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, indeed,
almost exactly identical with those directed against African natives today. It
is complained that, compared with the Dutch, they are self-indulgent and
idle; that they want no more than a bare subsistence, and will cease work
the moment they obtain it; that, the higher their wages, the more—“so
licentious are they”[136]—they spend upon drink; that high prices,
therefore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the wage-
earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not a blessing, but a
misfortune, since they merely conduce to “weekly debauches.”
When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the rigors of
economic exploitation should be preached as a public duty, and, with a few
exceptions, the writers of the period differed only as to the methods by
which severity could most advantageously be organized. Pollexfen and
Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by reducing the number
of days kept as holidays. Bishop Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland
before his eyes, suggested that “sturdy beggars should ... be seized and
made slaves to the public for a certain term of years.” Thomas Alcock, who
was shocked at the workman’s taste for snuff, tea and ribbons, proposed the
revival of sumptuary legislation.[137] The writers who advanced schemes
for reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of punishment
and of training, were innumerable. All were agreed that, on moral no less
than on economic grounds, it was vital that wages should be reduced. The
doctrine afterwards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote, “every one
but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will
never be industrious,”[138] was the tritest commonplace of Restoration
economists. It was not argued; it was accepted as self-evident.

When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not be desirable
to reëstablish slavery, it was not to be expected that the sufferings of the
destitute would wring their hearts with social compunction. The most
curious feature in the whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in
contrast with the long debate on pauperism carried on in the sixteenth
century, was the resolute refusal to admit that society had any responsibility
for the causes of distress. Tudor divines and statesmen had little mercy for
idle rogues. But the former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded
pauperism primarily as a social phenomenon produced by economic
dislocation, and the embarrassing question put by the genial Harrison—“at
whose handes shall the bloude of these men be required?”[139]—was never
far from the minds even of the most cynical. Their successors after the
Restoration were apparently quite unconscious that it was even conceivable
that there might be any other cause of poverty than the moral failings of the
poor. The practical conclusion to be drawn from so comfortable a creed was
at once extremely simple and extremely agreeable. It was not to find
employment under the Act of 1601, for to do that was only “to render the
poor more bold.” It was to surround the right to relief with obstacles such as
those contained in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not be avoided,
in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest, to increase the
demand for labor by reducing wages.
The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might be so
administered as not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be
made by Utilitarian philosophers. But the theory that distress was due, not
to economic circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of
1834 called “individual improvidence and vice,” was firmly established,
and the criticism on the Elizabethan system which was to inspire the new
Poor Law had already been formulated. The essence of that system was
admirably expressed a century later by a Scottish divine as “the principle
that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right on other men or on
society for existence.”[140] Dr. Chalmers’ attack upon it was the echo of a
note long struck by Puritan moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had
impressed themselves on Nassau Senior,[141] before he set his hand to that
brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report, which, after provoking
something like a rebellion in the north of England, was to be one of the
pillars of the social policy of the nineteenth century.

It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of Puritan ethics
without emphasizing the enormous contribution of Puritanism to political
freedom and social progress. The foundation of democracy is the sense of
spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against
the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and parson, lifting
arrogant eyebrows at the insolence of the lower orders, combined to crush
popular agitation, as a menace at once to society and to the Church, it is
probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other
single movement. The virtues of enterprise, diligence and thrift are the
indispensable foundation of any complex and vigorous civilization. It was
Puritanism which, by investing them with a supernatural sanction, turned
them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion. Nor would it
be difficult to find notable representatives of the Puritan spirit in whom the
personal austerity, which was the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was
combined with a profound consciousness of social solidarity, which was the
noblest aspect of that which it displaced. Firmin the philanthropist, and
Bellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a century later hailed as the
father of his doctrines, were pioneers of Poor Law reform. The Society of
Friends, in an age when the divorce between religion and social ethics was
almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine, that it was permissible to take
such gain as the market offered, by insisting on the obligation of good
conscience and forbearance in economic transactions, and on the duty to
make the honorable maintenance of the brother in distress a common
charge.[142]
The general climate and character of a country are not altered,
however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks which rise into an
ampler air. The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different. It was
individual responsibility, not social obligation. Training its pupils to the
mastery of others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown of glory
the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary contest with a
hostile world, and dismissed concern with the social order as the prop of
weaklings and the Capua of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects
of that attitude were momentous for the future. It is sometimes suggested
that the astonishing outburst of industrial activity which took place after
1760 created a new type of economic character, as well as a new system of
economic organization. In reality, the ideal which was later to carry all
before it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and captain of industry,

was well established among Englishmen before the end of the seventeenth
century. Among the numerous forces which had gone to form it, some not
inconsiderable part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis on the life
of business enterprise as the appropriate field for Christian endeavor, and on
the qualities needed for success in it, which was characteristic of
Puritanism. These qualities, and the admiration of them, remained, when the
religious reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weakened or
disappeared.

CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
“Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sermon, beynge
asked if he had bene at the sermon that day, answered, yea. I praye
you, said he, how lyked you hym? Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked
hym alwayes—a sedicious fellow.”
Latimer, Seven Sermons before King Edward VI.

Societies, like individuals, have their moral crises and their spiritual
revolutions. The student can observe the results which these cataclysms
produce, but he can hardly without presumption attempt to appraise them,
for it is at the fire which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit.
The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its magnificent promise
of fruitful action and of intellectual light; the abdication of the Christian
Churches from departments of economic conduct and social theory long
claimed as their province; the general acceptance by thinkers of a scale of
ethical values, which turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a perilous, if
natural, frailty into the idol of philosophers and the mainspring of society—
such movements are written large over the history of the tempestuous age
which lies between the Reformation and the full light of the eighteenth
century. Their consequences have been worked into the very tissue of
modern civilization. Posterity still stands too near their source to discern the
ocean into which these streams will flow.
In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is the tritest of
commonplaces. But social psychology continues too often to be discussed
in serene indifference to the categories of time and place, and economic
interests are still popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over
which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though inherited dispositions
may be constant from generation to generation, the system of valuations,

preferences and ideals—the social environment within which individual
character functions—is in process of continuous change, and it is in the
conception of the place to be assigned to economic interests in the life of
society that change has in recent centuries been most comprehensive in its
scope, and most sensational in its consequences. The isolation of economic
aims as a specialized object of concentrated and systematic effort, the
erection of economic criteria into an independent and authoritative standard
of social expediency, are phenomena which, though familiar enough in
classical antiquity, appear, at least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively
recent date in the history of later civilizations. The conflict between the
economic outlook of East and West, which impresses the traveller today,
finds a parallel in the contrast between medieval and modern economic
ideas, which strikes the historian.
The elements which combined to produce that revolution are too
numerous to be summarized in any neat formula. But, side by side with the
expansion of trade and the rise of new classes to political power, there was a
further cause, which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least
fundamental. It was the contraction of the territory within which the spirit
of religion was conceived to run. The criticism which dismisses the concern
of Churches with economic relations and social organization as a modern
innovation finds little support in past history. What requires explanation is
not the view that these matters are part of the province of religion, but the
view that they are not. When the age of the Reformation begins, economics
is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activities are
treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character is determined by
the spiritual destiny of mankind; the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not
to utility; the legitimacy of economic transactions is tried by reference, less
to the movements of the market, than to moral standards derived from the
traditional teaching of the Christian Church; the Church itself is regarded as
a society wielding theoretical, and sometimes practical, authority in social
affairs. The secularization of political thought, which was to be the work of
the next two centuries, had profound reactions on social speculation, and by
the Restoration the whole perspective, at least in England, has been
revolutionized. Religion has been converted from the keystone which holds
together the social edifice into one department within it, and the idea of a
rule of right is replaced by economic expediency as the arbiter of policy and
the criterion of conduct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to survive,