The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
affected by sentimental pietistic influences. See the praise of tranquillitas animi which is much more pleasing to God than the sollicitudo of this world. Also Bailey, referring to the well-known passage in Scripture, is of the opinion that "A rich man is not easily saved" (op. cit., p. 182). The Methodist catechisms also warn against "gathering treasure on this earth". For Pietism this is quite obvious, as also for the Quakers. Compare Barclay (op. cit., p. 517), " . . . and therefore beware of such temptations as to use their callings as an engine to be richer".
7. For not wealth alone, but also the impulsive pursuit of it (or what passed as such) was condemned with similar severity. In the Netherlands the South Holland Synod of 1574 declared, in reply to a question, that money-lenders should not be admitted to communion even though the business was permitted by law; and the Deventer Provincial Synod of 1598 (Art. 24) extended this to the employees of money-lenders. The Synod of Gorichem in 1606 prescribed severe and humiliating conditions under which the wives of usurers might be admitted, and the question was discussed as late as 1644 and 1657 whether Lombards should be admitted to communion (this against Brentano, who cites his own Catholic ancestors, although foreign traders and bankers have existed in the whole European and Asiatic world for thousands of years). Gisbert Voet (Disp. Theol., IV, 1667, de usuris, p. 665) still wanted to exclude the Trapezites (Lombards, Piedmontese). The same was true of the Huguenot Synods. This type of capitalistic classes were not the typical representatives of the philosophy or the type of conduct with which we are concerned. They were also not new as compared with antiquity or the Middle Ages.
8. Developed in detail in the tenth chapter of the Saints' Everlasting Rest. He who should seek to rest in the shelter of possessions which God gives, God strikes even in this life. A self-satisfied enjoyment of wealth already gained is almost always a symptom of moral degradation. If we had everything which we could have in this world, would that be all we hoped for? Complete satisfaction of desires is not attainable on earth because God's will has decreed it should not be so.
9. Christian Directory, 1, pp. 375-6. "It is for action that God maintaineth us and our activities; work is the moral as well as the natural end of power. . . . It is action that God is most served and honoured by. . . . The public welfare or the good of the many is to be valued above our own." Here is the connecting-point for the transition from the will of God to the purely utilitarian view-point of the later liberal theory. On the religious sources of Utilitarianism, see below in the text and above, chap. iv, note 145.
10. The commandment of silence has been, starting from the Biblical threat of punishment for every useless word, especially since
