The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
59. Thus, for instance, Charnock, Self-Examination, p. 183, in refutation of the Catholic doctrine of dubitatio.
60. This argument recurs again and again in Hoornbeek, Theologia practica. For instance, I, p. 160; II, pp. 70, 72, 182.
61. For instance, the Conf. Helvet, 16, says "et improprie his [the works] salus adtribuitur".
62. With all the above compare Schneckenburger, pp. 80 ff.
63. Augustine is supposed to have said "si non es prædestinatus, fac ut prædestineris".
64. One is reminded of a saying of Goethe with essentially the same meaning: "How can a man know himself? Never by observation, but through action. Try to do your duty and you will know what is in you. And what is your duty? Your daily task."
65. For though Calvin himself held that saintliness must appear on the surface (Instit. Christ, IV, pp. 1, 2, 7, 9), the dividing-line between saints and sinners must ever remain hidden from human knowledge. We must believe that where God's pure word is alive in a Church, organized and administered according to His law, some of the elect, even though we do not know them, are present.
66. The Calvinistic faith is one of the many examples in the history of religions of the relation between the logical and the psychological consequences for the practical religious attitude to be derived from certain religious ideas. Fatalism is, of course, the only logical consequence of predestination. But on account of the idea of proof the psychological result was precisely the opposite. For essentially similar reasons the followers of Nietzsche claim a positive ethical significance for the idea of eternal recurrence. This case, however, is concerned with responsibility for a future life which is connected with the active individual by no conscious thread of continuity, while for the Puritan it was tua res agitur. Even Hoornbeek (Theologia practica, I, p. 159) analyses the relation between predestination and action well in the language of the times. The electi are, on account of their election, proof against fatalism because in their rejection of it they prove themselves "quos ipsa electio sollicitos reddit et diligentes officiorum". The practical interests cut off the fatalistic consequences of logic (which, however, in spite of everything occasionally did break through).
But, on the other hand, the content of ideas of a religion is, as Calvinism shows, far more important than William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, p. 444 f.) is inclined to admit. The significance of the rational element in religious metaphysics is shown in classical form by the tremendous influence which especially the logical structure of the Calvinistic concept of God exercised on life. If the God of the Puritans has influenced history as hardly another before or since, it is principally due to the attributes which the power of thought had given him. James's pragmatic valuation of the significance of religious ideas according to their influence on life is inci-
