The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
humble sinners to whom Luther promises grace if they trust themselves to God in penitent faith are bred those self-confident saints[46] whom we can rediscover in the hard Puritan merchants of the heroic age of capitalism and in isolated instances down to the present. On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means.[47] It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace.
That worldly activity should be considered capable of this achievement, that it could, so to speak, be considered the most suitable means of counteracting feelings of religious anxiety, finds its explanation in the fundamental peculiarities of religious feeling in the Reformed Church, which come most clearly to light in its differences from Lutheranism in the doctrine of justification by faith. These differences are analysed so subtly and with such objectivity and avoidance of value-judgments in Schneckenburger's excellent lectures,[48] that the following brief observations can for the most part simply rest upon his discussion.
The highest religious experience which the Lutheran faith strives to attain, especially as it developed in the course of the seventeenth century, is the unio mystica with the deity.[49] As the name itself, which is unknown to the Reformed faith in this form, suggests, it is a feeling of actual absorption in the deity, that of a real entrance of the divine into the soul of the believer. It is qualitatively similar to the aim of the contemplation of the German mystics and is characterized by its passive search for the fulfilment of the yearning for rest in God.
