The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
occasionally in other denominations, including Calvinism. That betrays the fact that the acceptance of the bourgeois practical ethics by these movements was the worldly application of an asceticism which had originally fled from the world.
187. Veblen in his suggestive book The Theory of Business Enterprise is of the opinion that this motto belongs only to early capitalism. But economic supermen, who, like the present captains of industry, have stood beyond good and evil, have always existed, and the statement is still true of the broad underlying strata of business men.
188. We may here again expressly call attention to the excellent remarks of Eduard Bernstein, op. cit. To Kautsky's highly schematic treatment of the Baptist movement and his theory of heretical communism in general (in the first volume of the same work) we shall return on another occasion.
189. "In civil actions it is good to be as the many, in religious to be as the best", says, for example, Thomas Adams (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138). That sounds somewhat more drastic than it is meant to be. It means that the Puritan honesty is formalistic legality, just as the uprightness which the sometime Puritan people like to claim as a national virtue is something specifically different from the German Ehrlichkeit. Some good remarks on the subject from the educational standpoint may be found in the Preuss. Jahrb., CXII (1903), p. 226. The formalism of the Puritan ethic is in turn the natural consequence of its relation to the law.
190. Something is said on this in the following essay.
191. This is the reason for the economic importance of the ascetic Protestant, but not Catholic, minorities.
192. That the difference of dogmatic basis was not inconsistent with the adoption of the most important interest in proof is to be explained in the last analysis by the historical peculiarities of Christianity in general which cannot be discussed here.
193. "Since God hath gathered us to be a people", says Barclay, op. cit., p. 357. I myself heard a Quaker sermon at Haverford College which laid great emphasis on the interpretation of saints as meaning separate.
CHAPTER V
1. See the excellent sketch of his character in Dowden, op. cit. A passable introduction to Baxter's theology, after he had abandoned a strict belief in the double decree, is given in the introduction to the various extracts from his works printed in the Works of the Puritan Divines (by Jenkyn). His attempt to combine universal redemption and personal election satisfied no one. For us it is important only that he even then held to personal election, i.e. to
