The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
two ethics, very important in practice, have been finally crystallized, even for modern times, by the Jansenist controversy and the Bull Unigenitus.
43. "You may labour in that manner as tendeth most to your success and lawful gain. You are bound to improve all your talents." There follows the passage cited above in the text. A direct parallel between the pursuit of wealth in the Kingdom of Heaven and the pursuit of success in an earthly calling is found in Janeway, Heaven upon Earth (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 275).
44. Even in the Lutheran Confession of Duke Christopher of Württemberg, which was submitted to the Council of Trent, objection It is made to the oath of poverty. He who is poor in his station should bear it, but if he swore to remain so it would be the same as if he swore to remain sick or to maintain a bad reputation.
45. Thus in Baxter and also in Duke Christopher's confession. Compare further pasages like: " . . . the vagrant rogues whose lives are nothing but an exorbitant course; the main begging", etc. (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines; p. 259). Even Calvin had strictly forbidden begging, and the Dutch Synods campaigned against licences to beg. During the epoch of the Stuarts, especially Laud's regime under Charles I, which had systematically developed the principle of public poor relief and provision of work for the unemployed, the Puritan battle-cry was: "Giving alms is no charity" (title of Defoe's later well-known work). Towards the end of the seventeenth century they began the deterrent system of workhouses for the unemployed (compare Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, Cambridge, 1900, and H. Levy, Die Grundlagen des ökonomischen Liberalismus in der Geschichte der englischen Volkswirtschaft, Jena, 1912, pp. 69 ff.).
46. The President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland, G. White, said emphatically in his inaugural address before the assembly in London in 1903 (Baptist Handbook, 1904, p. 104): "The best men on the roll of our Puritan Churches were men of affairs, who believed that religion should permeate the whole of life."
47. Here also lies the characteristic difference from all feudal view-points. For the latter only the descendants of the parvenu (political or social) can reap the benefit of his success in a recognized station (characteristically expressed in the Spanish Hidalgo = hijo d'algo = filius de aliquo where the aliquid means an inherited property) However rapidly these differences are to-day fading out in the rapid change and Europeanization of the American national character, nevertheless the precisely opposite bourgeois attitude which glorifies business success and earnings as a symptom of mental achievement, but has no respect for mere inherited wealth, is still sometimes represented there. On the other hand, in Europe (as James Bryce once remarked) in effect almost every social honour is now purchasable
