The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
doctrine, even in the Middle Ages, itself set up the ideal of a systematic sanctification of life as a whole. But it is just as certain (1) that the normal practice of the Church, directly on account of its most effective means of discipline, the confession, promoted the unsystematic way of life discussed in the text, and further (2) that the fundamentally rigorous and cold atmosphere in which he lived and the absolute isolation of the Calvinst were utterly foreign to mediæval lay-Catholicism.
69. The absolutely fundamental importance of this factor will, as has already once been pointed out, gradually become clear in the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen.
70. And to a certain extent also to the Lutheran. Luther did not wish to eliminate this last vestige of sacramental magic.
71. Compare, for instance, Sedgwick, Buss- und Gnadenlehre (German by Roscher, 1689). The repentant man has a fast rule to which he holds himself exactly, ordering thereby his whole life and conduct (p. 591). He lives according to the law, shrewdly, wakefully, and carefully (p. 596). Only a permanent change in the whole man can, since it is a result of predestination, cause this (p. 852). True repentance is always expressed in conduct (p. 361). The difference between only morally good work and opera spiritualia lies, as Hoornbeek (op. cit., I, IX, chap. ii) explains, in the fact that the latter are the results of a regenerate life (op. cit., I, p. 160). A continuous progress in them is discernible which can only be achieved by the supernatural influence of God's grace (p. 150). Salvation results from the transformation of the whole man through the grace of God (p. 190 f.). These ideas are common to all Protestantism, and are of course found in the highest ideals of Catholicism as well. But their consequences could only appear in the Puritan movements of worldly asceticism, and above all only in those cases did they have adequate psychological sanctions.
72. The latter name is, especially in Holland, derived from those who modelled their lives precisely on the example of the Bible (thus with Voet). Moreover, the name Methodists occurs occasionally among the Puritans in the seventeenth century.
73. For, as the Puritan preachers emphasize (for instance Bunyan in the Pharisee and the Publican, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 126), every single sin would destroy everything which might have been accumulated in the way of merit by good works in a lifetime, if, which is unthinkable, man were alone able to accomplish anything which God should necessarily recognize as meritorious, or even could live in perfection for any length of time. Thus Puritanism did not think as did Catholicism in terms of a sort of account with calculation of the balance, a simile which was common even in antiquity, but of the definite alternative of grace or damnation held for a life as a whole. For suggestions of the bank account idea see note 102 below.
