The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
even more sleep than is necessary for health,[12] six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.[13] It does not yet hold, with Franklin, that time is money, but the proposition is true in a certain spiritual sense. It is infinitely valuable because every hour lost is lost to labour for the glory of God.[14] Thus inactive contemplation is also valueless, or even directly reprehensible if it is at the expense of one's daily work.[15] For it is less pleasing to God than the active performance of His will in a calling.[16] Besides, Sunday is provided for that, and, according to Baxter, it is always those who are not diligent in their callings who have no time for God when the occasion demands it.[17]
Accordingly, Baxter's principal work is dominated by the continually repeated, often almost passionate preaching of hard, continuous bodily or mental labour.[18] It is due to a combination of two different motives.[19] Labour is, on the one hand, an approved ascetic technique, as it always has been[20] in the Western Church, in sharp contrast not only to the Orient but to almost all monastic rules the world over.[21] It is in particular the specific defence against all those temptations which Puritanism united under the name of the unclean life, whose rôle for it was by no means small. The sexual asceticism of Puritanism differs only in degree, not in fundamental principle, from that of monasticism; and on account of the Puritan conception of marriage, its practical influence is more far-reaching than that of the latter. For sexual intercourse is permitted, even within marriage, only as the means willed by God for the increase of His glory according to the commandment, "Be fruitful and multiply."[22] Along
